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Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage 1st Edition

by Kathryn Edin (Author), Maria J. Kefalas (Author)

4.6 254 ratings

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Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage, with a New Preface
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Millie Acevedo bore her first child before the age of 16 and dropped out of high school to care for her newborn. Now 27, she is the unmarried mother of three and is raising her kids in one of Philadelphia's poorest neighborhoods. Would she and her children be better off if she had waited to have them and had married their father first? Why do so many poor American youth like Millie continue to have children before they can afford to take care of them?

Over a span of five years, sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas talked in-depth with 162 low-income single moms like Millie to learn how they think about marriage and family. Promises I Can Keep offers an intimate look at what marriage and motherhood mean to these women and provides the most extensive on-the-ground study to date of why they put children before marriage despite the daunting challenges they know lie ahead.

ISBN-10

0520241134
ISBN-13

978-0520241138
Edition

1st
Publisher

University of California Press
Publication date

March 8, 2005
Language

English
Dimensions

6.32 x 1.14 x 9.2 inches
Print length

300 pages
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Andrea Elliott
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Kathryn J. Edin
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Andrew J. Cherlin
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Kathryn Edin
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"This is the most important study ever written on motherhood and marriage among low-income urban women. Edin and Kefalas's timely, engaging, and well-written book is a careful ethnographic study that paints an indelible portrait of family life in poor communities and, in the process, provides incredible insights on the explosion of mother-only families within these communities."

From the Inside Flap

"This is the most important study ever written on motherhood and marriage among low-income urban women. Edin and Kefalas's timely, engaging, and well-written book is a careful ethnographic study that paints an indelible portrait of family life in poor communities and, in the process, provides incredible insights on the explosion of mother-only families within these communities."William Julius Wilson, author of The Bridge over the Racial Divide

"This book provides the most insightful and comprehensive account I have read of the reasons why many low-income women postpone marriage but don't postpone childbearing. Edin and Kefalas do an excellent job of illuminating the changing meaning of marriage in American society."Andrew Cherlin, author of Public and Private Families

Edin and Kefalas provide an original and convincing argument for why low-income women continue to embrace motherhood while postponing and raising the bar on marriage. This book is a must read for students of the family as well as for policy makers and practitioners who hope to rebuild marriage in low-income communities.”Sara McLanahan, author of Growing Up with a Single Parent

"Promises I Can Keep is the best kind of exploration: honest, incisive and ever-so-original. It'll make you squirm, and that's a good thing, especially since Edin and Kefalas try to make sense of the biggest demographic shift in the last half century. This is a must read for anyone interested in the tangled intersection of family and public policy."Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of California Press; 1st edition (March 8, 2005)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 300 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0520241134
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0520241138
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.04 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.32 x 1.14 x 9.2 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #762,661 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #446 in Poverty
- #619 in Sociology of Marriage & Family (Books)
- #1,665 in General Gender Studies

Customer Reviews:
4.6 254 ratings

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About the authors

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Maria Kefalas
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Maria Kefalas earned degrees at Wellesley College and the University of Chicago, completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania and worked at the Brookings Institution and Barnard College (at Columbia University) before joining the faculty of Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia. She has received grants from the Department of Justice, the MacArthur Foundation, and the William T. Grant Foundation. Her writings have appeared in The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Slate, The Huffington Post and The Root and she is the author/co-author of four books. In 2012, her life took an unexpected turn when her youngest child, Calliope, was diagnosed with a fatal, degenerative, neurological disease called metachromatic leukodystrophy or MLD. That experience led Kefalas to become an advocate and philanthropist when she and her late husband Pat Carr to established the Calliope Joy Foundation and helped launch the Leukodystrophy Center of Excellence at the world-renowned Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Her newest book - Harnessing Grief - is a memoir about her life caring for her daughter and how she acquired the "superpower of grief" to champion gene therapy and save other people's children when Cal would not be helped. Learn more at www.mariakefalas.com
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Kathryn J. Edin
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KATHRYN J. EDIN is the William Church Osborn Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University. The
author of nine books, Edin is widely recognized for using direct, in-depth observation to illuminate key mysteries about poverty: “In a field of poverty experts who rarely meet the poor, Edin usefully defies convention” (New York Times).
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Cheated Customer

Unforgettable Book

Reviewed in the United States on October 12, 2023

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I read this book years ago and it sticks in my mind. It challenges stereotypes about marriage, upward mobility, and how women in poverty should prioritize marriage and family - with statistics to back it up. As more and more men in 2023 push women to be traditional with traditional marriage while states deny reproductive care, we can't ignore the data in this book that says marriage may not benefit women in certain blighted regions where male incarceration is high. This book definitely should be part of the discussion surrounding optimal family structure.

