“[M]ore than half of everybody's babies will be born where there was never a marriage. That is a disaster. It is wrong, and someone has to say, again, ‘It is simply not right. You shouldn't have a baby before you're ready, and you shouldn't have a baby when you're not married. You just have to stop it.’ We've got to turn it around.”
Guess who said that, some fire-and-brimstone, Bible Belt preacher?
Nope, it’s Bill Clinton, that darling of feminists and the broader progressive movement. His personal dalliances aside, Clinton, the poverty warrior, was right.
Modern life has triggered what sociologists call “the feminization of poverty” largely due to breakdown of the nuclear family. The sexual revolution made dating life more fun, but data show it’s compounded the cycle of poverty for low-income families. It’s time to figure out a healthy solution to this problem, which more privileged classes sidestep. Sex outside marriage obviously is a personal choice. But on matters of family formation, the question shifts to inter-generational poverty and public assistance.
Research from Harvard professors Mary Jo Bane and David Ellwood for the Department of Health and Human Services--that Brookings Institution scholar Ron Haskins reports was pivotal for President Clinton’s welfare reform-- showed that in that era 75 percent of all new welfare cases started after new single motherhood. Only 12 percent of new cases started because of a decrease in earnings.
Similar trends persist today. Marriage is a public good, one that has fallen out of practice among lower income brackets. Our “don’t judge my lifestyle” sounds great, but we need to start judging unwed births for what they are: harmful to kids. This isn’t an indictment of single moms--particularly those, thankfully, escaping an abusive relationship--just a level-headed reading of evidence. Giving birth outside wedlock hurts kids, and feminists can help by putting unwed births in their crosshairs. This goes beyond expanding access to birth control to broader cultural and behavioral norms.
Marriage and poverty
It is well-documented by many scholars that a child born to a poor, unmarried mom faces challenges that heavily influence whether he remains in poverty. He's more likely to have behavioral and emotional problems, more likely to drop out of school, end up in jail, abuse drugs--the list goes on. Our current Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen conducted research on unwed births with her Nobel-Prize winning economist husband, George Akerlof, and concluded that a driving factor in the explosion of unwed births was widespread societal acceptance.
Some claim it’s the economy that made marriage unattractive for low-income men and women. Yet during the Great Depression, unemployment skyrocketed to levels higher than the 2008 financial crisis. Still, the nuclear family remained intact. This was before the 1960s, before Feminine Mystique electrified American housewives and inspired them to join the workforce or reject traditional marriage. Sex outside marriage became accepted and safe in a post-industrialized economy with widespread access to birth control.
“Capitalism and feminism are on a collision course,” wrote Kathleen Geier, one of the feminists in a thoughtful dialogue at The Nation about class divisions within the feminist movement. This is absolutely true, given the forces of globalization that have driven down wages for both low-income women and men. Yet in their conversation on poverty among low-income women, these feminist writers danced around a dominant factor perpetuating the cycle of poverty: unmarried births.
We all want to cure poverty, and if we want progress--instead of continued stagnancy--that means facing uncomfortable truths.The Nation contributors gave suggestions for reducing poverty, including adopting European style benefits and wages. These remedies are unlikely given American political and economic realities. These fixes would also slow economic growth and shave off the ladder of economic opportunity for the most vulnerable workers--women, young people, and racial minorities--by making them more expensive and most likely to be fired or have their jobs automated or shipped overseas.
The class divide over marriage
Many of today’s feminists are well-educated, wealthy women, some viewing marriage as a flawed, paternalistic relic. Thus, they’re reluctant to address the connection between poverty and out-of-wedlock births. Just as some of The Nation feminist writers pointed out that Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In has limited resonance with low-income women, I'd argue the same of Feminine Mystique. Many low-income women didn’t have the luxury of being a housewife, and they didn’t view marriage as a repressive institution. Nor do they today, which has been documented by Johns Hopkins sociologist Kathryn Edin. Many single mothers want to get married, but many of them can’t and they aren’t willing to put off motherhood: despite the perception that most unwed births are accidents, Edin documents that’s not the case.
A shockingly high 94 percent of births to college-educated women today are in wedlock, but 57 percent of women with high-school degrees or less education are unmarried when they bear their first child. Sadly, marriage today is relegated largely to higher social classes, as documented in the recent book Marriage Markets, by June Carbone and Naomi Cahn. Interestingly, less-educated women tend to think that men should be breadwinners, per Brookings Institution scholar Richard Reeves, which means that if low-income men are unable to provide for a family, they are not fulfilling low-income women's expectations. This is a normative assumption that low-income women may be unaware is setting themselves up for disappointment in today's economy, perhaps keeping them from walking down the aisle.
Low-income women don’t marry as often as wealthier women for a host of other reasons, many outlined by Haskins in National Affairs. One is a dearth of marriageable low-income men who often engage in antisocial behavior made acceptable through "cool-pose culture" described by anthropologists like Orlando Patterson. Fighting this “bad boy” idealization can happen organically by elevating rather than lampooning responsible adults in popular culture. Haskin writes:
"The young fathers of the children born out of wedlock present one of the main barriers to more successful marriages and fewer non-marital births. There are currently almost 5.5 million men between the ages of 18 and 34 who have less than a high-school degree. Large portions of them grew up in single-parent homes themselves, lived in poverty, and attended failing schools as children. A large percentage of them have prison records. Not surprisingly, poor young women are reluctant to marry them. These women are, however, willing to have babies with them."
The cycle of violence and drugs (fueled in part by demand from wealthier Americans for illicit drugs), lands many low-income men in prison and away from the marriage market. Fortunately, leaders on both sides of the political aisle have begun (the right has dragged its feet, but Republicans like Sen. Rand Paul are leading the way) to support repealing mandatory minimum sentencing for nonviolent criminals and low-level offenders. We must vigilantly ensure these offenders are rehabilitated into the community and taught the benefits of marriage, which flow to men and women in addition to children.
Married men see a boost in their mental and physical health, as well as their earnings. Married women have better health overall, and are much less likely to suffer intimate-partner violence than divorced, separated, or never-married women. And as professors Robin Fretwell Wilson and W. Bradford Wilcox point out, “girls raised in a home with their married father are markedly less likely to be abused or assaulted than children living without their own father.”
Efforts to reduce teenage pregnancies were successful because of a combination of greater abstinence and access to birth control. However, this has simply delayed unwed births, shifting them to older women.
If part of the American Dream means giving your kids a better shot at life than you have, many low-income women are sadly setting their kids on a path that pushes them away from that Dream. Our society accepts what should be unacceptable.
Yes, sometimes accidents happen, sometimes relationships turn abusive. But this should be the exception rather than the tragic rule we see unfolding. Despite classic feminist rhetoric about marriage as a suffocating paternalistic force, unwed births create powerful negative implications for life trajectories of low-income children. Marriage is not a cure-all, but when the preponderance of evidence cries out in one direction, it only makes rational sense for feminists to follow where it leads.
