A little over a month ago, I picked up a copy of Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage. I heard about it from Lauren, who wrote a long post about the book by Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas. Lauren was inspired by a review of “Promises” written by Bitch Ph.D.
This is a powerful and important book. There are few groups in our society more consistently stigmatized than poor women (of any race, but particularly non-white women) who have children out of wedlock. Those of us in the middle class make a wide variety of assumptions about the motivations of the women who do become unwed teen mothers. Some of the assumptions are cruel in their falsehood (think of the “welfare queen” stereotype perpetuated by President Reagan). Others are both benign and clueless, such as the assumption that “these girls” just don’t know about birth control. And of course, in most such discussions, the role of the males who father these children is ignored.
One of the best aspects of “Promises I Can Keep” (and this gets touched on by both Lauren and Bitch Ph.D.) is its authors’ insight into how poor women interpret getting pregnant and having a child at a young age.
As I’ve blogged more than once, I got my high school girlfriend pregnant. We were very much in love; she was my “first” in every sense of the word. We knew about birth control, of course, but our use of protection was at best intermittent. When she got pregnant, we briefly fantasized about keeping the baby, about getting married, or about putting the baby up for adoption. But I was getting ready to go off to college, and she had another year of high school ahead of her. We both had dreams and plans and expectations that would have been derailed by a child. My girlfriend knew perfectly well that even if we chose adoption, carrying the baby to term would mean missing school, public embarassment (from which I would be conveniently immune), and it would mean the heart-wrenching surrender of a child she had carried for nine months. At barely sixteen, she was understandably not ready for all that. She had an abortion, and I was with her — as much as any man can be with a woman — as she went through it.
But of course, abortion appeared like the best alternative at the time because we both wanted and expected college. Our social class and our privilege made terminating the pregnancy the best possible option, because having a child would (especially in my girlfriend’s case) mean an end to (or at least a severe postponement of) of our ambitions. For many poor wonen, there are no social expectations of college and career to be derailed. The appeal of an abortion is thus considerably diminished.
Indeed, Edin and Kefalas point out that many poor women have a “radically different view” of abortion:
Virtually no women we spoke with believed it was acceptable to have an abortion merely to advance an educational trajectory… most believe that abortion is ‘the easy way out’ To them, ‘doing the right thing’ or ‘taking care of your responsibilities’ means bringing the pregnancy to term. And adoption is, to almost all, simply out of the question — it is generally viewed as ‘giving away’ your ‘flesh and blood.’
(My parents and my girlfriends’ parents both knew about the abortion — and they all said we were “doing the right thing.”)
The other fascinating part of the book I want to blog about today is the attitude that so many poor women in the study have towards marriage. Far from being contemptuous of the institution, the women whom Edin and Kefalas interview have an almost reverent attitude:
Poor women almost universally believe that marriage should be for life, and deride others who ‘get married just to get divorced.’ Most believe that marriage vows are sacred and ought to be held in the highest regard.
What’s fascinating, of course, is that the fear of divorce is much greater than the fear of having a child while still an unmarried teenager. That’s absolutely the reverse of how those of us raised in the comfortable, secular middle-class view the two issues. While most people in my social milieu weren’t divorced three times by thirty-five and married four times by forty as I was, more than half of the marriages in my extended family have ended in divorce in the past four decades. During that time, no woman in my entire extended family (and I am thinking now of dozens and dozens of second, third, and even fourth cousins) has had a child out of wedlock. During that time, only one woman in my family (a token evangelical) has had a child before at least the age of 27. We have had more babies born to women over 35 and even 40 than to women under 30.
So the secular WASPy middle-class might be accused of having a cavalier attitude towards marriage, though no one I know, including myself, got married “just to get divorced.” (I always expected my marriages to last, even though the first three all ended before the second anniversary.) We know that divorce is difficult and painful, but also entirely survivable. Having a child before one is grounded in a career and financially prepared to care for it seems infinitely more frightening to Our Kind of People than a failed marriage. (Or two. Or three.)
What’s helpful to me about a book like this is that it offers invaluable insight into what is, for me, a remarkably alien world. My feminism is sincere, but it’s also thoroughly white, and upper-middle class. Though my Christian faith reminds me that community is not unimportant, my feminism sees independence, personal responsibility, and autonomy as three essential components of human happiness. I want the young men and women with whom I work to become kind, thoughtful, educated and independent people. I want them to be well-educated, and exposed to ideas other than those with which they were raised. My classes at the community college, after all, are filled with single mothers in their teens, twenties and thirties. I see how exhausted and burdened they are. I honor their sacrifices, but I want their example to be cautionary!
