Following the explosively controversial Moynihan report of the 1960s, “for nearly twenty years the policy and research communities backed away from the entire issue” of family structure, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead wrote in 1993. The Carter Administration’s 1980 White House Conference on Families—a rare attempt to raise the issue—turned into “a prolonged, publicly subsidized quarrel over the definition of family.” Twelve years later, then–Vice President Dan Quayle’s criticism of single mom (and sitcom character) Murphy Brown was greeted with derision. “In short,” Whitehead concluded, “every time the issue of family structure has been raised, the response has been first controversy, then retreat, and finally silence.”
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