Chapter 5: Race, Gender, and Single Parenting: Dismantling the “Invisible” Myth Around Intellectual Black Female Scholars

It is a foregone reality that many scholars have confirmed that contemporary families often struggle with how to balance work and family life (Hall & MacDermid, 2009; Hochschild, 1997; Kanter, 1977). Contemporary research has also ventured to explore whether the experiences of single parents who balance work and family differ from those of partnered parents (Clark, 2000; Eagle, Miles, & Ecenogle, 1997; Hansen, 1991). Additionally, single Black women who are parents share a unique perspective and experience on parenting that defies the literature, which describes the Black, female, or single-parent experience as one that cannot be generalized to all others sharing the same cultural, racial, and gendered identity. Black women hold a duplicitous identity that is trapped in systemic and structural inequalities that racialized and gendered beings face in a White patriarchal society. Due to this fact, the experience of single parenting for Black females renders itself an experience that is unable to be quantified into a single experience or existence but rather qualifies itself as a varied, unique, and nuanced positioning.