But this book reminds me — as do many of my feminist colleagues — that not all young women are eager to embrace this feminist vision of personal autonomy. What I see as liberation, they see as alienation from the familiar (in both senses of the word). And rightly, they know that in the current economic climate, the odds of achieving real prosperity (the sort that enables a life of privileged individualism) are far too long. “Promises I Can Keep” makes the case that these young women who choose to raise their children outside of marriage aren’t nearly as short-sighted as many of us in the prosperous middle class tend to believe. What we often see as “failures of imagination” or an “inability to escape a dysfunctional culture”, these women often see as the best and most rational choices they can make given the options available.
So it’s an interesting question to ask young women:
Which seems to you more frightening?
1. having a child while young and unmarried
2. getting married and then divorced.
For the affluent middle-class, #1 is the easy and obvious answer. But for a great many others, it’s clear that the second is perceived as a much more significant, and thus scarier, personal failure. I’m going to find a way to work this discussion in to my women’s studies classes soon.
Great post, Hugo, and exactly what I was trying to get at in my own post.
I’m glad, Lauren, your words were percolating in my head for a long time before I wrote this…
Doesn’t the answer to the questions depend an awful lot on how the man/boy is likely to behave? (Since you mentioned how others have ignored the role of the father…)
Sure, z, that’s why I like asking the question in the abstract rather than the specific.
I just feel like it’s one of those things I can’t talk about because of my class and race status (both super-privileged)… doesn’t asking the question in the abstract leave a very important factor out of the discussion? If we can talk about attitudes women have towards parenting and correlate with their class status, can’t we have the same discussion about men?
Very interesting post, Hugo.
I am speaking as a thoroughly independent and ridiculously overeducated white European-born woman in her late thirties. I got married at 29 because that’s what you “get done” to advance the academic career and seem stable (my then-husband did it for the same reasons)–but kids? Hell, no. What about the career? The trips around the world at a moment’s notice? The coffee-infused late nights of grappling with a philosophical concept on the page? And what about the money that we’d have to set aside in order to “take care of” a child’s so-called physical, social, and educational needs? Not with our lifestyle choices.
At the same time, my then-husband’s (white) half-sister had her fourth child out of wedlock, as a conscious choice, making no bones about the expected related boost to her welfare check. So-called physical, social, educational needs … not so much. Currently, her 16-year-old daughter is also pregnant and has chosen to “do the right thing,” that is, not have an abortion, and to follow in her mother’s footsteps.
The question behind the “how do you theorize something like this” is, I think, the status accorded to what “we” choose to call “privilege” when “we” really mean “necessity” (and where the “we” really marks the privileged voice). How necessary is it really for a child to have an expensive college education, if what might potentially matter more (especially in a radical Christian context) is an “education of the heart” and the street smarts that can prevent a gang fight? How necessary is it for a parent?
I think I’m dancing around the same questions as you are, Hugo, only that I’ve seen both sides as conscious choices in action, and while I’m able to respond to my career-prioritizing lifestyle choice as a matter of course, I can’t bring myself to respond to my ex-half-sister-in-law’s one with the same nonchalance, especially since a whole potential discourse around victimhood lingers at its edges.
you didn’t mention that for many young women babies mean love and family. having a baby changes them into an adult and gives them a positive role. having a baby means that there is a person for them to love, will always love them and won’t leave. that is far more important for many young women then career, which is far off and uncertain, and does not hold a candle to the unconditional love of a child.
while i am a white male, i saw this dozens upon dozens of times while working with runaway and homeless and generally wayward teenagers who are a significant subset of young women who have babies out of wedlock.
basic emotions like love and belonging to something(their own family) are usually far more important then demographics or money. that is the mistake the educated make, they are looking analytically and at policy factors instead of basic emotions. emotions that would be pretty easy to see if they talked to more poor women( at least for the subset i’m discussing.)
Greg, all of this gets covered in the book — but to be fair, that’s familiar ground, and not the most original part of the text.
My classes at the community college, after all, are filled with single mothers in their teens, twenties and thirties. I see how exhausted and burdened they are. I honor their sacrifices,
It bothers me when people talk about the “sacrifice” of having children. Yes, as with any major decision in life, having children will limit your options in some ways. But, IMHO, the only good reason to have children is because you want to. For fun. To amuse yourself and, possibly, your partner*. Not to show how lovable or martyrlike or tough you are. If you are unhappy with the amount of time raising your child takes up and not enjoying his or her presence, for goodness sake, don’t have another one. Sacrificing oneself to childrearing is unfair to both the child and the parent.
Incidently, I’m a middle class, almost 40 year old single mother (in a committed domestic partnership.) I find option #2 the scarier of the two you mention. Not because of the possibility of divorce, but because I find the idea of marriage frightening on multiple levels.
*Of course, raising a child is a lot of work and requires you to put your needs second quite often. But many things in life are difficult.
