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

Edin and Kefalas study inner-city, low-income single mothers across racial and ethnic lines. They define low income as those who earned less than $16,000 a year when employed full-time at the time they conducted the study. This total is “about equal to the federal poverty line in those years [the late 1990s]” (24). All participants came from areas where at least 20% of inhabitants were poor, and some participants received welfare benefits. Approximately half of the study participants had received welfare within the two years before the study. Half were not in school or working at the time of the study. Forty percent of the women studied worked low-paying jobs in the service industry (e.g., servers, nurse aids, retail). Some participants lived alone with their children, while half cohabited with family or friends. A small number lived with male partners.

Edin and Kefalas contrast the low-income single mothers they studied with middle-class women. The middle class is defined in part by higher economic status, and in 2022, the Pew Research Center defined the median middle-class income as $106,100, (Kochhar, Rakesh. “The State of the American Middle Class.” Pew Research Center, 2024). However, income is not the only factor that distinguishes the middle class from the lower class, as Edin and Kefalas show.