LOOKING FOR “MR. RIGHT”: THE VIABILITY OF MARRIAGE INITIATIVES FOR AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN IN RURAL SETTINGS

Newly-funded initiatives aim to promote marriage among low-income African American women to reduce poverty and welfare dependency. Research indicates that these women have a strong desire to marry, but lack economically secure marriage partners. This research predominantly focuses on urban populations, and little is known about marriage as a strategy to end poverty and welfare dependency among the rural poor. Two case study counties in rural Mississippi were selected to examine if marriage promotion initiatives are a viable strategy for poor rural African American single mothers. Data were collected through semistructured interviews using a life history calendar procedure. The results show that, like their urban counterparts, poor rural single mothers are rarely able to find their “Mr. Right” because of their personal and contextual characteristics.     

Teen Mothers and Welfare Reform: Challenging the Boundaries of Risk

A major component of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) included policies directed to encouraging marriage while discouraging nonmarital births. Teen mothers were of particular concern as policymakers argued that there is a link between teenage childbearing and welfare receipt. This paper seeks to reframe the concept of at-risk teen mothers by looking to the socially construction of boundaries—an imagery that brings to the forefront the complex relations between young mothers and welfare reform policy. From this standpoint, we discuss how welfare reform might address the multiple issues facing teen mothers including housing, education and training, child care, transportation, health, healthy relationships and parenting skills.     

Single Mothers and Family Values

SUMMARY

In recent years the federal government has made marriage promotion a central part of its welfare reform initiatives. These promotion efforts are based on the assumption that poor women, particularly women of color, have family attitudes that differ from those of other women. This article tests that assumption using the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a nationally representative sample of births to single mothers in urban areas. Results show significant differences in family attitudes between married and unmarried White women, but few differences for women of color. In fact, unmarried women of color tend to be more traditional than White women. In addition, welfare recipients are similar to non-recipients in gender traditionalism and attitudes towards marriage, and low-income women often express the most support for traditional gender roles. Implications for marriage promotion policies are discussed.     

Marriage Promotion Policy and Family Inequality

In 1996, Congress overhauled welfare policy to promote marriage and work as ways to lift American families out of poverty. Almost all of the funding for governmental marriage promotion has been devoted to relationship skills programs intended to help couples strengthen their relationships, encourage them to marry, and thereby prevent poverty. Marriage promotion policy has sparked intense debate, especially over the connection between marriage and family inequality. While advocates of the policy argue the government should promote marriage because it fosters social and economic well‐being, critics challenge the assumption that marriage itself causes these benefits or will help lift poor families out of poverty. Recent sociological research on why poor and low‐income couples marry less finds that they tend not to marry if they cannot meet a specific economic threshold. This suggests that rather than promoting the view that relationship skills en route to marriage can help prevent poverty, marriage promotion policy could likely better serve disadvantaged families by acknowledging and addressing the socioeconomic roots of family inequality.     

Family roles and work values: Processes of selection and change

This study focuses on whether marriage and parenthood influence work values after taking into account the influence of work values on family formation. In a recent panel of young adults (N= 709), stronger extrinsic and weaker intrinsic work values during adolescence predicted marriage and parenthood 9 years out of high school. Controlling these relationships, wives, but not husbands, came to attach less importance to extrinsic rewards, and both husbands and wives attached less importance to intrinsic rewards, compared to single men and women. Fathers came to place greater importance on extrinsic rewards than men who had not become parents. The effect of motherhood on extrinsic values depended upon marital status, with positive effects only evident among single mothers. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for models of work‐family relationships and understanding the meaning of contemporary family roles, especially motherhood and fatherhood.     

