What do Low-Income Single Mothers Say about Marriage
Low-income single mothers view marriage differently. Dating back from the 1970s and the 1980s, causes have been construed. Then, financially unstable single mothers could claim welfare till their youngest child were disqualified for the program.Fast forward through the 1990s. Despite the continuation of such welfare programs, and which were seen as efforts to discourage the poor from marrying, the rolls of the welfare have almost fallen to the levels of the early 1990s.
According to Kathryn’s study, her qualitative interviews with 292 low-income unmarried mothers, economic factors were outweighed by other factors. According to the study, the following is what single mothers had to say about marriage. One of them is affordability. Mothers view fathers and boyfriends as having little skills and no good employment history and thus cannot support them in paying bills. Still, instead of marrying their children’s father, many single mothers opted to live in separate places or co-habit. As one black Philadelphia mother put it, “If you can’t put any food here, you can’t eat here…you can’t eat my kids’ food” and “I would never [get tied to] a[nother] man who is irresponsible and without a job” (p. 118); thus what keeps mothers unmarried is inconsistent paychecks.
The second factor is respectability which mother’s view is got from high-income earning and consistently employed partners (Kathryn). Marrying low-income earners than the mothers would lessen their respectability instead of boosting it. Single mothers look unto someone capable of driving them up the social ladder as explained by one single mother from Charleston, “[My baby’s father,] doing pretty good…not going to marry him until we get some land.” She said she wasn’t ready to, “get married and pay rent for someone else” but was ready after, “we save enough money to buy an acre of land and a trailer” (p. 120).
The third factor is control and stalled sex role revolution. As in the study, many single mothers feel their kids’ fathers tend to adhere to the tradition whereby they were on top of their wives and be the decision makers. The respondents’ view in the study express the men’s where they want or say, “it’s either my way or the highway”, “want to be in charge” “head of the house” while the single mothers want to be in charge and as one respondent put it, “I feel more freedom to be a parent how I want” and another quipped, “I don’t want any man thinking he has any claim on my kids or how I raise them” (p. 121). Breaking the tradition trend of family pattern or experiences in an unsuccessful marriage are driving factors.
The forth factor is trust where infidelity, double-crossing by partners after a planned birth and partner’s reluctance in supporting a child that they suspect isn’t theirs. One respondent, stated that when pregnant, her partner had asked her, “how do I know the baby’s mine?” and one Chicago respondent doubt a man enough to love her and her child really existed (p. 125). Lastly is domestic violence with many women saying were battered during their pregnancies with many respondents in insecure areas seeing it as a carry-over of street-violence. One respondent observed that “I got to where nobody be punching on me because love is not that serious” (p. 126).
A connection of the information to other concepts is the “Theory and Culture” whereby in Exchange Theory there is the analysis of cost vs. benefit in a family unit, the gains and costs of staying or leaving a relationship. This connection is whereby women pull out of their marriages in the case study because they felt they were oppressed, subjected to domestic violence and not having freedom.
Based on primary data, the case study delves into the root causes of low-income single mothers substituting marriage motherhood to single motherhood and straddles the line between economic and non-economic factors. The article has made me understand that single mothers don’t merely opt to stay single because of economic factors but also mainly because of non-economic factors that they feel are a threat to their wellbeing. Despite the continuation of the initiated welfare programs, and which were seen as efforts to discourage the poor from marrying, the rolls of the welfare almost fell to the levels of the early 1990s. This, coupled with the fact that some people claim the decline of the welfare results from the improvement of economic conditions and what the scholars opine as the “signaling effect” whereby rules have been revised thus not suiting way of life; this clearly points out and conforms with the article writer’s thesis that “current theories of marriage under-predict the extent of non-marriage, have not been adequately tested…do not apply well to women with low-socioeconomic status.”
Work Cited
Edin, K. “What Do Low-Income Single Mothers Say about Marriage?” Social Problems, Vol. 47, No.1,(2000): pp. 122-133. Print.