This traditional procession of marriage before children has indeed been reversed in recent decades across much of America. Researchers for 2013’s Knot Yet Report, which detailed “the benefits and costs of delayed marriage in America,” highlighted “the great crossover” moment, around 1990, when the age at which women have their first child became lower than the age at which they get married.
And, while the rate for out-of-wedlock births among college graduates has risen in recent years, those who have most dramatically scrambled the old familial sequence are Americans who have either not graduated from high school or those who have graduated and attended some college: most of the working and middle classes. The Knot Yet researchers described the crossover as “The moment at which unmarried motherhood moved from the domain of our poorest populations to become the norm for America’s large and already flailing middle class.”38 They contrast it with the unmarried lives of privileged, college-educated populations, who they imagine “meeting friends or dates for sushi. . . . after a day consulting with bosses and co-workers from their cubicles . . . parlaying the twenties into a time of self-improvement: going to grad school, establishing a career track, and achieving some degree of financial independence.”
It’s true that many of the circumstances that stem from a lack of financial security—from random police interrogations to perpetual job insecurity to crumbling housing options—make life for most Americans terrifyingly unpredictable. But it’s not quite right to portray wealthy choices around marriage as carefully calibrated and those choices made by poor women as examples of flailing. The decisions that women, even financially insecure women, are making about when to have children and when (or when not) to marry are not necessarily emblematic of disarrayed thinking, a lack of planning, or otherwise being out of control.
Struggling single women with children are often operating based on the same impulses that guide the sushi-gobbling grad students who stand for a new kind of unmarried autonomy: a desire to fill their lives with meaning and direction, to live independently. They’re just doing it with far fewer resources.
Pamela grew up in the Bronx; her family received welfare. Pamela’s mother, who suffered from physical and mental ailments, stayed at home, and her father cleaned streets to earn benefits. Pamela discovered she was pregnant when she was seventeen. For Pamela and her boyfriend, who was thirty-four, abortion wasn’t an option; their first, firm decision, was to have the baby. The second decision, she said, was to make a financial plan. She didn’t have a job; she was set on going to college, which she had hoped to do outside New York, away from her alcoholic father. That part of her dream got scuttled, but she refused to back away from the idea of an education.
Many of her peers from high school, she said, dropped out of school after having babies. “Those that did graduate and the spouse wasn’t around,” she said, “didn’t go to college. They ended up working full-time jobs, maybe at McDonalds or at a clothing store. I knew I didn’t want that.” Pamela had worked a paid internship during high school, socking away money, so that she could move. “The money I had saved for something else was going to be used to raise my daughter.”
Pamela and her boyfriend wanted to stay together; he got a second job. “We formulated a plan of how everything would work and what bills should look like,” she said. “How much he should make so that he could feel he was able to pay for everything without me working and just going to school.” Although Pamela insisted on living away from the instability of her parents’ apartment, her mother helped by babysitting for the first two years of Pamela’s daughter’s life.
“I gave birth in August,” Pamela said. “A week later I was in school. Because I knew that if I would have took a break I probably would not have gone back. So, I said, no. I’m not just going to be another statistic. I’m going to go to college and I’m going to graduate. And that’s exactly what I did. But the only way I was able to do that was because I had help around me and I had money saved.” She graduated from New York’s City College in 2014.
Pamela had remarkable determination, a cooperative partner, and educational and financial opportunities that are not readily available to many young women. However, even among those who are poorer than she, sociologists have found that there is agency—and a good deal of active, engaged decision-making—in the choice to become a mother and remain unmarried.
In some cases, yes, a lack of sex education and impediments to making birth control and abortion available combine to mean that women have far fewer choices than they should about whether or when to become mothers. From a broader historical perspective, improved access to contraception and abortion has resulted in a decrease in teenage pregnancy; the rate of teen pregnancy was as low in 2012 as it has ever been.
Most unmarried mothers today are in their twenties and thirties.39 Sociologists have found that many of those pregnancies are, if not consciously planned, then at least not unwelcomed by many economically disadvantaged single women who are seeking exactly the same thing their more affluent peers are seeking: meaning, connection, fulfillment, ballast, direction, stability, and identity. But many American women do not have college course work to throw themselves into or careers that offer anything like a promise of future economic stability. They could put off babies as long as they’d like without expecting to land an appealing job or gain access to a fast-moving career track.
Like their more privileged contemporaries, low-income women are wary of throwing themselves into early marriages that might not be economically stable and, therefore, might further encumber them without a promise of emotional fulfillment. So, as science writer Natalie Angier has described, “childbearing . . . offers what marriage all too often does not: lifelong bonds of love.”
Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas have written of how motherhood, despite the high probability that it will push a financially strapped woman closer to or further below the poverty line, nonetheless has an overwhelmingly “positive valence” for the single women choosing to have babies out of wedlock, since it provides them with an opportunity to make a seemingly active, hopeful choice.