“I Try Not to Depend on Anyone but Me”: Welfare‐Reliant Women's Perspectives on Self‐Sufficiency,Work, and Marriage*

Welfare reformers sought to reduce “dependency,” or reliance on state‐supported cash benefits and deployed a discourse of “self‐sufficiency” to promote the legitimacy of efforts to remove welfare recipients from publicly funded cash assistance through either wage labor or marriage. We use longitudinal, qualitative interview data collected from 38 initially welfare‐reliant women to examine what self‐sufficiency means to them and their perspectives on how work and marriage affect their ability to be self‐sufficient. Grounded theory analysis revealed that for these women, self‐sufficiency means formal independence from both the state (i.e., Temporary Assistance to Needy Families [TANF]) and men (i.e., marriage). Although they value marriage as an institution and would ideally marry, they do not consider marriage to be a likely route to self‐sufficiency given the pool of men available to them. Rather, they embrace their own market‐based wage labor as the means by which they can attain some measure of independence. Taking our lead from the women in this study, we challenge the emphasis on marriage in current welfare policy. We argue that employment training that results in better jobs for women and men and work supports that make low‐wage work pay are clearly the appropriate direction for policy aimed at the welfare‐reliant and working poor.     

Philippine Women on the Move: Marriage across Borders

This paper discusses how Philippine transnational marriage migration is intertwined in complex and paradoxical ways with global, local and personal matters. My argument will blur the artificial and still dominant analytical division between marriage migrants (wives or "mail order" brides) and labour migrants (workers – mainly domestic workers). Focusing on the life histories of different Filipina women, the paper illustrates the intersections and multiplicity of their roles as wives, mistresses, workers, mothers, daughters and citizens in a transnational migratory space.
Furthermore, I go along with those scholars who argue that women do not only marry in order to migrate, but that they also migrate in order to marry, as marriage is seen as an important aspect of social fulfilment. By carefully investigating these emerging transnational or even global marriage-scapes, I analyze the different motives, logics and desires that come into play. While women from the Philippines may look for "modern husbands" and "modern marriages" because of local constraints on their marriage opportunities, many western men turn to Asia and the Philippines for "traditional" wives whom they imagine to be more "conservative" and "less demanding." Both often discover that their gender stereotypes are more imagined than real.
The stories illustrate how Filipina migrants use different socio-cultural and socio-economic situations across transnational space – and at times against local gender constructions – in order to renegotiate and reclaim a respectable and desired marital status. On the one hand, these women are subject to manifold localised, legal and religious-moral definitions as women and wives. On the other hand, they creatively and actively utilise structural differences and new opportunities across transnational space to redefine themselves. The stories thus show both the women's agency and the importance of structural factors.     

Fathers in Prison

ABSTRACT

The parenting roles and responsibilities of incarcerated men have not traditionally been considered an important public concern. The impact of criminal justice policies and practices on family functioning has rarely been addressed by policy makers or family scholars and men's family obligations have not been a priority for the individuals responsible for the safety and security of correctional institutions. Similarly, and with few exceptions, fathers in prison have been out of sight and out of mind of community organizations concerned with family life and children's wellbeing. Several recent developments challenge this historical approach to handling parental incarceration and responsible fatherhood initiatives involving incarcerated fathers are being promoted. This article examines the individual and societal issues that must be addressed if responsible fatherhood among incarcerated men is to become a serious social goal. It presents an overview of the complex family roles and relationships of incarcerated men and describes ways in which individual situations and family preferences affect their ability to function as parents. Analyses of prison location strategies and communication regulations and the post-release environment are used to show how public policies influence and shape family relationships and responsible fatherhood. The article concludes with an agenda for research to guide informed and humane policy decisions.     

Permanent or Uninterrupted Revolution: Lenin,Trotsky, and their Successors on the Transition to Socialism

In Russia, post-communist reforms to state social benefit policies have shown contradictory views of gender. On the one hand, reform showed a desire to promote gender equality between individuals, a view in which men and women alike were considered autonomous citizens. On the other hand, there was an impulse to consider women as a needy group dependent on special help from the state. This paper examines three related areas of policy: pronatalist policy, child welfare benefits, and old age pensions, in order to reveal unresolved issues in Russian social policies towards women and children.     

De‐Romanticizing Black Intergenerational Support: The Questionable Expectations of Welfare Reform

Past research suggests that despite the substantial strengths of Black kin networks, they are not always up to the task of supporting young mothers. This study is an analysis of potential barriers to women‐centered kin support for present‐day urban Black teen mothers and possible implications for kin support mandates specified in the 1996 federal welfare reforms. In‐depth interviews with African American midlife women, who themselves were teen mothers, shed light on their attitudes and perceptions about Black kinship systems and teen childbearing. Study results suggest that these women perceive governmental intervention, age‐condensation among urban Black families, and urban “underclass” culture to have undermined traditional Black intergenerational support.     

