Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage
Book by Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas
Review by Richard Gibson, original at
http://www.amazon.com/Promises-Can-Keep-Motherhood-Marriage/product-reviews/0520248198/ref=cm_cr_dp_all_helpful?ie=UTF8&coliid=&showViewpoints=1&colid=&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending
at December 10, 2007.
This book examines why poor women have children prior to being married. The authors did a years-long, very intense, ethnographic study of dozens of poor women of all races in some of the worst neighbrhorhoods of Philadelphia.
The book is good. It is easy to read, and it maintains a nice balance between academic depth -- the authors are well read in their area, but are low key about it -- and engagement with their subjects. The authors care about these women, and that comes across.
The book has a number of conclusions, which are all, to some degree, unexpected.
First, the authors do not believe that the problem is poverty. Obviously, life for these women is more difficult, because they are poor, but that is not whey they have kids before they marry. After all, we have always had poor people, and, in the not so-distant past, the vast majority married before they had kids. No, the authors conclude, the fundamental reason why the poor have children before marriage is a massive cultural shift. Quite simply, marriage has been re-defined. It used to be that one could not have sex, have kids or be accepted as an adult, without being married. Now, marriage has been disconnected from all of these things. The authors see this shift as not being limited to the poor; indeed, they believe that the poor are simply following the middle class in this regard.
Second, although the authors see the poor as having the same basic values as the middle class, they believe that these values play out differently for the poor. The middle class generally gets married, prior to having children, because middle class women have alot to lose. They have careers. They have futures. Having kids, outside marriage, threatens all of this. Since the paramount goal is individual fulfillment, middle-class women do not threaten all of the good things in their lives by having children without any male support.
The poor, on the other hand, say our authors, basically have nothing in their lives which having children would threaten. They do not have a career. They work at lousy low-wage jobs, to which they can return after having kids, because what difference does it make. The authors portray their women as having so little in their lives that they see no downside to having kids by themselves. On the contrary, the authors report that poor women value children, and see the children as adding a great deal to their lives. Many of the subjects report that their lives were an out of control mess -- drinking, drugging, partying -- until they had kids, which is often reported as turning them around.
Third, this book reports a very bleak landscape between the sexes among the poor. Men are just no damm good, virtually all of the women in this book say. Men will not grow up, do not support their kids, chase other women, are often violently abusive and often wind up in jail. While most women report having a child as turning their lives around, and making them into responsibile adults, most of the men involved can not handle the responsibility and run away. It is deeply depressing to read how bitterly these women distrust the men in their lives. (I found that the account rang true, but, to be fair, the authors only spoke to poor women; they did not speak to poor men, who might give a different version.)
In the end, the book describes this odd paralled universe, in which poor women want children and marriage, but see children as easy to get and marriage as an impossible dream.
Very eye-opening book, and very depressing.
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