A question was asked recently by a young Black woman: “why are so many of my friends’ single moms?” After a slew of hypothesis from the gathering group, and the blame passed around to every possible component comprising humanity, the final answer was summed up in a broad generalization equal to the phrase, “I don’t know.”

Many have wisely abandoned the notion of the “no good Black man” theory, and refuse to accept little or no wrong doing on the part of the Black woman; they are carefully and patriotically reluctant to “blame the white man”, or “the system,” and when there was really no one else to blame, they simply conceded to plain ole ignorance.

This is a very dangerous state to be left, in ignorance, because once a person is left baffled to any complex problem, they are thereafter vulnerable to any crack-pot answer or train of reasoning. When faced with this type challenge, the human mind independently leaves the capacity of human ability, and reasons with itself.

The human mind being an element of natural creation, exist in the realms of time and space where all answers reside. In that realm there is what is known as change. To enact change, time is broken into social-historical frames that overlap with one another thus bringing about eras of time. Our current era is the direct result of past overlaps of recent historical changes in society, for instance, the social transition from traditional lifestyles to alternative ones.

If more Black women are single now than in times past, there stands to reason that at some point, not many Black women were single, but more were married. And this is true; at one point in time more Black women were married than single. Over time, however, that changed, but why and how; both the why and how being interchangeable.

Put bluntly, factually and realistically, with the women’s movement of the nineteen sixties and their declaring of independence from traditional women roles of cooking and cleaning the house came a strain on marriages. During the seventies, the divorce rate doubled and thus was born the single parent. Now here’s the irony.

After women fulfilled their desires and became independent from the male, free to choose whether or not to marry and or have kids, and remained defiant to the role of traditional mother and wife, many found themselves unfulfilled and confused as to why they are not married. To fill this void, women resolved to maintain a sense of strength to uphold dignity and declared that they did not need a man or a father for their children. And they convinced themselves that it was men who had the problem, even wrote and passed laws to legitimize it, and also convinced themselves that their children were turning out ok despite having a father.

As the rate of ADHD rose among children and doctors legitimized medicating them, and as courts and the states declared it basically illegal to be a father, women begin to realize that maybe they got more than they bargained for. Not only were their families broken, thus came the term in the 80s, “broken homes,” but as women poured into the workforce to escape the duties of wife and mother, employers saw the benefits of adding to the workforce and began utilizing these females to their full capacity.

During the nineties society saw a rise in stress and medical related illnesses among women which brought on more cancers that women hardly ever experienced during the traditional lifestyle eras, such as breast, ovarian, and other cancers not to mention panic attacks, obesity, heart problems, and more nervous breakdowns. All this in addition to child birth defects and strained marriages.

So in retaliation to their situations, they resorted to demanding men share more in the home and child rearing duties. More men began to appear on talk shows to discuss how convenient it was to share in the house work and many decided to simply stay at home all together. Society had officially reversed traditional family roles, placing women in the workforce and giving men the option to stay home. The women’s movement was successful.

The workforce took an extreme toll on the health and well-being of women, who worked long days from 8 to 12 hours, and they began seeking relief. First in medications and then in healthy lifestyle, fitness, aerobics, yoga and other stress relieving activities. They even begin to seek spiritual relief from the church and prayer. Now comes the breakdown between Black women and white ones.

White women discovered this problem earlier than Black women and in the late nineties began to secretly and discretely reverse the trends. They began migrating back into the home and finding ways to spend more time with their children and families. They acknowledged the fact that the traditional family lifestyle was more convenient and less stressful than what they had encountered.

Black women, on the other hand, because we are more prone to social lag in trends, sought answers for their barren-single lives from the Black church. Church congregations grew in female numbers like never before during the nineties and early millennium. However, instead of getting the same message as white women, which was to return to traditional family lifestyles, church leaders taught Black women to seek promotions on their jobs and to begin businesses of their own and to earn college degrees and better themselves instead of depending on men.

Church pastors themselves were stalled in the social time-warp of female independence and could not see that that very lifestyle was taking a harsh toll on the female mind, body, and eventually, soul, as well as the family, which explained their poor male member numbers. These pastors, in need of maintaining a membership and tithing quota, kept women working, which eventually caused more Black women to become corporate slaves and their children became latch-key, video and television addicted victims of a society gone astray.

Now, well into the millennium, Black women have found themselves alone and in need of a man or at least a father figure for their stray children, and they are settling for anyone. The problem, however, is that not many have come to the realization what it is they need like white women have. Black women remain locked into the mind that they need independence and that men should share in the home responsibility, unknowingly pushing their marriage to an inevitable end.

Woman today could never actually appreciate what being a stay-at-home wife and mother is really like. They are missing the secret to pure happiness and contentment and bonding of the family and children because they are being pushed into corporate servitude. The blessing of God comes through the natural, not the material. But this message is obviously unknown to today’s church pastors.

So no, there is no one per se to blame for the rise in single Black females; neither men, society, or women themselves collectively because they all only fell into, followed or were born into a movement out of control. The movement itself cannot be blamed because it is only a cog in the social-historical frameworks that overlap with one another. As time continues and changes recycle, trends reverse themselves naturally, which brings us to the most logical answer of who created the single Black female.

When a person looks around at their surroundings and perceives that change is happening, they have the God-given free-will to choose whether or not to change with the times. Many suggest changing with the times because time waits for no one. But whether we choose to accept and cycle through change or if we choose to allow time to pass us by, knowing that the only force powerful enough to give us that choice is ourselves, we can only blame ourselves.

The Single Black female is a creation all her own.

© Jan 2008 By CR Hamilton