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.
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