Single mothers — We need a RE:Definition

March 19, 2007 at 12:19 pm | In Blogroll, blogging for choice, breaking news, the forg |

(With apologies to Black Star.)

As the previous post indicates, I’ve been doing a lot of reading on the March 6 raids in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in which at least 360 immigrants working at a Michael Bianco garment factory were taken into custody and, with few exceptions, flown directly to a holding center in Texas by federal agents. The majority of those arrested are women from Central American countries. Most of these women have children who were left behind. As the story spreads, there is plenty of justified indignation about the initial lack of coverage. WaPo finally got around to it this weekend.

The raids in New Bedford are disgraceful and demonstrate a profound lack of respect for or recognition of the personhood of immigrants, or any recognition of the complex dynamics of when poor immigrants have children born in the US, and thus are American citizens. These raids also continue a long history of lack of respect and recognition for women of color raising children in poverty in the US, regardless of citizenship. As elle writes:

A discourse has developed in this country to support stealing our children away from us that attacks us as immoral, “illegal,” or uneducated. I see this raid on a historical continuum with black children sold away from their mothers and Native children forced into “Indian schools” so they could be “properly” Christianized and Americanized. In fact, Americanizers of the late 19th/early 20th century spent inordinate amounts of time threatening to take immigrant children from their parents, telling immigrant mothers how their methods of child-rearing were substandard to those of more WASP-y Americans, probably as much time as 20th century welfare critics spent convincing themselves that poor black women did not really love or want their children–they only had them to get more out of the system–and as much time as 21st century anti-immigration proponents spend convincing themselves that Latinas don’t really love or want their children–they just want anchor babies.

Last week, I attended a talk at UH Hilo given by Dr. Gwendolyn Mink, author of multiple books about welfare history in the US, including Welfare’s End. Dr. Mink’s mother, Patsy Mink, was a Congresswoman from Hawaii and one of the co-authors of 1972’s Title IX bill, so the local connection made it very exciting to have her speak on the Big Island. Her talk, titled ‘Single Mothers, Married Fathers, and the Gender Politics of Poverty Policy’, is very timely to the current discussion surrounding the New Bedford raids.

[The following is based on my scribbled notes of Dr. Mink's talk -- my adds are in brackets. For a more thorough explication of her views on welfare, you should definitely check out this interview from 2001. And her books, of course. -pp]

Although the first welfare programs as we know them acknowledged the large amounts of single mothers who needed financial assistance [find a brief if imperfect history here], over time the concept of ‘gendered poverty’ has disappeared in mainstream discourse. Women’s greater vulnerability to experience poverty is ignored. As a result, single-motherhood is seen as a cause (not a correlary) of single-mother poverty.

This is true across the political spectrum — while progressives may not rail against ‘welfare mothers’, they are generally unwilling to affirm motherhood as a right for women, whatever their marital or socioeconomic status, and they are especially unwilling to affirm single motherhood as possibly being good for children.

Recent efforts to address single-mother poverty focus on data supporting two-parent, biological families (in other words, both parents have direct blood ties to their children). Because of this, we now have federal funding initiatives through the Administration for Children and Families promoting marriage and responsible fatherhood [often by funding social service providers to offer marriage classes to people living in poverty and/or reentering their communities after incarceration -- added by pp]. In this model, (biological) fatherhood and marriage stand in for time and resources as the solution to single-mother poverty. This is private male income substituted for public economic policy.

Here are some things you (possibly? probably?) don’t know about single-mother families in the United States:

They have the highest employment rate anywhere in the industrial world.
However, because of the low economic value assigned to women, especially those raising kids, they are consistently the lowest-paid. Single mothers earn 33% less than white men.
In 2004 51% of poor families were made up of single mothers. This is a poverty rate three times that of all adults — including single fathers. Single mothers are 106% more likely to be poor at some point in their lives than single fathers.

Two-thirds of welfare (whose official name is Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF) recipients are women of color. These women, who are more likely not to marry in their lifetimes than white single mothers, bear the brunt of efforts to bring their families under a nuclear [cough cough cough -- pp] model. For example: Women on welfare are subject to a 25% reduction of their cash benefit if they refuse to identify the paternity of their children.

By telling single mothers of color that their only secure defense against poverty is attachment to an employed husband — not better pay, not adequate childcare, not destigmatization of their position — we commit inequality. This arithmetic is based on single-mother poverty as an inevitability, and thus perpetuates single-mother poverty. When we scrutinize the behaviors of single mothers, and focus our research and service efforts on ‘changing behavior’, we withdraw the rights of individuals to make their own decisions about when and how to raise a family.

