The article, "Stone Soup" by Barbara Kingfisher is about the certain types of marriages and how it is okay for families to be different. Then the outline of the "Dad, Mom, Sis, and Junior". She shows an example of a non-nuclear family at a soccer game cheering on a member of the family that has Just scored a winning goal and she states, "l dare anybody to call this a broken home", (Kingfisher 207).
She was implying that even Hough they are not a common structured family, they still care about each other. Then she goes into detail on how she was raised in a nuclear family but now realizes that even though she is a single parent, she and her daughter are fine. Then she explains how people think that, if a family is not nuclear, then it is a mess of a family and if the marriage ends up in a divorce, it's labeled as a failure.Kingfisher states that, she used to believe in this ideology of divorce being the lazy way out and as a hill, she wanted to be part of a "Family of Dolls," (Kindergärtners), but soon realized that after she got married, there is a story that did not fall into her prince of charming fairy tale which lead to a dead marriage. She then relieves the time right after she got divorced and how American customs claim that she was burdened with task of single parenthood and some of her friends emphasized that by leaving her when she needed help most.Then after she recovered, she felt like she and her gather were pitied, but her daughter always looked on the bright side of having parent's that don't talk to each other.
Kingfisher, then goes back to family structure and states that to Judge a family by its harmony is like Judging a book by its cover. She goes back in time to show how nuclear families struggled to survive and how most of the family members had to work Just to get by. She goes into details about families during the Great Depression and explains that families were alliteration's due to lack of money for housing.She writes about how the "Family of Dolls" theory was introduced when the economy rose, to make sure women gave their Jobs to returning soldiers and single parent families that sank and struggled economically.
She states that, families are always being reshaped due to economic tides and how single mothers are more likely to be employed now rather than in the fifties and are able to get a divorce and able to support a family in order to be "happy'.
