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

Edin and Kefalas are sociologists and academics who spent five years during the late 1990s studying unwed mothers in eight linked inner-city communities in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Camden, New Jersey. Edin is a leading expert on the sociology of poverty with a specific focus on low-income, single mothers. Her co-author, Kefalas, is an expert on the growing rural-urban economic divide and published a book on the power of grief, shaped by her own mothering experience.

The authors relied on both quantitative survey data to understand these women’s feelings about motherhood and marriage and qualitative data, including interviews and sociological observations. They adopted the ethnographic approach of their anthropologist colleagues by fully integrating into the communities they studied. Edin lived alongside some of the women the two studied in Camden and shared her pregnancy journey with them, while Kefalas worked alongside and joined in the lives and communities of the subjects she studied. This integration into these communities gave them first-hand insights into their participants’ attitudes toward unwed pregnancy and motherhood, as well as their thoughts on marriage. Edin lived in an East Camden apartment for two and a half years, which facilitated connections with community members. She joined a local church and volunteered with “an after-school and summer youth employment program” (19). This community integration allowed Edin to have conversations with educators, healthcare workers, social workers, law enforcement officers, and local officials with whom the subjects under study interacted. These connections provided critical insight into community values and life in this low-income area. She also taught Sunday school, patronized local businesses, and was involved in community events. She lived as her subjects did, which “yielded dozens of opportunities to observe the lives of neighborhood residents and to experience personally some of the stresses of neighborhood life” (19).

Kefalas’s attention centered on Kensington and PennsPort, two Philadelphia neighborhoods where she became involved with a GED program for teen moms, Head Start, and after-school programming. Participants invited her into their lives once they trusted her. When she became pregnant during the second year of the research study in her early thirties, many of the participants “assumed she’d had difficulty getting pregnant” (23), with one commenting on how the physicians had been wrong. This researcher’s lived experience speaks to the study’s findings: Low-income women place high value on becoming young mothers and do not see it as tragic. The real tragedy, for them, is delayed pregnancy or infertility.

Edin and Kefalas wrote for academic and general audiences to interrogate and challenge common misconceptions about inner-city, poor mothers, including middle-class beliefs that these women are happy to avoid marriage and rely on welfare; that they devalue marriage; and that their pregnancies are unplanned and tragic occurrences that destroy their prospects and trap them in a cycle of poverty. Instead, they argue that low-income women highly value marriage but see it mostly as an unachievable pipe dream, while children provide young mothers with chances to prove their worth and give their lives meaning.