Written by: Grace Plumpton-Hill

Edited by: Laurence Desjardins

I realized at a young age that my family–my two mothers, my twin brother, and I–did not fit the mould. I did not see my family in childhood movies, television shows, schoolbooks, or advertisements. The media I consumed insisted that romance and parenthood required a man’s presence. But it wasn’t only the media that marginalized my family. Teachers assumed a father would handle my permission slips or attend my sports games. Other children called my family “weird” or “impossible”. Strangers would question who the real parent was. I quickly learned that my family unsettled people. Not because it was unstable, but because it was fulfilled entirely without a man, and this subverted the accepted family structure.

Lesbian relationships alone already threaten patriarchal systems by excluding men and undermining their importance in the romantic sphere. Accordingly, lesbian parenthood is double transgressive against the patriarchy’s sacred tool for enforcing male authority: the traditional family unit. The anxiety evoked by two women loving each other and raising a family together exposes how entrenched our concept of a healthy family is in the preservation of male dominance.

Lesbian parenthood exposes how parental responsibility and authority are not naturally gendered, but rather sustained through social structures that preserve male dominance within the family and society. By intertwining lived experience with sociological analysis, this article reveals that the patriarchal family is not inherent, it is ideological. As such, it demonstrates how lesbian parenthood reconfigures the hegemonic family concept into an egalitarian model of kinship.

The Western Traditional Nuclear Family

The idealization of the Western traditional “nuclear” family has long been used as an ideological tool to condemn both feminism and homosexuality while defending patriarchy. Maria Mies established that the nuclear family involves “the definition of the man as ‘head’ of [the family’s] household and ‘breadwinner’ for the non-earning legal wife and their children.” According to Mies, the nuclear family was institutionalized through state intervention in the nineteenth century rather than natural social evolution. Its purpose was to secure women’s dependence and legitimize male authority in both public and private life.

In the twentieth century, US conservatives and far-right Christians propagated the structure as the foundation of national morality and well-being. In Seth Dowland’s Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right, he wrote that they “labelled their opposition to abortion, feminism, and gay rights as the defence of ‘family values’,” claiming that the family’s demise would threaten the nation itself. Moreover, “The Moral Majority” founder, Jerry Falwell, described the nuclear family as “the fundamental building block” of society, while the movement’s The Family Manifesto (1988), defined it as “an immutable structure”. By framing the family as natural and patriotic, the political and Christian right concealed its ideological and historical development.

This rhetoric enabled anti-gay sentiment to be relabeled as a righteous, protective duty. Christian conservatives weaponized public anxiety of national social change to blame gay people. Charlie Jodd and other members of The Moral Majority warned that the acceptance of homosexuality would “bring about the demise of American culture”. This fear was also extended to the private sphere. Dr. Harold Voth defined maturity as heterosexual cohabitation and parenthood, and as such rendered same-sex relationships as deviant and “immature”. Anita Bryant’s Save Our Children campaign portrayed homosexuals as threats to children, tainting the nation’s future with their perverse influence. However, these homophobic and nationalistic arguments unravel when, as feminists like Mies reveal, the U.S. “nuclear family” is shown to be not an immutable human institution but a historical construct of bourgeois society. This raises the question: if it is not the nation’s foundations being protected, then what purpose does the defence of the family actually serve?

What conservatives truly sought to defend was not the nation’s prosperity, but a gender hierarchy that served to maintain the dominance of men and subjugation of women. The way of life that is at risk of disintegration with the acceptance of homosexuality is one in which the patriarchal structures of the public sphere are sustained within the private sphere. Homophobia has served to preserve patriarchal power by delegitimizing any forms of kinship or parentage not organized around male authority. In this sense, lesbian motherhood, which separates motherhood from male and heterosexual dependence, poses an especially subversive challenge to this ideology. This analysis reveals critiques of lesbian motherhood as symptoms of misogyny rather than concern for children or national social stability. 

Misogyny and the Myth of the “Missing Father”

Central to the belief of both women’s dependence on men and the defence of the traditional family is the myth of the “missing father.” It suggests that a family without a man is inherently deficient, and that women are incapable of fulfilling his presumed paternal duties. This notion casts women as incomplete and emotionally unfit for leadership or discipline. Lesbian parenthood becomes a double violation of adequate parentage, as it rejects both heterosexuality and male dominance within the domestic sphere. 

Within Western gender ideology, the father symbolizes discipline and moral authority, while the mother represents nurturance and emotional support. Critics often claim that children raised without a father will lack the natural “authority” and “guidance” that a man provides, which could damage the child’s future relationships. This argument reinforces the idea that parental roles should and do rely on biology rather than social construction and personality. Yet empirical research consistently disproves this claim about fatherless children, demonstrating that children of lesbian parents fare just as well as those of heterosexual parents across various child well-being measures.

My personal experience supports this evidence. I have been lucky enough to know only abundance within my family–of love, care, and support. My moms watched every sports game, attended every parent-teacher conference, applauded every performance, and has always loved me unconditionally. Nonetheless, many wonder how my moms are able to compensate for the absence of a father figure with questions like: “Which one is the ‘father’?” or “do you wish you had a dad?” My response was that I have two loving parents who each provided care, discipline, and guidance in equal measure, ultimately sharing responsibilities. One taught me to write, introduced me to Toronto’s sports teams, and loves to cook; the other taught me math, showed me how to do my laundry, and gave me my sense of humour. Neither my parents–nor myself–needed a man’s presence to complete our family.

The “missing father” narrative is revealed as ideological, not empirical or biological. It projects the patriarchal assumption that women require male partnership to form a complete and functional family. Lesbian families demonstrate that care, discipline, and moral guidance need not be mediated by a patriarchal force, challenging the ideological core of the Western family model. They present a unique potential to reimagine the domestic sphere as a place of kinship rather than gendered subordination. 

Lesbians Reconfiguring the Family Sphere

Lesbian parenthood represents a structural challenge to the patriarchal foundation of the traditional private sphere. Existing outside of the heterosexual model, same-sex families are compelled to construct their own framework of kinship that is not organized around male authority. In doing so, they also expose the supposed naturality of patriarchal family roles as cultural invention rather than inherent fact. 

It is important to recognize that lesbian families are not inherently free from hierarchy. Gendered expectations can persist without men, as many lesbian households reproduce the binary of “masculine” and “feminine” parental roles. Similarly, not all heterosexual families are bound to patriarchy. However, lesbian parenthood provides a distinct vantage point from which to question and reimagine domestic relations. Without a father figure, parental responsibilities can be distributed through negotiation and personal strengths rather than tradition. This emphasizes cooperation, emotional reciprocity, and shared authority.

It is in this sense that lesbian families carry the potential to innovate the meaning of kinship itself and resist hegemonic systems. They demonstrate that care, responsibility, and moral guidance can thrive outside of patriarchal hierarchies. By existing beyond the heterosexual structure, lesbian parenthood reveals that the family is a mutable social construct capable of more egalitarian possibilities that do not subjugate women. This reconfiguration challenges the notion that women’s autonomy and independence from men are incompatible with familial stability while gesturing towards a broader liberation from gendered power itself.