46 pages • 1 hour read
Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage
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Index of Terms
Low Income
Edin and Kefalas study inner-city, low-income single mothers across racial and ethnic lines. They define low income as those who earned less than $16,000 a year when employed full-time at the time they conducted the study. This total is “about equal to the federal poverty line in those years [the late 1990s]” (24). All participants came from areas where at least 20% of inhabitants were poor, and some participants received welfare benefits. Approximately half of the study participants had received welfare within the two years before the study. Half were not in school or working at the time of the study. Forty percent of the women studied worked low-paying jobs in the service industry (e.g., servers, nurse aids, retail). Some participants lived alone with their children, while half cohabited with family or friends. A small number lived with male partners.
Middle Class
Edin and Kefalas contrast the low-income single mothers they studied with middle-class women. The middle class is defined in part by higher economic status, and in 2022, the Pew Research Center defined the median middle-class income as $106,100, (Kochhar, Rakesh. “The State of the American Middle Class.” Pew Research Center, 2024). However, income is not the only factor that distinguishes the middle class from the lower class, as Edin and Kefalas show. For example, middle-class attitudes toward unplanned pregnancies at a young age vastly differ, with the middle class seeing a nonmarital pregnancy as tragic, something that derails a young woman’s future including plans for her education and career prospects. Low-income communities, in contrast, see these pregnancies as an opportunity for a young woman to prove her self-worth. The poor and middle-class Americans alike value marriage, but for the middle class, it is prioritized over childbearing and happens younger. For low-income women, marriage is a dream to which they aspire after becoming mothers.
Relational Poverty
Relational poverty refers to a lack of social connections to others via family relations or friendships. This lack of an emotional support system, Edin and Kefalas argue, contributes to young women choosing to bear children outside of marriage because motherhood fills this gap and provides them with badly needed emotional connection.
Single Mother
Edin and Kefalas use the term “single mother” to refer to women who are unmarried at the time of their children’s birth. They point out that common usage of this term often obscures the reality of these women’s lives by assuming they have no romantic partners. In fact, many unwed mothers are in a romantic relationship with the father of their baby at the time of birth: “A large national survey shows that when poor women give birth, eight out of ten are still romantically involved with their child’s father, and four in ten are even living together” (74). However, many of these relationships end within a few months to a year after the birth. Two-thirds of these couples part ways by the child’s third birthday.
Welfare Queen
Edin and Kefalas’s study counters the right-wing narrative about low-income, single mothers who abuse the welfare system. The term “welfare queen” came into popular usage after presidential candidate Ronald Reagan used it in a 1976 speech. This stigmatizing and derogatory term suggests that low-income, often non-white women deliberately have many children to collect welfare benefits and avoid paid work. It erroneously portrays these women as lazy and living off the taxes of wealthier Americans. Edin and Kefalas’s research, however, shows that low-income women do not have children because of the welfare benefits. Rather, they have children at a young age because of their relational poverty and the low cost of nonmarital pregnancy. Their prospects for higher education and career advancement are already low, so having a child young while unmarried does not negatively impact opportunities the way it does for the middle class. Also in contrast to “welfare queen” narratives, these women are not selfish, and they do not use their children to make money. Low-income mothers take great pride in good mothering and “being there” for their children in the face of less-than-ideal living conditions, and they often prioritize their children’s health and happiness over their own.
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