saw the rise in single parenthood as a sign of increasing individual
liberty, sexual equality, and social tolerance.

If at first Quayle's remarks were greeted with protests and catcalls
from the media establishment, the catcalls were soon drowned in a
newly open-minded public debate on the problems of single par-
enthood. Social scientists came forward to support Quayle's allega-
tions about fatherless homes. Marshaling the results of numerous
studies on the effects of fatherlessness, they claimed that, indeed, our
crisis of youth bore a strong relationship to the rise in out-of-wed-
lock childbearing. These studies had found that children raised in
single-parent, female-headed households were far more likely to
suffer emotional problems, to fail in school, and to engage in delin-
quent behavior than children raised in two-parent families. And
this was true almost regardless of their socioeconomic environment. ³

Many social scientists went even further than Quayle had in
castigating single parenthood. In her widely read April 1993 Atlantic
Monthly article, "Dan Quayle Was Right," family scholar Barbara
Dafoe Whitehead charged that illegitimacy was not the only do-
mestic trend that threatened children. Ours, she said, was not only
a culture of unwed motherhood, but of rampant divorce. Both of
these phenomena, she contended, were by-products of an ideology of
expressive individualism that had seized postwar generations and dri-
ven them to put self-realization before their children's needs. How-
ever noble or valid our ideals of happy adult lives might seem, she
warned, they were seriously destabilizing childhood by robbing chil-
dren of the comforts and security of intact families.

Whitehead's article was perhaps the most influential of a tide of
highly visible academic reflections on the effects of single parenthood
on children. After its publication, reports in the mainstream media
at last began to imply that the two-parent family was not an ex-
pendable bourgeois convention, but rather an optimum condition of
both a happy childhood and a healthy social order. In June 1992,
Newsweek had mocked Quayle's remarks, commenting, "The '50s
fantasy of mom and dad and 2.2 kids went the way of phonograph
records and circle pins." Just a year later, in a cover story entitled
" Endangered Family," the magazine fretted, "For blacks, the insti-
tution of marriage has been devastated in the last generation.... The
impact, of course, is not only on black families but on all of society.
Fatherless homes boost crime rates, lower educational attainment

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