Women, Work, and Poverty

Women Centered Research for Policy Change

Heidi I. Hartmann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135803230
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

Find out how welfare reform has affected women living at the poverty level

Women, Work, and Poverty presents the latest information on women living at or below the poverty level and the changes that need to be made in public policy to allow them to rise above their economic hardships. Using a wide range of research methods, including in-depth interviews, focus groups, small-scale surveys, and analysis of personnel records, the book explores different aspects of women's poverty since the passage of the 1986 welfare reform bill. Anthropologists, economists, political scientists, sociologists, and social workers examine marriage, divorce, children and child care, employment and work schedules, disabilities, mental health, and education, and look at income support programs, such as welfare and unemployment insurance.

Women, Work, and Poverty illuminates the changes in the causes of women's poverty following welfare reform in the United States, using up-to-date research that's both qualitative and quantitative. Taking racial and ethnic diversity into account, the book's contributors examine new findings on the feminization of poverty, the role of children and the lack of child care as an obstacle to employment, labor market policies that can reduce poverty and improve gender wage equality, sex and race segregation in the labor market, and the low quality of jobs available to low income women.

Women, Work, and Poverty examines:

• marriage, motherhood, and work
  
• pay equity and living wage reforms
  
• community resources
  
• welfare status and child care
  
• acquiring higher education
  
• advancing women of color
  
• income security
  
• repaying debt after divorce
  
• gender differences in spendable income
  
• women's job loss

Women, Work, and Poverty is an invaluable aid for academics working in social work, social policy, women's studies, economics, sociology, and political science, and for policy researchers, anti-poverty activists, and women's leaders.

Marriage, Work, Poverty, and Children

The Changing Impact of Marriage, Motherhood and Work on Women’s Poverty

Hilarie Lieb, Northwestern University
Susan Thistle, Northwestern University

SUMMARY. This study evaluates historical changes in the relative importance of key factors influencing white, African American, and Hispanic women’s poverty. Empirical results, based on reduced form logistic regressions, indicate that work has become, relative to marriage, a potentially better way to decrease women’s poverty. The greater relative importance of work when compared to marriage is strongest for blacks and weakest for whites, although for all three groups of women this pattern holds. This trend is consistent with the move from women’s main economic support being generated through marriage to instead being generated through work. At the same time, children continue to increase women’s chances of being in poverty, though their impact has changed differently among the three groups. The findings suggest that resources directed towards alleviating poverty should ideally be allocated towards efforts to create good job opportunities combined with support to reduce the costs associated with balancing market and family responsibilities. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: <[email protected]> Website: <http://www.HaworthPress.com> © 2005 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]

KEYWORDS. Children, employment, poverty, marriage, African Americans, Hispanics, whites, single mothers

Introduction

Female-headed families and their presence among the poor began to increase in the 1960s and have been the subject of much debate for several decades. A multitude of studies has shown that the loss of marriage and the burdens of single parenthood have played a central role in this “feminization of poverty.” Women’s lives have changed dramatically over the last forty years, however, suggesting the causes of their poverty may also have altered. Emphasis upon the unchanging level of women’s poverty since the late 1960s, joined with an assumption that the causes of such poverty have remained the same, has hampered a full understanding of women’s poverty, while also encouraging a backward-looking focus in policies to resolve such hardship.¹

In this article we set women’s poverty in a new analytic framework, bringing a dynamic historical perspective to such hardship. We place women’s rise among the poor in the context of other dramatic changes taking place in women’s lives, most centrally their turn from marriage to the market for support, or the “employment revolution” noted by many analysts.² Examination of poverty from this perspective reveals that, beneath the surface, important changes have indeed taken place in women’s poverty over the latter part of the 20th century, especially among women of color.

