‘Proud of our families’: single-parent activism in the 1990s ¹

This article explores the history of the Bristol-based organisation Single Parent Action Network (SPAN), and its challenge to mainstream understandings of single parenthood. A sharp increase in single parent-led households since the 1970s had been met by a political and social narrative that single parent families (c. 90% of them headed by women) were both a drain on the public purse and a root cause of social breakdown. Both the Conservatives and New Labour supported policies that aimed to decrease welfare dependency by increasing child support payments from absent fathers and getting single mothers into paid work. These policies – which reconceptualised single mothers as workers rather than carers – were opposed by SPAN, a multi-racial and woman-led national and international network, which sought to challenge the stigmatisation of single parents. SPAN’s work and organisational self-understanding were underpinned by ideas and practices that had their origins in 1970s and 1980s Bblack, women’s and community activism: anti-racism, a feminist understanding of care as work, and the importance of lived experience in the political process. Although SPAN often seemed out of step with modernised and professional NGOs, the values it espoused were to prove remarkably persistent and re-emerge in the new millennium in unexpected ways.