Poor Women, Poor Children

American Poverty in the 1990s

Rodgers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315481838
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This work presents the most recent data on poverty, family structure and participation in welfare programmes. It analyses the causes for the continuing rise in female-headed households, the high rates of poverty among such families, and evaluates past, present and future reform policies.

Chapter 1

The Increasing Numbers of Poor Women and Children

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It is up to us to determine whether the years ahead will be for humankind a curse or a blessing.

—Elie Wiesel

Poverty continues to be one of America’s most serious social problems. Despite the fact that America may be the richest nation in the world, a substantial proportion of the American population lives in poverty. In 1993 the federal government counted 39.3 million Americans living below the poverty line, about 15 percent of the population (Bureau of the Census 1995, xvi). This is a huge number of people. Fewer than 30 million people live in all of Canada. The American poverty population is, in fact, larger than the combined total populations of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Delaware, West Virginia, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, Alaska, and Hawaii.

Poverty has increased in recent years and has proven an extremely difficult problem to ameliorate, in significant part because one of the most vulnerable groups—mother-only families—has grown very rapidly over the last thirty years as a proportion of all families. Between 1970 and 1993 the number of mother-only families with children more than doubled, from 3.8 million to 8.7 million (Figure 1.1). During this same period, the number of two-parent families with children increased by only 1.3 percent. As a consequence of these changes, by 1993 almost one of every four American families with children was headed by a woman, compared to one in ten in 1960 (Bureau of the Census 1995, D22).

As Table 1.1 (p. 6) shows, in 1960 only 8 percent of all children under eighteen lived in a family headed by a single woman. In 1993 the percentage was almost one in four, 23.3 percent, including some 17 percent of white children, 28 percent of Hispanic children, and a majority, 54 percent, of all black children (Figure 1.2 [p. 7]). The number of children in single-parent families has increased dramatically. In 1993 some 17.9 million children lived with only one parent, 87 percent of those—over 15 million—with their mother. In 1960 a third of that number, about 5 million children, lived in mother-only families (Table 1.1). Of the current generation of all American children, more than half will spend some of their childhood in a household headed by a single mother (Sweet and Bumpass 1987; Bumpass and Raley 1993). A significant percentage will spend their entire childhood in a mother-only family.

Single mothers and their dependent children are extremely vulnerable economically, educationally, and socially. These families suffer extremely high rates of poverty. In 1993 over 46 percent of all families with children headed by a single woman lived in poverty. By contr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Increasing Numbers of Poor Women and Children
• 2. Poverty Trends and the Feminization of Poverty
• 3. Mother-Only Families: Growth and Causes of Poverty
• 4. The Social Welfare Response
• 5. Social Welfare Lessons from Europe
• 6. Reforming the American Welfare System
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author