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Beautiful!

Comment by Sylvia — March 19, 2007 #
petit,

i’m going to display some sheer laziness here–can you tell me where you got the bulleted statistics? i’d love to read more.

Comment by elle — March 19, 2007 #
elle,

All of the stats were given by Dr. Mink in her talk, but I recognize many of them from US census data… for anyone who is interested, their online database is here.

Dr. Mink mentions a whole bunch of other stats in the interview I link to in the post, too, for example:

In 1999, the median weekly earnings for white women who worked in the labor market fulltime were $483. For African American women, it was $409. For Latinas, it was $348. That means African American women earned 15 cents less on the white woman’s dollar, while Latinas earned 28 cents less. The wage gap between white women and Latinas is greater than the overall gender wage gap! Also, if you compare white women’s income to Black men’s ($48 and Latinos’ ($406), you’ll see that race effectively erases the gender wage gap. This doesn’t mean that the gender wage gap, driven largely by white men’s earnings, isn’t important. But it does mean that a feminist politics of wage equity needs to attend to the fact that the wage gap for women of color has as much to do with their racial status as it does with the fact that they are women.

Here’s the link again so you don’t have to scroll back up to find it.

Comment by petitpoussin — March 19, 2007 #
Here’s the link again so you don’t have to scroll back up to find it.

You’re so considerate ms. jem. that’s why i loves ya to pieces.

great post–I love the angle you and elle have taken on this.

Comment by brownfemipower — March 19, 2007 #
thank you!

Comment by elle — March 19, 2007 #
[...] Single mothers — We need a RE:Definition — “Although the first welfare programs as we know them acknowledged the large amounts of single mothers who needed financial assistance … , over time the concept of ‘gendered poverty’ has disappeared in mainstream discourse. Women’s greater vulnerability to experience poverty is ignored. As a result, single-motherhood is seen as a cause (not a correlary) of single-mother poverty.” [...]

Pingback by Link Roundup: 20 March 2007 « Vox ex Machina — March 19, 2007 #
Brilliant post! I have to ask: why, why, WHY is it that two parents are better than one? Is that socialized into us or is it true? I’ve been asking myself that question about marriage also. Why is marriage better than a long-term committed partnership? Tax breaks? Why do we all feel that getting married and having kids is the path every life should take? Why are unwed mothers so strange? Why are single women labeled spinsters and single men labeled bachelors? A good post gets you asking questions. This does that…Thank you.

Comment by Leslie — March 20, 2007 #
they are not immigrants, they are illegal immigrants. as such, they have no rights - or let’s say very little. it is a mistake for this country to define someone born here as being a citizen - how may other countries adopt the same policy - and so their illegal sons and daughters should accompany them back to where they came from. i am a legal immigrant and before you come down hard on me, be honest and tell me that the next time you are in dmv, in a long hours long line that you have no prblem with someone walking in and jumping to the front of the queue, and then another and another and another. over-simplification perhaps, but you get the point.

Comment by martin — March 26, 2007 #
I don’t get the point. Maybe you should explain it again.

Comment by Jane Awake — March 26, 2007 #
Martin, are you a regular reader of this blog? I suspect you are not, because if you were, you would know that I’m not terribly sympathetic to people who support imprisoning or deporting entire families just so the line at the DMV gets a bit shorter.

Comment by petitpoussin — March 27, 2007 #
Illegal is Illegal Why can’t you understand that!
What good are laws if we don’t follow them? no one is above the law!

Comment by stacy — March 28, 2007 #
Stacy, you’re the one who doesn’t understand. Please feel free to never visit my blog again.

Comment by petitpoussin — March 28, 2007 #
Don’t worry petit, some time stacey will get arrested for smoking pot or get pulled over for speeding on an otherwise empty road, and she will tell the cop the same thing she told you. (These things will happen in the future of course, because she’s obviously not yet old enough to drive.)

Comment by Jane Awake — April 2, 2007 #
As a single mother myself I thank you!

Comment by Carrie — December 1, 2007 #
I’m sorry to read all of the statisticts, it’s sad, even though it’s my first time visiting your site I almost cried. I was just curious as I’m a single mother of triplets, not receiving child support, not qualifying for welfare, medical or medicare. I’m one of those stock in limbo who never collected government help, paid taxes and still can get child support straighten out after 5 years of divorce…I though I was one of the most desperate mothers in earth as of now that I’m unemployed, fighting for custody and behind on all my bills. God bless all the mothers that never abandone and fight for them “kids”.
Lu

Comment by Lulu Hiznay — May 24, 2008 #