Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage
By:
Kathryn Edin Maria Kefalas
Buy it now at Amazon.com!
Lowest New Price: $14.00
List Price: $19.95
Average Customer Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Description:
Millie Acevedo bore her first child before the age of 16 and dropped out of high school to care for her newborn. Now 27, she is the unmarried mother of three and is raising her kids in one of Philadelphia's poorest neighborhoods. Would she and her children be better off if she had waited to have them and had married their father first? Why do so many poor American youth like Millie continue to have children before they can afford to take care of them?
Over a span of five years, sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas talked in-depth with 162 low-income single moms like Millie to learn how they think about marriage and family. Promises I Can Keep offers an intimate look at what marriage and motherhood mean to these women and provides the most extensive on-the-ground study to date of why they put children before marriage despite the daunting challenges they know lie ahead.
Publisher: University of California Press
Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Fantastic book about a not-so-fantastic phenomenon - As a social worker who deals with the population portrayed in this book day in and day out, I was very interested in reading a book that I hoped would help me understand a phenomenon that has intrigued me since the day I started my job. I was very pleased when I read this book as I thought that it did address its stated purpose in a factual but still thoughtful way. I enjoyed this book because the authors were able to keep away from giving the book a judgmental feel while still not appearing to condone the choices that these women made.
Although the book was a fantastic read, especially for those interested in the subject...beware. That is, the book itself is good but the subject matter is all too real and therefore all too disheartening. I say that because there is nothing in the book that I didn't already have a sneaking suspicion about: the selfishness that exists when so many people in this country, be them male/female, rich/poor, black/white, see no problem with creating and bringing a new life in to this world solely to serve their own unfulfilled needs....be them relational, monetary, social, personal, to get their "act" together, and the like.
Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Sets a high standard for ethnographic research - The quotation from William Julius Wilson on the cover sounds "over the top," but it is not: "This is the most important study ever written on motherhood and marriage among low-income urban women." Edin and Kefalas set a high standard for ethnographic research. Unlike many other research projects, they did not simply "dip their feet into a flowing river" (with apologies to Heraclitus). They conducted hundreds of interviews among a diverse population over several years. One of them (Edin) actually lived for several years with her family in one of the neighborhoods: went to church there, shopped there, swapped stories about motherhood... i.e., became part of the community (really). The final study is a testament to the authors' tenacity, integrity, and professionalism. It is not difficult to understand why this book won a major award and has been so highly praised.
On a final note, if you are expecting extensive theoretical justification, you may be disappointed. This study is exceptionally well-written and rich in detail, but it is not, and does not pretend to be, "theoretical" -- at least not in the postmodern or critical sense. From my point of view, this is a merit, not a defect. Edin and Kefalas make a parsimonious, but significant claim regarding single urban mothers and support it with seemingly unimpeachable data. For most auditors, that counts as elegance. Elegance is enough.
Customer Review: 4 out of 5
Sheds light on an important subject - 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.
Customer Review: 4 out of 5
Promises I can Keep: - I very much enjoyed reading 'Promises'. The depth of research is extensive. There is plenty of material here to draw your own conclusions or to append other research. My major criticism is the conflicting stories. I felt like I was reading a book written by ten different authors compiled by style in no particular order. I often felt a little sea sick. There is also a lot of redundancy. Nevertheless, there is a lot of useful original information.
Customer Review: 4 out of 5
Promises I Can Keep - Very interesting from a social perspective. Not alot is written about this subject for the lay person. I found it quite insightful.
--> Find out more about "Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage" at Amazon.com or Order Now
|
|
