Jenny Davidson: CEO Council of Single Mothers and their Children
Can you tell us a little a bit the work of the Council of Single Mothers and their Children, and your role as the CEO?
Council of Single Mothers and their Children advocates for change and provides practical support for single mother families. There are three pillars to our work: support, advocacy, and membership engagement. Our frontline work is through our support line for single mothers, support workers, and friends and allies who can email, call or send us a message through Facebook. Our advocacy work takes place at a state and federal level, because the legislation is also made at both of those levels. Finally, we also engage and mobilise our 4300 members through change and mutual support.
As CEO of a small organisation, I do the strategy, the operations, financial management, fundraising and HR. I do have support with the finance and fundraising side of things, but I also support the board, liaise with funders, do the grant writing, and manage all the staff. I’m also a full time single mother.
It was the 50-year anniversary last year for the CSMC, which is such a testament to the ongoing hard work you and the team undertake. What do you think has changed for the CSMC in that time?
The primary change is the definition of who is a single mother. The organisation was founded by women who would have been identified by society, at the time, as unwed mothers. And they were really breaking with societal norms and struggling with financial realities in order to keep their children. The vast majority of women who found themselves pregnant outside marriage were either forced into a marriage, or forced to give children up for adoption. Post-World War II, adoption was seen as the solution. ‘Nice’ married couples struggling with fertility required children to be a ‘real family’. And women having children outside of marriage didn’t deserve these children, and were told in so many words that if they loved their child, they would give it up to a proper family with two parents.
CSMC was instrumental in securing the first federal benefit, the Supporting Mother Benefit, in 1973. It was one of the first legislation changes made by the Whitlam government, and that meant that women could manage to keep their babies financially. And social laws changed also because of the work of CSMC. The adoption rate just plummeted in the mid-seventies.
Now, we don't actually ask women if they are separated, divorced, de facto, or never married. That’s been the biggest change. What's interesting is that the stigma has now transferred to the words ‘single mother’. Single mother families are the family unit most likely to be in poverty in Australia. One in four is below the poverty line. Many more are financially stressed. So, our work isn't done.
What has remained stubbornly in the picture – the issues that have remained consistent across the last 50 years?
The stigma of being a single mother is still there. There are plenty of women who may not identify as single mothers. There might be women who identify as solo mothers, or as co-parents, but they don’t want to be known as what might be considered a welfare mum, because of these outrageous associations with women who are actually doing their best for their kids.
The issue of poverty is still significant. If a woman relies on government benefits while doing essential, unpaid care for their children, then they are in poverty. In a national survey of single mothers we undertook in 2018, 90% were concerned about their long-term financial wellbeing. That's across all education levels and all levels of employment: there was this very consistent concern that even if things were okay now, women are worried about poverty in older age. And so possibly, the outcome for these women after all those years of caring and trying to create a future for their children is an increased risk of homelessness.
In many ways, COVID-19 was a perfect storm of risk factors for single mothers: we know there were more women in insecure work, and due to COVID we also had more children having to stay at home. But, at the same time, there was also the other opportunities that, to an extent, helped balance some of this. How did CSMC navigate 2020?
Single mothers had the largest drop of employment from March to June of any family structure by an extraordinary amount, and this was because so many were in casualised work. Single mothers lost jobs at five times the rate of partnered mothers in that three-month period. At the same time, the families who were receiving the increased JobSeeker and JobKeeper payments were financially better off. Initially, we saw a drop in demand for our services, particularly telephone calls. This was because of the financial reprieve represented by the Government’s coronavirus supplement. Many other families had a break from the years and years of poverty, and were able to get things like cars repaired, dental work done, and decent winter coats.
But now that these payments are being reduced, they are pushing families back into poverty. The research shows us that it's not the number or gender of your parents that impacts children: it's the poverty. Poverty is what impacts a child’s future, and poverty is what creates intergenerational welfare dependence.
What can we do to support single mothers, and the CSMC?
Membership to the CSMC is free for single mothers, and people can sign up on the website. We're here for single mothers, but we can't support women that don't know about us. Single mothers are determined and resilient and they're doing their best under difficult situations. They're doing more with less, and perform an extraordinary juggle: they need all the support they can get. So spreading the word to single mothers you know or meet is a great way to support our work, and of course financial support is also great appreciated.
We have a new project that we just launched, called the Minerva Project, after the Roman goddess of wisdom. It's a time capsule aiming to capture single mothers' experiences of COVID through their individual artistic expressions. The work we’ve received has been transformed into an online exhibition, and includes art, writing and video diaries. We want to be sure that single mothers' experiences are included and represented as the state and Federal governments’ responses to the pandemic are assessed.
You can see it here: https://www.csmc.org.au/minerva-covid19capsule/
Interview by Jessamy Gleeson