Having It All? Unmarried Women Choosing Hetero-Gay Families

The study presented here considered heterosexual women who chose to conceive and raise children together with gay men outside marriage. In-depth interviews with 10 Israeli mothers who had established hetero-gay families revealed their motivations for choosing this family configuration and the characteristics they sought in the fathers. The findings revealed that the women maintained traditional values with respect to the ideal parental model, two-gender parenting, and the attributes they sought for the coparents of their children. Rather than overtly challenge institutional patriarchy, these women chose to establish an alternative family that circumvented patriarchal impositions.