Maybe it’s a neighbor down the hall, who sets the alarm at dawn to take care of the house before the children wake up? A workmate, who slips away discreetly in the evening and never opens up about her private life? A friend who we no longer know how to invite to “couple’s dinners”? Maybe it’s you yourself, this single mother who sometimes feels alone or overwhelmed? The investigation of the journalist at Release Johanna Luyssen gives a face and a collective belonging to these more than 1.5 million women who raise their children alone.
First of all, it is a striking portrait. One in four families is single-parent in France, and 82% of these single parents are mothers. For them, precariousness is sometimes a threat, often a reality: as Johanna Luyssen writes, 22% of children in single-parent families with their father were poor in 2018 – a proportion close to the average –, compared to 45% for children in single-parent families with their mother.
Chapter by chapter, the author lists the difficulties these women face in their daily lives. There is housing, of course. Johanna Luyssen, herself a single mother, says that after two years of waiting for social housing in Paris, a counselor explained to her that, according to the standards of the social housing sector, a single parent and one child means a two-room apartment, a single parent and two children means a three-room apartment, etc. In other words, “you are ordered to sleep in the living room”she sums up. Then come the questions of employment and professional life (67% of single mothers work, compared to 81% of fathers in the same case), childcare, and physical and mental health. The picture is overwhelming.
Unpaid alimony
This is probably why, in the second part of the book, Johanna Luyssen tries to give reasons for hope: avenues for affordable housing, for example community housing initiatives; ways of convincing one’s company to finance childcare at a lower cost… However, the majority of actions that could transform the lives of these women rely on political will and on reforms that are not currently on the agenda.
Read also: Article reserved for our subscribers Alimony, a symbol of inequalities between men and women after a separation
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The most telling example is that of alimony: in 2019, unpaid amounts stood at 40%. The objective of the public agency responsible for recovering them is to reduce this rate to 21% by 2027. That is still one in five unpaid amounts…
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