Notes on Promises I Can Keep, pt. 2: why lower-income women tend not to marry.
Edin and Kefalas found that poor women want very much to get married (70% of their interviewees stated explicitly that marriage was an important life goal for them), and that their ideal conception of marriage is virtually identical to the middle-class ideal: a partnership of equals that provides emotional support, companionship, and a harmonious home in which to raise kids.
The problem is that it's really hard to find a partner who can live up to this ideal when you're poor. Most of the men available to these women are bluntly described by the researchers as "low quality." Infidelity, domestic abuse, substance abuse, and criminal involvement are common; almost all of their respondents had experienced at least one of those issues in a relationship. In these neighborhoods, "good, decent, trustworthy men are in short supply."
(An interesting side note here is that because irresponsibility is more socially tolerated for new fathers than new mothers, and because mothers in these neighborhoods not only expect but welcome the responsibility of "getting serious" when babies arrive, there's actually some evidence that having a baby tends to settle girls down, but has no such effect on boys. The result is that poor moms tend to fare better, economically and behaviorally, than poor dads. The research suggests that having children is actually a stabilizing factor for these women -- it often acts as an incentive to stop fighting, abusing drugs, associating with less stable acquaintances, etc. -- and is part of why, as a group, the mothers often become more responsible and hardworking than their men.)
Compounding the economic and behavioral unsuitability of these men is the fact that poor, unskilled men have not accepted modern gender norms to the same extent that everyone else has. Many of them still expect to be treated like kings of the household, displaying an attitude of explicit sexual ownership and jealousy toward their wives that the women want no part of.
Because of all these factors, the women tend to put off marriage until they're economically stable. If the woman isn't financially dependent on her husband, she has some leverage to demand that he "treat her right," or else she'll walk. Also, "these couples live in a world where the better-off men go to the better-off women," so by improving her own economic position, a poor woman can attract a better class of man. All of this creates a powerful incentive to delay marriage until later in life (many of the women say that the ideal age for marriage is 35 or 40).
Further, because the symbolic importance of marriage as a marker of having "arrived" into the "white picket fence" dream of respectability is so great, "[f]or the poor, divorce is the ultimate loss of face; the couple must bear the reproach of neighbors and kin for daring to think they were ready for marriage in the first place." It's precisely because marriage vows are perceived as so sacred and powerful that the women don't want to risk failure and aren't willing to accept a proposal until they have complete faith in the relationship.
The upshot is that "for a poor single mother to say she's abandoned the goal of marriage is the equivalent of admitting she's given up on her dreams for a better future." But the value of the dream is so great that "the poor avoid marriage not because they think too little of it, but because they revere it. They object to divorce because they believe it strips marriage of its meaning[... and] their prerequisites for marriage reflect the high standards they've adopted."
In this context, with so few gems available amidst the duds, a man's reaction to news of his partner's pregnancy is perceived as a test of his worthiness. It's considered "better to gauge a man's worth early on than waste years investing in a lost cause."
Poor women "see little point in waiting to have children, since they do not believe that having children early will have much effect on their economic prospects later on," and "consider marriage a luxury -- one they desire and hope someday to attain, but can live without if they must."
So what policy prescriptions do the authors see working?
-- A big piece is "improving the quality of the male partners in the pool," via increased employment/job training (and addressing the host of ills that have accompanied the "war on drugs"), plus early intervention to teach relationship skills (which are generally lacking in communities that have few good role models for strong marriages), plus convincing men to delay fatherhood until their late twenties, when most of them age out of crime and delinquency.
-- Social programs that effectively address teen pregnancy among at-risk populations show promise. One of the more effective methods is engaging teenage girls in service learning, giving them "the opportunity to give of oneself and the chance to feel useful to others" via community involvement. (I think this could dovetail neatly with government-sponsored child care in, e.g., paying teenage girls to work as daycare aides.)
-- Asset creation strategies such as EITC, subsidized home ownership/car ownership/education for the poor, and higher minimum wages, make marriage more economically feasible. (The late '90s economic boom, which increased wages even for unskilled workers, spurred a drop in nonmarital childbirth rates, suggesting that when girls saw a viable economic path forward, they were willing to delay childbearing to take advantage of the available opportunity.)
-- In general, anything that effectively reduces inequality and opens opportunities for women who otherwise see no viable paths forward will tend to encourage marriage and delay childbearing.
A few years later, Edin and Kefalas wrote a whole separate book examining poor men's attitudes toward fatherhood, which is next up in the queue.
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