The Columbia Daily Tribune (Missouri) ran a story on Friday about sociologist Maria Kefalas’ work on how “poor women find redemption in having a baby.”
When Maria Kefalas started visiting low-income neighborhoods in Philadelphia to interview the young, single and often welfare-dependent mothers who lived there, many of the grandmothers were her age. When one mother heard Kefalas, at 32, had just become pregnant with her first child, she said, “Isn’t it wonderful that the doctors were proved wrong and you were able to get pregnant?”
The woman, who had her own first child in her teens, assumed Kefalas had been trying without success to have a baby since 19 or 20. This wasn’t true, of course. In her early 20s, Kefalas had college to think about. Summer vacations spent traveling. Her future career. But this was still an assumption she encountered in these neighborhoods while conducting research with another sociologist. One 14-year-old told her, “I’ve been trying to have a baby ever since I could.”
As Kefalas puts it, childbirth has very little “competition” in these women’s lives.
“The stylish careers, fulfilling relationships and exceptional educations that will occupy middle- and upper class women’s twenties and thirties are unattainable dreams to the women driving the non-marital childbearing trend,” she writes on her blog on the Huffington Post. She sees children out of wedlock not as a decline in family values in poverty-stricken areas but as yet another symptom of the growing divide between the haves and the have-nots in the United States.
In a phone interview, Kefalas said she believes talking to these women allowed her to dig past survey and statistical data that provide information but few answers. When the question “Why do poor women have children outside of marriage?” comes up, society responds that individuals in low-income neighborhoods don’t believe in marriage.
The innovative and important contribution of this work…
Kefalas and Edin’s research doesn’t refute the notion that repairing family structures will help end welfare dependency by stabilizing homes. But it does challenge the assumption that the women living in Philadelphia’s worst neighborhoods didn’t care about marriage. In fact, the young women they met cared deeply about it.
“Everyone’s notions of marriage have changed in society,” Kefalas said. The difference is, “upper-class young couples are able to achieve those raised” expectations, although “among low income couples you see the raised standards like everybody else, but actually more diminished opportunities to achieve those goals.”
For example, if the dream for marriage is a stable, dependable husband, these women had little hope of finding him. Many don’t go to college and remain in the neighborhood where they grew up. The men around them are engaged in high-risk behavior and are often involved in the drug economy. Many spend some time in prison. Seen in this light, marriage is far from a stabilizer. The relationships are very “volatile,” and the divorce rate for these low-income couples is significantly higher than the national rate.
Having a child, however, does seem to provide new sense of purpose for the women Kefalas interviewed. It can act as a stabilizer in a neighborhood, family or financial situation that is otherwise chaos.
“Having a child offers a source of redemption,” Kefalas said. “You go from being this teenager who is wild and out of control to being this young woman with a baby, and if your baby’s clean, people stop you on the street and say, ‘You’re such a wonderful mother.’
“These young women say, ‘Having a baby saved my life.’ ”
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