Tanya, a thirty-year-old urban farmer and social activist from the Bronx, told me, after having spoken in public about being pregnant with her fifth child by three different ex-partners, that she was tired of hearing from people who said things like, “You seem so smart, you don’t seem like someone who’s misguided; I don’t understand how you can be on your fifth child!” Fields feels that she was far from passive, far from anyone’s victim. “Every one of my children was a choice,” she said. “My children are not the product of bad decision making. Every one of my kids is wanted, loved, and cared for.”
There are very logical reasons for women who aren’t wealthy to have children while they are young. In youth, women with fewer financial resources have advantages that are more likely to disappear as they age: good health, living and able parents and aunts and uncles and siblings who can help with childcare and possibly a place to live. For young women born in difficult circumstances in today’s economically striated America, there is not the sense of an infinite future, but rather a very difficult one, in which work, good food, and quality healthcare will only get scarcer, not only for the woman in question, but for her network of friends and family. “Until poor young women have more access to jobs that lead to financial independence,” Edin and Kefalas have argued, “until there is reason to hope for the rewarding life pathways that their privileged peers pursue—the poor will continue to have children far sooner than most Americans think they should, while still deferring marriage.”40
Anita Hill has considered this circumstance and told me, “If you’re saying that women are much better off if they have children later in life, you also have to say as a policy maker that they will have childcare, housing, health care. All these things that will benefit them and that they will need to raise children.” But we certainly don’t promise our citizens childcare, housing, or quality healthcare; we don’t ens
ure them educational paths that can lead to advancement. And thus, there is logic in acting on the few advantages—youth, family—that life does offer. Having a baby is its own way of exerting control over the future.
Edin and Kefalas argue persuasively in Promises I Can Keep that, based on their studies, across races, motherhood is an organizing and often stabilizing factor in unmarried female life: the thing that prompts women to get up in the morning, to take better care of themselves, to settle down, to perhaps stop using drugs or staying out late, or to return to school or form closer bonds with other family members. Their interview subjects told them of the benefits, including “My child saved me.”
Though the researchers acknowledge that the economic costs of having the children does not make poor women better off, the reasons behind motherhood have everything to do with the urge to bring structure and fulfillment to their lives. What motherhood provides, according to Edin and Kefalas, “is the possibility—not the promise—of validation, purpose, connection, and order. More importantly, children allow mothers to transcend, at least psychologically and symbolically, the limitations of economic and social disadvantage. These women put motherhood before marriage not primarily out of welfare opportunism, a lack of discipline, or sheer resignation. Rather, the choice to mother in the context of personal difficulty is an affirmation of their strength, determination, and desire to offer care for another.”41
This matches what unmarried thirty-five-year-old Ana Perez, a high-school dropout who had her first baby at nineteen, but went on to become a vice president at a financial-services company, told the New York Times. If she had not had the baby, she said, “I would have been much less productive. I would have spent all my time just hanging out.”
Suitable Mates
Pamela is still with her boyfriend, the father of her daughter. But she doesn’t want to marry him any time soon. “I always knew that marriage would not keep a man around,” she said. “If I did get married and he wanted to leave, he would leave.”
Pamela said that among her peers, not marrying is the norm. “I don’t see people being married that often, and I see a lot of divorces if they were married,” she said. “I see a lot of women being single mothers, and that’s only what I see.” Maybe in wealthier climes, she suggested, she’d know more legal couples. “But in an environment like I grew up in, the people around me have less education, probably didn’t finish high school or just have their GEDs, and they don’t have money.”
Pamela considers herself fortunate to have a lasting relationship with the father of her baby. “I hear women becoming discouraged, saying there’s not enough good men out there nowadays.” She sees it, she says, in the South Bronx neighborhood where she was raised. “I don’t feel like those men are somebody that I would like to marry or that I would like to raise a family with.” When she was at City College, she said, “It’s different; you see educated men. They’re independent. They have something going for themselves and you can say to yourself, wow, you never know, there’s a chance I can find someone who’s educated, who’s knowledgeable, that maybe I can connect with and build a relationship with. But I don’t see that in my mother’s neighborhood, and it’s sort of discouraging.”
Like the decision about whether and when to have children, the reasons that many women remain unmarried—even when they are in romantic relationships, often with the fathers of their children—aren’t random, rash, or illogical. They are part of the story that has been unfolding for hundreds of years, in which women have come to understand that marriage, as a binding legal commitment entered into at the start of adulthood, may not be an institution that best serves their needs.
