My Grandmother Raised Six High Achievers - Alone
26 Feb 2006
Evening Standard My Grandmother, "Miss Di", lived all her life in the village of Smithville in rural Jamaica. The "Miss" was not a clue to her marital status. It was the normal honorific title for adult females. But as it happens, Miss Di had six children by five different men and never married.
Yet she was a pillar of the local church and had the utmost respect for the institution of marriage. And she would have shared the horror of conservative commentators at the fact that the proportion of children born out of wedlock in Britain has risen from 10 per cent in the 1970s to 42 per cent last year. But precisely because people in rural Jamaica regarded marriage with the utmost seriousness, it was common for them to have quite a few children before getting around to the display of conspicuous consumption that a proper wedding demanded. This would have included: a marital home (which you or your family were likely to have constructed); a handmade suit (no such thing as "off the peg"); a handmade wedding dress; unlimited supplies of stewed chicken, curried goat, roast pork and rum. However, Miss Di would have been puzzled by the same commentators' insistence that the mere absence of a marriage certificate means social disruption and, worse, that children born out of wedlock behave badly or are low achievers.
She was a doting mother and rightly proud of her children: my mother and her two sisters were nurses in Britain and North America; my uncle Moore became the Jamaican High Commissioner to Canada; my uncle Charles had a street named after him in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for services to civil rights, and my uncle Paul became a successful insurance salesman in Chicago. The close-knit nature of the tiny Jamaican village they grew up in gave them stability, security and an abundance of role models. Watchful grandmothers provided 24-hour surveillance and were "one-woman" child-support agencies. Miss Di may not have married her children's fathers but they never disputed their obligations and fulfilled them as best they could. Community disapproval was a far more effective enforcer than our own CSA.
Paradoxically, those commentators who are most vociferous about the "death of marriage" are also avid supporters of free markets and globalisation, the very forces that destabilise and fragment communities worldwide. France, despite its tax incentives for married couples, has an even higher proportion of children born out of wedlock than Britain. In practice, government can do little about the trend of having children outside marriage. But it can recognise there are plenty of women who manage to be loving mothers and raise stable families without ever making it up the aisle.
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