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

Qualitative research is a particularly effective method of study when used to inform complex social issues that are not well understood. This is certainly the case regarding family formation decisions about marriage, cohabitation, and childbearing among low-income couples. Until recently, research, policy, and intervention programs tended to focus on individuals within couples – either mothers or fathers separately – rather than on the behaviors, decision-making and outcomes of the couple as a unit. This paradigm is beginning to shift. New attention to the relationship trajectories of couples in poverty is taking shape through charged policy debates, increased funding for program evaluation efforts and innovative research among scholars studying young, unmarried couples and the family formation choices they make. Policy makers are eager to learn how generational patterns of single-mother households can be altered.

In this book, Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas unravel the mystery of how marriage, one of America's most valued institutions, has become decoupled from childbirth. Using ethnographic research as the basis for the book, Edin and Kefalas provide insight into the thoughts, motivations, decision patterns and relationship pathways of 165 single mothers from Philadelphia and surrounding impoverished communities in New Jersey. The book offers a new look at why poor women choose to have children they cannot afford, why they see marriage as an institution that does not apply to their family formation strategies, and what motherhood and marriage mean in the context of poverty, violence, incarceration, substance abuse and infidelity. Through interviews with women in kitchens and living rooms and on front patios and sidewalks, the authors paint a picture that sets the context for informing and understanding quantitative research, policy analysis and intervention development currently underway in government agencies, university settings and research institutes around the country.

In Chapter 2, the authors introduce the intricately complex story of courtship and conception that takes place between the low-income young men and women in their study. The authors show how relationships move at lightning speed and go from innocent kissing, to sex, pregnancy and cohabitation sometimes within months. Edin and Kefalas illustrate how the motives behind this common journey are deeply embedded in the cultural fabric in which low-income couples live. For men, fathering a child is a way of attesting to a woman's beauty and charm. For women, it means engaging in a valuable social role, escaping from loneliness, and avoiding the risk of infertility if one waits for marriage. For both men and women, childbearing, unlike marriage, represents the strongest possible bond between two people. In fact, many of the women interviewed "believe it is better to have children outside marriage than to marry unwisely and then divorce."

Edin and Kefalas show in Chapter 3 how pregnancy and birth push the boundaries of many relationships. Pregnancy is viewed by mothers as a test of the relationship, while fathers tend to respond in a variety of ways ranging from eager acceptance, to denial, and even abandonment. However, once the magic moment of birth arrives, a renewed sense of hope and joy often follows. The new reality of father, mother, and baby frequently generates the promise of commitment and marriage.

Chapter 4 goes on to share the voices of mothers whose hopeful visions of the future end in great hardship and despair. Despite trustworthy assurances and promising dreams, relationships often fall apart under strain from unemployment, drug and alcohol abuse, imprisonment, conflict and betrayal. Chapters 5 and 6 get to the heart of what marriage means to these mothers and why they say that successfully raising children is the most important job they will ever have. Edin and Kefalas discover that marriage has different standards and is viewed as an end goal, something that comes after finishing school, finding a job, obtaining a home, becoming established and having children. "Marriage is the prize one obtains at the end of a race won." Parenting...