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This book is a study of the personal tales of many single mothers, with intentions to understand why single mothers from poor urban neighborhoods are increasingly having children out of wedlock at a young age and without promise of marrying their fathers. The authors chose to research their study in Philadelphia’s eight most devastated neighborhoods, where oppression and danger are high and substantial job opportunities are rare. They provide an excellent education against the myth that poor young urban women are having children due to a lack of education on birth control or because they intend to work the welfare system. Instead, having children is their best and perhaps only means of obtaining the purpose, validation and companionship that is otherwise difficult to find in the areas in which they live. For many of them, their child is the biggest promise they have to a better future. They also believe that though their life may not have been what they want, they want their child to have more and better opportunities and make it their life’s work to provide that. Their ethnographic study included about 162 women. The sample was limited to mothers making less than $16,000 per year, placing them under the federal poverty line. All the women lived in neighborhoods where at least twenty percent were poor. Each had at least one child under eighteen living at home. They also were classified single mothers, though few actually maintained their own household. They ranged in age from fifteen to fifty-six, with an average of twenty five years of age. Forty-five percent had no high school diploma, but fifteen percent had a GED. Of these women, forty percent worked low income service jobs. The authors had informal interactions with the wome... ... middle of paper ... ...promising dreams, relationships often fall apart under strain from unemployment, drug and alcohol abuse, imprisonment, conflict and betrayal. Finally, we get to the heart of what marriage means to these mothers and why they say that successfully raising children is the most important job they will ever have. Almost all of the women said things like “It’s only because my children that I am where I am today.” This is the take away message I think. Pushing marriage, like we have done in the past, is not what will help these women. Based on this, I would encourage policies that allow women to grow and reach more after they’ve had children, instead of giving handouts, give hand ups and the future generations may be made better by this. Works Cited Edin, Kathryn and Kefalas, Maria. 2005. Promises I Can Keep. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
Bishop, J. Michael. "Enemies Of Promise" The Presence Of Others Ed. Andrea A. Lunsford, John J. Ruszkiewicz New York: St. Martin's, 1997 255-263.
In Wade F. Horn’s article “Promoting Marriage as a Means of Promoting Fatherhood,” Horn discusses how having a child and being married is better for children because the father is more involved in the child’s life. Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas’s “Unmarried with Children,” on the other hand, takes the reader through Jen’s story about getting pregnant at a young age and deciding not to marry the father of her son. While both sources make appeals to emotion, reason, and character, Edin and Kefalas’s article makes more successful appeals and thus is the stronger argument.
While marriage was synonym of childbearing and childrearing, in the 1950’s, it takes another sense nowadays. Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas study this new trend within poor young mothers. Specifically, they stress the importance of parenthood over matrimony in these poor neighborhoods. Edin and Kefalas explain how young mothers perceive the erstwhile correlation between marriage and parenthood. This divergent way of thinking throughout social classes and ethnic is analyzed in their book, Promises I Can Keep.
In this book, we get just a glimpse into some facets of the life of a low-wage worker. We never read of car repair issues or meet anyone who uses public transportation to get to work. We also never hear of childcare issues, often a major problem for single mothers. Overall, it was an in-teresting read. However, anyone can learn much of this same information and more by simply talking to the “invisible” people who serve us every day.
She holds back the close emotional connections that her children and husband crave. Instead, she prepares her children for life's disappointments and hardships, for which she has never expected.
Harris, Kathleen. “Work and Welfare Among Single Mothers in Poverty.” The American Journal of Sociology. Vol. 99 Sept. 1993. 317-52.
In the United States, more than one in three women live in poverty or on the brink of it (Patron, 2014). The current federal poverty level starts at $16,020 for a family of two, $20,160 for a family of 3, and so on at increments of slightly more than $4,000 for each additional family member (Buteau, 2007). There are 106 million people in the United States that have incomes below 200 percent of the federal poverty level, or are low-income. About 42 million of these low-income individuals are women and 28 million are their children (Patron, 2014). This phenomenon of the disproportionate rate of the population’s poor being women is known as the feminization of poverty.
Miller, Naomi. Single Parents by Choice: A Growing Trend in Family Life. New York: Insight, 1992.
“Ninety percent of single-parent families are headed by females. Not surprisingly, single mothers with dependent children have the highest rate of poverty across all demographic groups” (Olson & Banyard, 1993, p. 50-56). “Approximately 60 percent of U.S. children living in mother-only families are impoverished, compared with only 11 percent of two-parent families. The rate of poverty is even higher in African-American single-parent families, in which two out of every three children are poor” (Kirby, n.d., Single-parent Families in Poverty section, para.2).
“I belong to that classification of people known as wives, I am A Wife. And, not altogether incidentally, I am a mother’’. This quote stated by Judy Brady from the essay, “Why I Want a Wife”, shows that a wife and a mother are just as important as everyone else. Judy Brady feels that wives are not acknowledged enough from all the hard work they do. Judy Brady shows that wives are important and underappreciated by using rhetorical devices such as ethos, sarcasm, and exaggeration.
Also, single mothers who do have the opportunity to finish high school, then college creates barriers. These barriers can include unfamiliar college environment, childcare needs, transportation and affordable housing (Megan and Hartmann, 1997), as a result it appears, single mothers upon completion of these programs find it hard to get jobs that generate enough income to support their family (Purmort, 2010 pp. 15-16 ). Another divergent with the labor force of single mothers this research seems to reveal is the sudden shift from financial incentives to dependent on working earning alone (Moffitt, p.17). Working mothers generate larger budgets and find it more difficult to make ends meet than when they received welfare (Edin and lein p.254).
The situation between a single mother, Patty, and her pregnant teenage daughter, Amber, connects to many different social and cultural contexts. A social context that the mother and daughter faces together is single parenting. Patty, a single parent of three, struggles to support her children (Duan & Brown, 2016). Being raised by a divorced or single parent creates new situations that the parent and their children must work through. When I was in 6th grade, my parents went through drawn-out divorce. Connecting my situation to Ambers situation, Patty is trying her hardest to have amber be successful in school/ her life. Yet, no matter how hard she tries, patties past gets in the way. Patty’s former experiences with guys created the poor relationship
The reduced earnings of women have an impact on 7.4 million households run by single working women. Over two point one million families consisting of working single mothers were considered poor. An added two point four million working single mothers were severely struggling to barely make ends meet. They were falling between 100 and 200 pe...
...to raise you family as a normal one. It’s not about masculinity that the women have to stay home and we take care of the hard work, it just not that way. It’s about how we as a couple and partnership share capability and the responsibility of having a family nowadays. Although, you would never miss the security of having a job because as a couples you will have the job of a lifetime and that job is to teach them and taking time with them so that they don’t feel along and scare. “Some parent take a philosophical, you do what you gotta do approach. As Mr. Fulgham put it, you’ve got to look at the positive. You’ve got to manipulate the negative and make them more positive…In a family like ours; everybody learns that they’re all part of the solution. Our family has adapted (“Beat the Clock”).” In other words, your family will adapted to any situation you put them.
In the article, Unmarried With Children, the main person that is discussed is a young lady by the name of Jen, who had a child at a young age and was not married. Jen like others that grow up in poverty, it is usually hard for them since it is hard for them to access resources that aren’t even readily available to them. For example, Edin and Kefalas states at the end “until poor young women have more access to jobs that lead to financial independence-until there is reason to hope for the rewarding life pathways that their privileged peers pursue-the poor will continue to have children sooner than most Americans think they should” (Edin, Read, pg. 605). Economically, if one is living day by day, it is an unstable en...