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

Edin and Kefalas’s work focuses on low-income, unwed women who experience unintended pregnancy before their education is complete. Their struggles often infuriate the American public since the number of unwed mothers has increased from 1 in 20 in 1950 to one in three at the time of the book’s publication in 2002: “Having a child while single is three times as common for the poor as the affluent” (2). The authors also acknowledge that social science research indicates that children benefit when their parents marry and remain together, stating that “children raised outside of marriage typically learn less in school, are more likely to graduate from high school and enroll in college, and have more trouble finding jobs” (3). The cycle of poverty persists because single parents are frequently not only poor but face other disadvantages. Many conclude that these women should wait to have children until they are married and established financially, and public policy has encouraged marriage as an antidote to impoverishment. However, the authors argue that the reasons for the divergence between marriage and childbearing are not obvious. Their study addresses this gap in social science research by studying family formation among 162 single mothers in low-income neighborhoods of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and the adjacent New Jersey city of Camden.