Analysis of white, Hispanic, and African American women using decennial census data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Samples through a series of logistic regression analyses reveals significant shifts in the rate, causes and composition of women’s poverty between 1960 and 1990. Secondly, the relative importance of the causes of poverty has also changed. Most centrally, work, rather than marriage or the avoidance of motherhood, has increasingly become the most important way for women, especially African American women, to avoid economic hardship. This process has not been uniform, however. Rather, while the majority of women have turned from marriage to paid employment for support, others have held to the domestic role despite the breakdown of support for their work in the home. This process has intersected with changes in the wage economy, impeding many women’s efforts to provide for themselves and their families through their own earnings. The end result is that while the majority of women have adjusted to the changing location of their support, others have been left behind in deteriorating circumstances. In brief, we have seen the formation of a female underclass, based on women’s own shifting relationships to work at home and for pay.³

These findings provide support for a more dynamic historical understanding of women’s poverty, tied to women’s shifting opportunities both at home and in the wage economy and differing responses to such changes. Secondly, these findings have important implications for how the economic hardship still afflicting many single mothers might best be addressed. In brief, they point toward the importance of improving conditions in the wage economy rather than limiting involvement in motherhood or turning women back toward marriage as their key means of support.

Theoretical Perspectives On Poverty and Past Findings

In the largest sense, consideration of changes in women’s poverty over time brings a dynamic historical or temporal dimension to analyses of women’s poverty. Debates over poverty have emphasized the presence of a long-term group of poor due to either behavioral failings (Gilder 1981; Lewis 1961; Murray 1984) or the failure of a market economy to provide work for all (Edwards, Reich, and Weisskopf 1972). Neither approach could provide a satisfactory explanation of women’s rising presence among the poor in the years after World War II.⁴

Instead, understanding of the “feminization of poverty” came from analysts who looked at changes in family structure. Many studies, both quantitative and qualitative in nature, have established that marital breakdown and the burdens of single parenthood were central to the poverty experienced by women of all backgrounds in the first decades after World War II (Bane and Ellwood 1989; Caspar, McLanahan, and Garfinkel 1994; Garfinkel and McLanahan 1986; Kniesner, McElroy, and Wilcox 1988; Lichter, McLaughlin, and Ribar 1997; McLanahan, Sorensen, and Watson 1989; Ross and Sawhill 1975; Wojtkiewicz, McLanahan, and Garfinkel 1990). These analyses made a crucial contribution in recognizing the negative impact of changes in the traditional structure of marriage on women’s economic well-being.

These explanations have dominated discussions of women’s poverty for several decades, encouraging the assumption that the loss of men’s support carries an insurmountable cost for women resolved only through a return to marriage. While the high incidence of poverty faced by single mothers is indeed a matter of great concern, such focus obscures the steps women may have taken to address the economic hardship they have faced, and ways in which changes in the world of work as well as the home may have affected such efforts. In sum, like explanations of poverty stressing limitations in people’s behaviors or the market economy, these explanations also run the danger of suggesting an unchanging set of causes, implying as well that marriage is the sole means of resolving such poverty.

Here, we reintroduce a point made in the 1960s, that of the need “to see poverty in dynamic, or longitudinal terms” (Thernstrom 1968, 161). This approach recognizes poverty may stem not just from persistent shortcomings in the economy or a segment of individuals, but also from a larger move from an older form of work into the urban industrial labor force. The hardship faced by different groups of men as they were pushed off the land and into work for wages is a well-known story.

We argue the feminization of poverty is of a similar nature, tied not simply to a “time of transition” between husbands, but to the large-scale break down of marriage as women’s primary means of support, and their turn instead to wages. Such breakdown has thrown many women into new or deeper poverty until they could gain access to jobs paying a decent wage, and new provisions for the domestic tasks still placed upon their shoulders.⁵