Marriage Migration Policy in South Korea: Social Investment beyond the Nation State

This article seeks to contribute to understandings of South Korea's approach to marriage migration. Situating our analysis of marriage migration policy specifically within the recent emergence of a social investment approach to welfare, we bring together two bodies of literature that due to the methodological nationalism of much welfare state scholarship are usually treated separately. Through an examination of the policy framework governing marriage migration ‐ so‐called ‘multicultural family policies’ ‐ we find that successive Korean governments have actively sought female marriage migrants to perform various social reproductive roles as a means to secure the reproductive capacity of the nation, just as feminist scholars have argued the care work of citizen‐mothers can be understood. Our analysis also suggests that marriage migration policy in Korea constitutes a distinctly transnational dimension to its overall social investment approach, which is strongly motivated by concerns to reproduce the next generation of human capital.     

Public Policies and Father Involvement

SUMMARY

The last two decades have been marked by a series of social and policy developments that are changing both how men see themselves as fathers and how policies conceptualize and encourage their involvement in the lives of children and families. This paper focuses on several areas of intersection between research on fathers and policy. The paper first summarizes the research that led to the current political and social interest in fathers. The paper then describes the Fatherhood Initiative, a set of activities that stemmed from a 1995 memorandum from President Clinton. This Initiative led to coordinated efforts by U.S. Federal Statistical agencies to collect better data about fathers. The paper concludes with a discussion of what we know about the effects on father involvement of policies such as welfare reform, child support, work place policies, responsible fatherhood programs, and other fatherhood interventions. Examples of new programs and initiatives on father involvement are also given.     

The Performance of Desire: Gender and Sexual Negotiation in Long-Term Marriages

We integrate theoretical traditions on the social construction of gender, heterosexuality, and marriage with research and theory on emotion work to guide a qualitative investigation of how married people understand and experience sex in marriage. Results, based on 62 in-depth interviews, indicate that married men and women tend to believe that sex is integral to a good marriage and that men are more sexual than women. Moreover, husbands and wives commonly experience conflict around sex and undertake emotion work to manage their own and their spouse's feelings about sex. We refer to this emotion work as "performing desire" and show how it is linked to gendered experiences in marriage and to competing cultural discourses around gender, heterosexuality, and marriage.     

‘In a bind’: Foster mothers' experiences with welfare reform

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 has diminished government support to single mothers and further limits the options for full-time parenting, placing priority on work participation and reduction of welfare caseloads. Based upon interviews with 100 low-income foster mothers who are also Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) recipients, this study examines their experiences with these policies while they balance multiple responsibilities as caregivers for abused and neglected children from the child welfare system. The implications of TANF policies for foster mothers and policy alternatives that support diverse family structures are also discussed.     

Scandalous Scarcities: Black Slave Women, Plantation Domesticity, and Travel Writing in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

This article draws on the writing of North American and European travelers to illustrate the ways in which enslaved black women became central to Cuba's visions of colonial prosperity in the mid-nineteenth century. Such literature highlights the anxieties that plagued Cuban colonial elites as the slave trade consistently brought fewer African women than men to the island. As mothers, wives, and caretakers of domestic space, black and African women became critical to planters' dreams of continued wealth and stability. To further encourage this idealized culture of respectable domesticity, white Cuban elites erected slave cabins and barracks whose physical arrangements could increase slaves' compulsion to marry, and enhance managers' ability to survey and oversee the enslaved populations. Thus white Cuban elites hoped that enslaved women – and the ideas about marriage, home, and family such women were thought to inspire – would help to produce plantation regimes as orderly and disciplined as they were prosperous.     