2 people found this helpful

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J. Akil

Why Put Motherhood Before Marriage?

Reviewed in the United States on November 5, 2006

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Often when the question is posed as to why do poor women continue to have children before they are obviously -at least to the majority of Americans it is obvious-in the most opportune position to accomplish the task of parenting successfully, several common responses are usually offered. The most common retort may be that poor women don't have access to low-cost or free contraception and/or abortion providers, followed by claims that these women are just irresponsible and possess low ( or completely lack) moral values. Nothing could be further from the truth. Yes, poor women have less access to inexpensive contraceptive supplies and behavior that may be common in the ghettoes of America can be starkly contrasted against what is deemed acceptable in middle and upper-class communities. Yet it turns out that these differences have surprisingly little to do with why poor women consistently put motherhood before marriage.

Sociologists Edin and Kefalas spent 5 years interviewing, studying and interacting with a group consisting of one-hundred and sixty-two women from eight impoverished communities to find the real answer to this perturbing question. Along the way Edin and Kefalas dispell the myths and stereotypes pertaining to poor men and women and their attitudes regarding motherhood and marriage. It turns out that rather than viewing marriage as an inconsequential and outdated institution, the interviewies revered marriage. What the authors discovered was that the women held marriage to such a high-standard and erected so many hurdles to be jumped before they would consider getting married that they effectively placed the hallowed institution outside of their reach in the near future. While the middle and upper-class follow the line of thinking that says "first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the baby in the baby carriage", poor women women more often than not say "first comes infatuation, then comes the baby, then you move in together and plan for the wedding to take place in 5 or 6 years once the two of you are satisfied that you really know each other". Many of the things that these single-mothers say and do appear inexplicably contradictory, and at times, almost absurd. Yet to the women it all makes perfect sense. This book has numerous examples of "you have to read it to believe it" moments: for instance, there are the single mothers of two or three children who say that they don't want to get married just yet because marriage is such "hard work," as if raising several children in the heart of the ghetto while seemingly mired in abject poverty is a far easier task.

The differences between the attitudes and behavior of poor and upper-class women is as stark as night and day when it comes to marriage and motherhood. Anyone genuinely interested in exploring these differences and crafting real responses to teen pregnancy and the high rates of out-of-wedlock childbearing in ostensibly dire circumstances should begin their exploration by reading this book.

49 people found this helpful

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Arkansaw Traveler

Required Reading for All Politicians -- Actually, Maybe Everyone

Reviewed in the United States on July 5, 2009

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There is so much good here I don't know where to start. Maybe by simply saying that this is probably the most important book ever written on understanding why low-income women value motherhood while putting marriage into an entirely different decision mode. Babies automatically elevate the mother into instant adulthood and, in their minds, a position of respect. The question of providing for their children to give them the best possible start in life is simply not relevant.

I will leave the book's details to several other reviewers who have covered the ground extremely well, but wish to emphasize that the authors dispel many myths concerning single mothers' attitudes toward marriage, and point out that 70% of low-income "single mothers" actually live with a boyfriend who may or may not take part in child-rearing and support. The public policy implications of the authors' statistics is simply too important to ignore. Children give the single mothers' lives meaning -- but note that it gives the mothers' lives meaning rather than give the children what they need to succeed or become well-adjusted as adults. In fact, as Ann Coulter pointed out in her much maligned book, "Guilty", the single mothers can't keep their promises. A mother's job is to prepare her children to leave home, and they rarely accomplish that.

Some sociologists will attack this book on the sample not being sufficiently broad, either racially or geographically, but those criticisms are small potatoes. Even if the authors' presentations are on point only seventy percent of the time (& I believe the percentage is much higher than that), the public policy and cultural implications are staggering. With the current trend toward bifurcating the American populace into two classes, the very rich and the poor, the rise in single mothers and their ensuing problems are far from peaking.

The authors use their technique of allowing the single mothers to speak for themselves truly brings home their situation, attitudes, and optimism (or lack thereof.) The book is almost exciting reading to anyone who cares about problems in American (or just Western) culture today. Even though the book was written (& researched) during the Bush 43 Administration, it is certainly even more timely now for Obama and subsequent administrations. I don't want to put my own spin on this review, but the State makes a very poor father and is getting worse.

I recommend this book to everyone as one of the most important books produced in this decade. The authors are to be commended. This work will enhance every reader's knowledge and understanding of a modern phenomenon that is rapidly changing our entire way of life.

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