Last week, copies of Jeb Bush’s “Profiles in Character” were selling on Amazon for less than $12. Today, those same used paperbacks are going for more than $500, with one mint-quality edition on the block for $2,526. Hidden market forces? Call it the HuffPo Effect. Since the Huffington Post outed Bush last week for advocating in “Profiles in Character” that unwed mothers should be publicly shamed, prices for the 1995 political tome have spiked.
But high prices shouldn’t be confused for lofty thinking. Bush’s plea for public humiliation of unmarried mothers was as wrongheaded in 1995 as it is today. And as the president of a non-profit and non-partisan organization that helps mobilize unmarried women to register and vote, including many single mothers, I also know firsthand how politically perilous Bush’s message has become.
In the interests of saving readers $2,526, here’s what Jeb Bush, the now-official presidential candidate, wrote in 1995 in a chapter called "The Restoration of Shame”:
“One of the reasons more young women are giving birth out of wedlock and more young men are walking away from their paternal obligations is that there is no longer a stigma attached to this behavior, no reason to feel shame. Many of these young women and young men look around and see their friends engaged in the same irresponsible conduct. Their parents and neighbors have become ineffective at attaching some sense of ridicule to this behavior. There was a time when neighbors and communities would frown on out of wedlock births and when public condemnation was enough of a stimulus for one to be careful.”
Twenty years later, Bush came close to equating the children of unmarried mothers to damaged goods. In an interview with MSNBC last week, he said: "It's a huge challenge for single moms to raise children in the world that we're in today and it hurts the prospects, it limits the possibilities of young people being able to live lives of purpose and meaning," he said.
There’s no denying the benefits of having two parents actively engaged in the lives of a child. There are clear advantages, beyond the obvious financial ones. But Bush takes a massive leap and argues that the children of single parents won’t easily live “lives of purpose and meaning.” What? His solution to this dilemma is ripped straight from the pages of The Scarlet Letter, circa 1850. He wants single moms to be publicly ridiculed, or to feel public condemnation if they consider raising a child on their own or with parents outside of a traditional family structure.
An Ozzie and Harriet worldview ignores the reality of contemporary America, and the millions of single women successfully raising children on their own. Or with the help of non-married partners. As the Pew Research Center pointed out in 2014, “just because a woman has a non-marital birth, that does not necessarily mean that the mother is ‘going it alone.’ For instance, in the U.S., more than half of births that occur outside of marriage are to women who are cohabiting.” The American public has become more accepting of this trend, with a record high 58 percent of all Americans now finding it morally acceptable to have a baby without being married, according to a recent Gallup poll.
The larger point is that single mothers shouldn’t be ridiculed, they should be supported! Unmarried mothers are among the most economically vulnerable group in the nation. The median income for an unmarried woman with a child under age six years old is just $29,100, or $5,900 less than her married counterpart, according to recent Census data. That’s why marriage-neutral government policies that help unmarried women are so important.
And yet the scorn of single mothers has deep roots in America. As Governor of Florida in 2001, Jeb Bush refused to veto the so-called "Scarlet Letter" law, which required single mothers to publish their sexual histories in the newspaper in order to place their babies up for adoption. Bush allowed the bill to pass into law without signing it. Another presidential candidate, Sen. Marco Rubio, voted for the Florida law, which has since been overturned by the courts as unconstitutional.
So as the 2016 race heats up, here’s some free advice for political candidates of all parties: Stop demonizing unmarried mothers. Besides being bad policy, it’s also horrible politics. By 2016, for the first time, a majority of the vote-eligible women in America are projected to be unmarried. And a lot of those unmarried women voters will also happen to be unmarried mothers.