SYDNEY SIDE WITH JANET PARR Unmarried mothers emerge

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33033, 28 September 1972, Page 7

SYDNEY SIDE WITH JANET PARR Unmarried mothers emerge

Once upon a time she bought herself a wedding ring, changed Miss to Mrs, perhaps went to live in another town where she wasn’t known and hoped she never would be.

Or, in white dress with trailing bouquet strategically placed for the wedding photographs, she was married off. The reason arrived six or seven months later “prematurely,” but a nice healthy little bundle for all that.

This view is shared by Miss Sue Thompson an unmarried mother and secretary of Care and Help for Unmarried Mothers, “Chums.” “RESPONSIBLE” ACTION “We're certainly not irresponsible,” she says. “We’re taking the responsibility for our actions in keeping our children.” And she stressed that in submissions to the Government for assistance the group had always said that girls did not want pensions for life, but did ' need financial help for the first three years so that they could stay at home and establish a sound motherchild relationship.

Miss Ann Lodge, of Melbourne, has decided to take her fight further. She is 38, has a daughter of three and a

half and a full-time job as a law clerk. She is not married.

Every year, since her daughter was 10 months old and she put her into nurseries and child-minding centres so that she could go on working, she has claimed the charges on her income tax returns. They have always been refused. COURT TEST CASE This year she is going to ask the High Court to settle once and for all whether the costs — $647 for 1971 — are tax-deductible. A claim for the services of a housekeeper or someone to look after children is. Two members of Parliament and such organisations as the Council for the Single Mother and Child and her own group Parents without Partners, are backing her. Miss Lodge earns $lO3 a week which puts her in a rather higher bracket than most unmarried mothers, many of whom are too young to have had much experience in a job. One of the practical things that Chums does is to find girls live-in jobs, give access to free legal advice and knowledge of benefits available. Under the stringent New South Wales means test they can earn only $4 a week to remain

qualified for their allowance.

Some unmarried mothers have talked of discrimination against them in hospitals and hostels and there is a growing feeling that the attitude of censure against the unmarried mother can only be changed by the mothers themselves. Chums feels that this is so.

But the social stigma of having an illegitimate child has been removed to a certain extent, and half of them now keep their babies according to a Sydney hospital social-worker, although, she says, not all the mothers should. Some, she said, had babies because they had been deprived of love in their own childhood. MIXED, MUDDLED There does seem to be some general agreement that society has become mixed and muddled in its attitudes. On the one hand it seems to actively encourage premarital and teen-age sex and sexual experiment, yet on the other, condemns its results.

Even the illegitimate child himself has been having a say. One, a man now in his 40s, has questioned the practice, which has hardened into custom, of the mother invariably being given custody of children. ,

This is an attitude with which at least some divorce judges are beginning to agree. There remains, of course, a vacuum around the whole problem of the illegitimate child and a mass of questions. Society is beginning to accept the necessity to limit its reproduction if it is to survive, and where does the illegitimate child fit here?

There are increased demands for child care and minding—by the married as well as the unmarried. But who is going to do the job? It is a bit like that hards' annual about legalising brothels-—who is to staff them and will it be considered an acceptable trade to which to put one’s daughter? Either way the girl who “got into trouble” was paying her dues for having offended against society’s moral taboos. And it could be argued that the fear of society’s odium was a pretty effective form of contraception.

But recently the unmarried mother has been showing an increasing tendency to stand up and be counted, if not named. Indeed, this has been to such purpose that the Victorian Minister for Social