The single mother makeover

Murphy Brown, played by actress Candice Bergen, was a TV anomaly at that time: a sympathetically portrayed single mother. So Bush's vice president, Dan Quayle, attacked the show for normalising rather than stigmatising single motherhood.

Much hand-wringing followed, with single mothers (never, at that time, single fathers) cast as harbingers of doom for core American values. The implication was that selfish me-first feminists (if they were affluent white women) or feckless social parasites (if they were low-income women of color) were putting their own interests above their children's. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's widely reprinted study The Negro Family: The Case for National Action painted a picture of single motherhood as the primary instigator of inner-city and especially African-American criminality, illiteracy, and drug use.