According to a Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study of unmarried couples with children, who were romantically together when their first child was born, there were a lot of good reasons for women to be hesitant about marrying their partners: 40 percent of fathers in the study had been incarcerated, a third earned less than $10,000 a year, 24 percent were unemployed. Forty percent of both the mothers and fathers in the study had dropped out of high school, and in 61 percent of couples, either the mother or the father had children by another partner.42 Three years later, only 15 percent of the couples in the study had married, and 50 percent had broken up.
A shortage of eligible male mates is a phenomenon famously described by University of Chicago sociologist William Julius Wilson who argued in his seminal book, The Truly Disadvantaged, that the social and economic circumstances of impoverished urban neighborhoods has depleted the number of emotionally and economically robust young men. It’s a serious argument. Just as surely as westward expansion drained the United States’ East Coast of marriageable men, so, too, the systemic cycle of racism and poverty dramatically reduces the number of men available to marry. A 2014 Pew report43 noted that for every 100 single women, there are only eighty-four employed single men; for every 100 single black women, there are only fifty-one employed single black men.
For African-American and Latino populations, this cycle includes sky-high incarceration rates. Thanks to long-time racial profiling and newer, codified stop-and-frisk procedures, black and Latino men—more likely to be poor—are far more susceptible to being stopped by police and put in jail for minor drug offenses. Nearly one-third44 of black men born in 2001 are predicted to spend at least some time in prison during their lives.45 A third of black high-school dropouts were in jail in 2010; that figure is less than half—just thirteen percent—for white high-school dropouts.46 Over one million people are arrested for drug possession every year;47 more than six hundred thousand for marijuana possession alone. Black people are incarcerated at about six times the rate of white people,48 and the United States has more people incarcerated than the thirty-five top European countries combined.49
Having been convicted of a crime, in turn, makes it much harder for men to get jobs, leaving many with few choices other than to turn to illegal means of making money. In 1994, the federal government made it illegal for people in prison to receive Pell Grants.50 People who have been convicted of a crime—and, in some cases, simply arrested51—can be evicted from public housing. As Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow puts it, once men have been to jail, “They’re relegated to a permanent under caste. Unable to find work or housing, most wind up back in prison within a few years. Black men with criminal records are the most severely disadvantaged group in the labor market.”52 This makes it exponentially harder for them to be the stable mates on whom women might rely for economic or emotional ballast.
And again, economic struggle is not the exclusive domain of people of color. Hanna Rosin writes persuasively about how the collapse of blue-collar jobs around the nation—the shipping of manufacturing offshore—has resulted in decreased marriage rates around the country. Coontz points out that, even before the start of the recession, “the average employed guy with a high-school degree made almost $4 less an hour, in constant dollars, than his counterpart in 1979.”53 Even for those who are not living below the poverty line, the financial stress of unemployment, stagnated wages, high education costs, and the reverberations of the mortgage crisis make the prospect of partnering much more tenuous. Not just practically, but emotionally.
In a story about the pervasive health problems experienced by poor white women, journalist Monica Potts wrote, “In low-income white communities of the South, it is still women who are responsible for the home and for raising children, but increasingly, they are also raising their husbands. A husband is a burden and an occasional heartache rather than a helpmate.” Poor women, Potts writes, “are working the hardest and earning the most in their families but can’t take the credit for being the breadwinners. Women do the emotional work for their families, while men reap the most benefits from marriage.”
Economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers have explained that “money is related to love. Those with more household income are slightly more likely to experience that feeling. Roughly speaking, doubling
your income is associated with being about four percentage points more likely to be loved.” Perhaps, Stevenson and Wolfers guessed, having money makes it easier to find time to date, or maybe there are correlative reasons: “It’s possible,” the economists continue in a Valentine’s Day editorial, “that other factors correlated with income, such as height or appearance, are the real source of attraction. Or maybe being loved gives you a boost in the labor market.”54
It’s also possible that not having money distracts a person from her personal life, or puts her in a dating pool with others who are also distracted by not having money. Financial tension makes marriages far more unstable. Impoverished communities have higher rates of depression, domestic violence, sexual abuse, and gun violence.
When (white) men had union-protected jobs at manufacturing plants and could get a good rate on a loan for a three bedroom house and had a pension plan, marrying one of them—especially when women didn’t have these kinds of opportunities themselves—made sense. But when men are struggling and women are more capable than ever of economic, social, sexual, and parental independence, marriage doesn’t just become unnecessary; bad versions of it can become burdensome and deleterious to women.
Jason DeParle’s story about the two women in Michigan whose circumstances, we are to believe, are shaped by their marital status, reveals that the father of Schairer’s three children “earned little, berated her often, and did no parenting.” She later met and moved in with another man, but DeParle reports that, “It took a call to the police to get him to go.” There’s not much of a case that marrying either of these guys would have had a positive impact on Schairer’s fortunes, economic or familial.
All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation Page 24