Mine is an unusual case: pregnant in high school, did marry the father, also went to college, and as of about a month ago, divorced after 12 years of marriage. So while I did face the same question of what’s scarier, I didn’t get the same answers as most young women in my situation. Becoming a teenage mother was terrifying, but I never considered giving up the lifelong assumption that I would go to college (and not “just” go to college a la basic liberal arts; I held on to engineering). And while the thought of marrying and possibly divorcing down the road sickened me, I married him anyway and here I am in a very different boat than most young mothers who end up divorced.
My point, inasmuch as I have one, is that it’s a good start when we look at the options young women have from their own point of view rather than imposing our own assumptions. But to be effective I think we have to move a step beyond and start to question whether our assumptions about the ‘natural consequences’ of those options are really a foregone conclusion. We can change those consequences a lot more than we think.
I’ve been thinking a lot about these issues lately.
Listening to these young women who are very different than myself, I suspect that 25 years after college I have come around to seeing the world more like they do.
I realize now that college was my one important life goal when I was a teen. Marriage or a child would have been an impediment to that. In the 1970s I met so many women who were being divorced. I remember dissecting a frog for one such woman at a community college. She was taking classes there while she tried to figure out how to put her life back together again. I was going to be smart and not experience the helplessness they did. My goals were based in large part on fear.
Now I’m the married parent of a teenager and want him to know that marriage and family are the most important things in life after his faith in God. I wonder if Christian families can reasonably ask their kids to be chaste for years because of the need to attend college. My upbringing told me college was more important that making a family. I don’t think that is what my parents really believed, but their anxiety to see me safely launched distorted the values they wanted to share.
I can’t go back and subtract my college education from my life, but I wonder sometimes what it was all about.
I have taught the book in a class I have taught on issues facing contemporary families, like Welfare reform. It is always challenging to do so! Not only for me, Af-Am, middle class, “ridiculously overeducated’ female, but also for my students, primarily middle class and white.
I was raised in a family whose values were very similar to the WASPy middle class attitude, except that we were Roman Catholic, and mine was an immigrant family. Many young black women are raised to believe they should be educated first, and then think of marriage and children, because the thought of being young, unmarried, on assistance, and struggling was too much to fathom. Yet, there were in the community young women I knew of who fit the type described in the book. The difference is that the girls I knew didn’t believe education and upward mobility was an impossible dream. And if anything, early pregnancy would derail all the dreams our parents had for us.
So in talking about the book in class, I have found it difficult for us all to get our heads around the behavior some the young women express, of motherhood as the primary source of their identity, when these were young women barely out of high school, without well-paying jobs, who had an explicitly lackadaisical attitude towards birth control, who had sex with men first and then hoped the relationship would follow. The birth of the baby tested whether a man had staying power, and if he didn’t, they broke up, and the young women raised their kids alone.
None of us could relate, because for us, financial stability mattered, a relationship came first, before childbearing, and if a man proved himself long-term relationship material, then marriage might follow, and then children…a typical middle class attitude. The attitudes and behaviors of the women in the book also seemed to boggle the minds of the books’ authors.
I have to say, I’m kind of where pioneervalleywoman is when it comes to this. I know it’s probably a cultural thing, but as a young (yet not affluent) white woman having it pounded into my head every day how important it was for me to be educated, be able to support myself successfully and not be tied down with any other obligations before I could do so, I find the idea that anyone else should derive her primary identity from motherhood, or from “having a baby who will always love me,” as completely alien.
I first heard of this book some time ago, although I haven’t read it as yet. When I did, I tried to put myself in the place of such a young woman who had never been given an alternative future to consider; whose head hadn’t been filled with notions of education and escape from her small existence and exploring the big world beyond before committing to parenthood. But doing so didn’t help me understand these young women any better. All it did was make me feel sorry for them that their horizons were so limited–and, yes, a bit puzzled as to why they seemed to have the relationship process reversed–first, they have sex with a man; then, after they get pregnant, they determine from his reaction to the news whether or not he’s a “keeper.” Most of the time, predictably, he bolts, proving them right to have doubted his “keeper” eligibility, and they raise the children resulting from what is frequently a series of such relationships alone. To me, it just seems as if they’re going about it back-asswards. If you’re so afraid of divorce and abandonment, why not look for a committing type of man first, then marry him, THEN have children? It’s still no guarantee against abandonment, but it seems the likelihood of his not bolting the relationship would be greater.
I can’t blame these women for not wanting to marry every man they have sex with, or even every one who makes them pregnant. What I question is the casualness of their approach toward sex and birth control, not from a moral standpoint, but because I think it limits their options in ways that cannot be denied. The more unprotected sex a woman has with more men, the more likely she is to become pregnant by someone who’s not going to particularly want to stick around and help her raise the child. It’s very much a self-fulfilling prophecy.
As I say on another post, I’m not immune to my own problems when it comes to relationships and sexuality. But I can say one thing for my issues: they didn’t give me numerous children to rear into adulthood while I myself was still a child, and they didn’t put a permanent limit on my horizons.