A number of studies point to the importance of considering changes in the causes of women’s poverty over time and the role of the market economy and paid work as well as marital breakdown in contributing to economic hardship. A key analysis establishing the role played by marriage and single parenthood in women’s poverty between 1950–1980 also stressed that, while the poverty gap between men and women widened over these decades, poverty rates actually decreased substantially for women as well as men (McLanahan, Sorensen, and Watson 1989). In the 1980s, however, such gains were offset by a rise in never-married mothers and a decrease in employment opportunities tied to the growth of poorly paying service occupations, heightening difficulties for black single mothers in particular (Spain and Bianchi 1996; Browne 1997, 2000). Other analyses have demonstrated the importance of considering women’s own labor force experience as well as the burdens of single motherhood in assessing economic outcomes among unmarried women (Morgan 1991; Peterson 1989). Also, a recent analysis has found that marriage may be effective in reducing poverty among disadvantaged women, but only if the marriages are stable and long lasting; marriage that results in divorce or separation actually increases the incidence of poverty (Lichter, Graefe, and Brown 2003).⁶

These studies point to the importance of assessing possible alterations in women’s poverty over time, and to considering the impact of work as well as marriage and children upon such poverty. Further, it is clear that greater attention should be focused on the potential similarities and differences in the experience of poverty among women of different racial and class backgrounds. Investigations of racial differences in women’s poverty have found seemingly conflicting patterns, emphasizing first differences (Bane 1986), then “striking racial similarities” in female-headed family formation, movement into poverty and relationship to the labor force (Kniesner, McElroy, and Wilcox 1988, 88; Hao and Brinton 1997; McLanahan, Sorensen, and Watson 1989), and then once again differences in economic outcomes by race (Browne 1997; Corcoran 1999).

Thus, it is important to carry out an analysis of possible changes in the levels, causes and composition of women’s poverty in the years after World War II, with careful attention to women’s relationship to the labor force as well as to marriage and children.

The Present Study

In order to look more closely at possible changes in the nature of women’s poverty we undertook an examination of factors affecting poverty among white, African American and Hispanic women from 1960 to 1990, asking a series of questions and employing a number of analytic strategies in order to assess changes in women’s poverty. (Reliable data are not available for Hispanic women for 1960; thus we begin with data from 1970.) The first question we ask is whether factors associated with women’s poverty have changed over time among these groups of women. We then look more closely at potential changes in the level and causes of poverty among unmarried women, and alterations in the composition of poor single mothers. We focus on single mothers, as this is the group experiencing the most intense poverty and making up the majority of poor women, and the group of greatest concern to policy-makers and the public.

Data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS), consisting of samples from the federal census for 1960, 1970, 1980 and 1990 (with inclusion of 2000 when available) was used to carry out this analysis.⁷ These years span a key period of increased marital breakdown and the rise of female-headed families and women’s presence among the poor.⁸ Use of census data provides a sufficient number of cases to allow separate analyses of white, Hispanic, and African American women. It also allows for the analysis of differences by education and marital status in these respective groups’ experiences of poverty.

Our overall study, of which this analysis is one part, examines possible changes in factors associated with poverty over time through a series of logistic regression analyses. We use simulation techniques to assess the importance of potential shifts, joined with more detailed analysis of changing levels of poverty and their causes over successive decades through decomposition of our results. We ask finally whether changes have taken place in the group of women facing poverty, using an index of dissimilarity. Changes are assessed decade by decade, in order to get a more precise sense of how these shifts unfolded and intersected with shifts in the wage economy.

In the study presented here, the first part of this analysis is given. As noted, logistic regression analysis is used to evaluate the determinants of poverty for white, Hispanic, and African American women. The dependent variable is a dichotomous indicator for poverty which equals 1 if the family’s income is less than or equal to 125 percent of the official poverty threshold. This level is chosen to enable consideration of more than the very poor, as it is considered a more realistic estimate of poverty by many analysts (Fisher 1997). For the simulations, designed to evaluate the impact of certain factors holding everything else equal, a reduced form specification of the relationship between poverty and key explanatory variables is used. Included in the independent variables are standard human capital variables to measure investments in education; three categories of employment (full-time year-round work, part-time work, and no work i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• About the Editor
• Contents
• Introduction
• Marriage, Work, Poverty, and Children
• Advancing Women of Color
• Income and Income Security
• About the Contributors
• Index