Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage

The topics discussed in this book—declining marriage rates and rising rates of unwed motherhood—are considered serious social issues by US policymakers. Many elected officials believe that having children out of wedlock contributes to increased poverty levels, but sociologists Edin and Kefalas provide a different perspective. They flip cause and effect, suggesting that poverty and its associated issues such as drug use and domestic violence contribute to low marriage rates since these factors make male partners less attractive as long-term partners. They emphasize that addressing these systemic problems is necessary to improve marriage rates.

One aspect perpetuating poverty in the United States is the perspective that poverty is a moral issue. American identity is rooted in ideas like the Protestant work ethic and the United States as a land of opportunity—many people believe that anyone can achieve success through hard work, and so they view poverty as a choice or evidence of laziness. These ideas became particularly prevalent through the 1980s and 1990s, and the myth of the “welfare queen” relates specifically to these ideas about poverty and how they apply to childrearing and marriage. Popularized by Ronald Reagan during his 1976 presidential campaign, this harmful stereotype asserts that low-income women purposefully have children out of wedlock to collect welfare checks and use this money to live lavishly. While the myth has consistently been disproven, it motivated policies that cut funding from social programs, presuming that withholding welfare would motivate low-income Americans to work harder and lift themselves out of poverty.

Under President Bill Clinton, one of the country’s largest “welfare reform” bills was passed in 1996. This bill dismantled the existing welfare program—Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC)—and replaced it with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). One of the major system changes was making welfare payments temporary: There is a cap on how long one can receive benefits. The goal is to encourage people receiving welfare to find employment, but the bill has not succeeded in making this change. While fewer people are receiving benefits, those who are kicked off the welfare rolls tend to remain impoverished. For example, Edin’s research since the publication of Promises I Can Keep focuses on populations that live in extreme poverty, often earning less than $2 a day. Due to welfare reform, these individuals do not qualify for aid.

One of the findings in Promises I Can Keep is that low-income mothers prioritize having children over marriage because few men are marriage material at a young age. TANF, in extending poverty rather than alleviating it, thus perpetuates a dynamic in which young men struggle to support their families. Indeed, while TANF supports state programs that promote healthy marriages, recent research shows that these programs have little impact on marriage rates (Lichter, Daniel T. “The Unsuccessful Family Experiment” Pathways, 2018). This data confirms Edin and Kefalas’s argument that alternative social programs are necessary to cultivate marriageability through “concrete methods of increasing access to economic security that helps make relationships strong” and encourage young, low-income couples to delay pregnancy (218).