Teresa Caldeira is certain: it is important to see what is happening with single mothers (just mom, in English) in order to understand the society in which we live today. To see how far we have advanced -or not-.

Single mothers can be single mothers; with shared custody; grandmothers raising their grandchildren; mothers whose partner is disabled or incarcerated. They may be widowed or have the child’s father in another city. They can be single mothers by choice or by circumstance.

They are above all “women who do not assume the position of victims or abandoned, women who have decided that this is how it works best for them and who are responsible for raising their sons and daughters “, underlines Teresa Caldeira, Brazilian anthropologist. , professor of regional and urban studies at the University of California-Berkeley.

To speak of single mothers, then – underlines the expert, who recently participated in the Norbert Lechner Chair of the UDP – “is to speak of a term that appeared a few years ago in various feminist groups and which reaffirms the empowerment of these women”.

This is something Teresa Caldeira knows very well. 40 years ago, when I interviewed women who raised their children alone, they “were hyper stigmatized, discriminated against, frowned upon”.

How were they perceived at the time?

Like women who had made a mistake or whose marriage had failed. It is part of a type of “collective life” in which the nuclear family is highly valued.

Social groups, explains the anthropologist, live in certain ways that must be understood as collective lives. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they do things together, but that they have common references.

If forty years ago the idea of ​​not belonging to a nuclear family was frowned upon, today, according to research carried out by Teresa Caldeira in the outskirts of São Paulo, this is no longer the case.

“People today, especially young people, live differently, they build new forms of collective life because they are shared by several people, it is not just one family, it is not just one single mother, there are a lot of women,” he explains.

In São Paulo, for example, almost half of the mothers are unmarried, they do not live in nuclear families, and this, says the expert, “is a model of the new way of collective life in which you accept that ‘it is possible to live in another way’.

“40 years ago, a young woman who became pregnant outside a couple was a scandal, her parents tried to force her to marry, it was a family drama, with tears, fights, violence. has decreased a lot. Nowadays, when these young people talk to their parents and tell them that they are pregnant, nothing happens, on the contrary, the girls tell me ‘my mother published the news on Facebook’ or ‘my mother sent a message to the whole family saying it will be a grandma”, so there is a change in sensitivity, a change in the way we relate to this pregnancy only”, retail.

This means, in the long term, that more than an individual change for women, values ​​have been modified collectively and, consequently, collective life.

Do single mothers feel more comfortable today?

I don’t think all the women I’m interviewing right now feel rejected by their families or by society. On the contrary, they feel rejected for other reasons, such as being black or poor, but not because they are single mothers. I will not say that there is no prejudice against single mothers, but it’s not the same as when i started doing research and single moms They were called “women abandoned by their husbands”. Last year I did a lot of interviews about single mothers and no one told me that they were “abandoned by their husbands”.

The concept of family is changing…

Yes, and she does because there are many women who, in practice, live other lives. Nobody has come a long way saying “now we are going to be single mothers”, there is no manifesto, but there is something going on in everyday life.

Why is it important as a society that we focus on single mothers?

For me, they are proof that a lot has changed. The fact that many women say they are single mothers It means that a lot of things have changed, it’s not that they’re going to change, they’ve already changed: they’re here and they have another type of family formation, they have another type of relationship with those who can being the parents of the children, they have a different type of relationship with his own family, about what the family is, what his family relations are. These women support their children and the man is not the one who supports them.

And what is missing to better understand them?

That censuses change the categories, going beyond their marital status, and that the social sciences recognize that they have to speak differently, to reach and describe the change because in practice people have already changed their way of life.

A significant part of Teresa Caldeira’s research focuses on city life, as well as spatial segregation, urban violence and social discrimination.

Invited to reflect on the relationship of women to the public space, the anthropologist insists on the fact that she does not know “any society in which women evolve serenely”.

“We move around, we walk in the streets, but it is obvious that we take certain precautions. I think we all know you have to look back, you can’t be distracted, you can be mugged, you better not walk alone down a dark street at night, there are many things in a good way for women to know that public space It’s not a very safe space.”

Have there been any changes in this regard, according to your investigations?

Yes, I think it got better. For example, in the metro at 6:00 p.m. there are millions of people on the move and half of them are women who go to university, work, return home, they are constantly on the move. This is happening due to social changes and because women are also much safer to defend their spaces and say “step aside”, they don’t think they have to put up with everything that happens. I believe social media has helped because if something absurd happens you can post it on social media, report the person, etc. There are several things going on that show that women are not going to swallow certain types of situations – like street harassment, for example – without saying anything.

Do you make the connection with the rise of feminism?

In part. There are many organized feminist groups and this helps many women to have feminist credentials and fight for change in public space.

Finally, do you think that these references can change our collective life and, in a certain way, protect women in the public space?

It is the hope that things will improve. I believe that all activism and denunciation helps. Today, if a man makes a super macho comment on social media, there will be someone who will respond, you can no longer walk around commenting on the same absurd things as before and get away with it. I think there are a lot of movements. If you touch a woman on the bus, the first thing that happens is that the woman will ask for you and the second thing is that there will be people who will intervene saying “don’t do that, what’s wrong with you.” There is greater collective protection, but it is still lacking.

For example…

There are many violations taking place in public places, and this shows that progress is still to be made. But it’s always good to remember that most rapes happen inside the home and not on the street. Yes, there is violence in the streets, but the biggest problem is domestic. This is why it is so important to continue to accompany the changes in our collective life.