Quayle succeeded in launching a public discussion. His side lost. Feminists, Hollywood bigmouths and the usual suspects went ballistic. “Murphy Brown’s” producers made the execrable decision to write a show in which Quayle had attacked the “real” Murphy Brown, not a fictional character. In full martyr mode, the make-believe Murphy Brown said, “Perhaps it’s time for the vice president to expand his definition and recognize that, whether by choice or circumstance, families come in all shapes and sizes.”

Quayle, of course, never said that families don’t come in all shapes and sizes. What he said was that children raised by married, responsible parents do better than those who aren’t. And that’s where Whitehead came in. Marshaling the still-gelling social science at the time, she put numbers behind Quayle’s assertions.

Back then, Whitehead’s essay was heretical. Today, it’s conventional wisdom. Last year, Isabel Sawhill, a widely respected liberal economist at the Brookings Institution, wrote an op-ed article for the Washington Post titled “20 years later, it turns out Dan Quayle was right about Murphy Brown and unmarried moms.”