Making Marriage Promotion into Public Policy: The Epistemic Culture of a Statewide Initiative

Though political sociologists have sought to understand how self-interest influences politics and policymaking, little research has examined the mechanisms involved in the relationship between constructing knowledge and forming policy. This article extends the concept of epistemic culture to the field of policymaking to uncover the mechanisms of knowledge production in policy formation. It offers an extended case study of government marriage promotion policies that seek to fund and disseminate marriage education among poor couples with the goal of lifting them out of poverty. Based on an ethnography of a statewide marriage initiative in Oklahoma, this article maps out the parameters of an epistemic culture of marriage promotion shaped by three mechanisms: 1) The articulation of connections between policy, commonsense ideas, and extant epistemologies; 2) The formation of policy that consolidates research findings to quell controversy; and 3) The creation of networks to convince relevant actors of the importance of marriage promotion policy.     

Women's Marriage Behavior Following a Premarital Birth in Sub‐Saharan Africa

This study examines the relationship between premarital childbearing and the timing of women's entry into their first marriage in sub‐Saharan Africa. The study shows that African women who have a premarital birth generally experience later transitions to marriage than do their childless peers. Although the birth of a child precipitates a quicker transition to marriage initially, unmarried mothers, on average, marry at older ages than their childless peers and remain single for between 2 and 14 years. Evidence from a subsample of countries confirms that the time between having a child and first marriage has lengthened slightly in some countries; however, this reflects mainly the overall trend toward later marriage, rather than a further bifurcation of the marital trajectories of mothers versus childless women. The study raises policy concerns about the welfare of Africa's single mothers and their children.     

TANF’s 15th Anniversary and the Great Recession: are Low‐Income Mothers Celebrating Upward Economic Mobility?

This article examines the impact of welfare reform for the upward economic mobility of low‐income families at the fifteenth anniversary of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. The reformed policy was based on assumptions about participating families’ morality and encouraged states to move families off welfare through work and marriage without considering whether they were still poor. TANF was also implemented during an economic boom. Today, the US economy is suffering from the effects of the Great Recession, with many fearing a double dip recession. Poverty rates rose during the last 3 years and are currently above 15 percent. For the first time since 1996, the welfare rolls are increasing in many states. Welfare reform’s ‘work first’ approach did not create lasting upward economic mobility for low‐income families. As an alternative, I explore how higher education for welfare mothers will create opportunities for lasting upward mobility, even in times of recession.     

Welfare reform and the subject of the working mother: “Get a job,a better job,then a career”

Until 1996, poor single mothers in the United States could claim welfare benefits for themselves and their children under the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program if they had no other source of income. With the 1996 passage of the Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), paid work and work-related activities became a mandatory condition for receiving aid. At the same time, the law promotes marriage as a route out of poverty. Using a feminist reinterpretation of Althussers concept of interpellation, I turn to Job Clubs, mandatory week-long workshops that teach job search skills, to analyze the citizen-subject generated by front-line representatives of the state in the context of this new legislation. Based on participant-observation, I conclude that while PRWORA ostensibly promotes both marriage and paid employment, Job Club trainers enforced a masculine worker-citizen subject through the deployment of three discursive strategies. These discursive strategies 1) promoted paid work over welfare-receipt as both a pragmatic and moral choice, 2) posited an individual-psychological account of womens welfare receipt, and 3) portrayed parenting skills as marketable skills. In the conclusion, I speculate that current welfare reform efforts require the generation of a self-reproducing worker-citizen and that workshops like Job Club become a site in which the existence of this autonomous citizen is affirmed.     

When His Ship Comes Home: The Stress of The Australian Seafarer's Partner

This article explores the stress that the wives of Australian Merchant Navy men experience as a result of the seafarer's lifestyle. The article first describes the difficulties that the wife and family experience due to the long absence of the seafarer. An exploratory survey was conducted in which 52 partners of seafarers answered questions regarding the stress they and their family experience. In addition, data were collected on their work patterns, the effect of the lifestyle on their marriage and sexual relations. While the sample obtained in this study was small, it did reveal several interesting problems associated with the seafaring family life. Eighty-three per cent (83%) of seafarer's wives found it stressful before and after their husband was due to return home. In their roles as mothers, they also felt their children experienced considerable stress because of the seafarer's absence. Many women felt that the seafaring life caused difficulties in their marriage and 25 % of the wives believed that their husbands had or were having sexual relations outside their marriage. The results of this study offer a preliminary profile into some of the difficulties families experience as a result of the seafaring life.