In their 2005 book, sociologists Kathy Edin and Maria Kefalas, for example, quote one young woman, a white high school dropout who had a child in her teens with a man who was awaiting trial:

That’s when I really started [to get better], because I didn’t have to worry about what he was doing, didn’t have to worry about him cheating on me, all this stuff. [It was] then I realized that I had to do what I had to do to take care of my son. … When he was there, my whole life revolved around him, you know, so I always messed up somehow because I was so worried about what he was doing.

Both men and women view marriage as a serious undertaking that rests on trust, commitment and mutual exchange. Yet low-income women today are warier of marriage than lower-income men, according to a 2013 study. Among 18-to 29-year-olds without a high-school diploma, 67 percent of men versus 47 percent of women say they expect to marry their current partner; among those with at least some college, 68 percent of women versus 46 percent of men expect to marry their current partner. In their twenties, better-educated men and less-educated woman may have partners whose promise does not match their own; their reluctance to commit increases with the disparities in their circumstances.

Without the ability to choose commitment to a partner who carries his own weight in the relationship, women choose the second-best option: independence, which allows them to control their own finances and their partners’ access to their children. They also recognize that commitment to a partner who cannot be trusted or who is a net drain on the family’s material and emotional resources is a fool’s errand.

So is this new system of matriarchy? Emphatically not. Instead, the system of greater economic inequality that writes off a high percentage of low-income men is still a system of male power, with women simply choosing single parenthood as the lesser of two evils. If single-family households were really a sign of a new matriarchy—a reflection of women’s increased societal power—we would simultaneously be seeing the decline of the patriarchal social structure that has long defined American society (and that women like us rebelled against during our college days in the seventies).

That prevailing system of male dominance had three overlapping parts—each of which is still largely intact. First, it included the male societal power that came from almost exclusive male access to the most influential and highest-paying jobs. Today, women constitute almost half of the labor force, and the gender wage gap for full-time workers—that is, the difference between men and women’s incomes—has shrunk considerably. Yet, since 1990, the gender gap in wages specifically for college graduates has actually increased; in fact, taking into account factors like education level, specialty and hours worked, the most dramatic increases between male and female wages have come for those above the 90th percentile in income. In other words, women’s wages aren’t just lagging behind men’s in top income brackets—they’ve fallen farther behind; in a more unequal society, men have been the big winners at the high end of the income spectrum. Competing for top jobs has increasingly taken the form of working greater hours, and among the elite, women are still much more likely than men to drop out of the labor market when children come.

Second, our society’s longstanding, and still prevailing, patriarchal system also extends to male political power—the ability to secure laws reflecting male preferences and perspectives over female ones. According to various polls, women as a group are more likely to support a larger role for government in providing basic services, while men as a group are more likely to prefer the economic policies that have contributed to increasing economic inequality—deregulation of Wall Street, for example. These are the prevailing economic policies of the day; men, particularly the most powerful men, are still winning out on political issues.

Third, patriarchy has also meant male power over the family. Feminist denunciations of marriage, after all, have often described it as a system that secured male power over children, as well as males’ ability to set relationship terms for dependent wives who vowed at the altar “to obey” and faced ignominy if they left unhappy unions. But the new single-parent system cannot be termed a matriarchy that gives women power over relationships. State laws relating to family and marriage have made long term alimony less common and reduced the child support obligations of higher earners who obtain shared custody orders. Custody standards, in turn, have also moved away from a preference for primary caretakers to insistence on shared parenting—a useful shift when both parents can take on that responsibility, but a less realistic one between two people who never made a long-term commitment to each other. Empirical studies show that women, who initiate the overwhelming majority of divorces, become less likely to do so if they fear loss of control over their children. The states that insist on shared custody still restrain women who would like to end their relationships and make marriage that much less attractive.

The word “matriarchy” suggests power, and it is hard to see what power today’s struggling single mothers exercise. Their hard-won independence, in a world where they do not have the power to create better relationships or stronger communities, is under assault. They might be better off unmarried than married to unemployed boyfriends who still live at home with their mothers. But with children to raise, bills to pay and multiple jobs to go to, do they really have any other choice?