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

“For those middle-class women Hewlett spoke to, the tragedy was unintended childlessness following educational and professional success. For the low-income women we spoke to, the tragedy is unintended pregnancy and childbirth before a basic education has been completed, while they are still poor and unmarried.”

Economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett published a monograph in 2002 that argued middle-class, career-driven women were making a mistake in delaying pregnancy and facing infertility. This book became a bestseller highlighting a fertility “crisis.” Edin and Kefalas contrast their work with Hewlett’s book. There is an alternative crisis occurring in poor urban centers: the proliferation of young, unwed mothers trapped in a cycle of poverty.

“While the poor women we interviewed saw marriage as a luxury, something they aspired to but feared they might never achieve, they judged children to be a necessity, an absolutely essential part of a young woman’s life, the chief source of identity and meaning.”

Low-income communities do not reject marriage, in contrast to what some conservative critics suggest. Instead, low-income women highly value marriage and delay it until they feel economically stable and secure in their relationship. Indeed, they speak of divorce in disparaging terms. Marriage is a privilege they can only hope to achieve while motherhood is a necessity that gives them hope and a meaningful identity.

“The heady declaration ‘I want to have a baby by you’ is fueled by the extraordinarily high social value the poor place on children.”

Young men compliment their girlfriends when they proclaim they want to have a baby with them. This declaration is a high form of praise that assures a young woman of her worthiness in the eyes of her partner and contributes to pregnancies that are not entirely planned but also not avoided.