OpinionJournal - Leisure & Arts: The Meaning of Their Motherhood

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

The subhead on the title-linked book review by Kay Hymowitz is "Marriage is key to improving the life chances of the inner-city poor", but that doesn't necessarly mean what you might think it does.

Here are the first two paragraphs of the review:

Poor, unmarried women with children may have receded from the public alarm list thanks to increasing numbers of them leaving welfare for work, but that doesn't mean that they are yesterday's problem. In some respects, little has changed: A third of all children are still born to husbandless women; and those children are far more likely to grow up poor than the children of two-parent families--and to become impoverished single parents themselves.

If anything can revive interest in this vexing subject, it is "Promises I Can Keep" by Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas. The book is the product of five years of interviews with black, white and Latino women in the poorest neighborhoods of Camden, N.J., and Philadelphia, where the authors are professors of sociology. Ms. Edin and Ms. Kefalas decisively rescue the young welfare mother from the policy wonks and feminist professors who have held her hostage until recently, and in so doing overthrow decades of conventional wisdom.

Hymowitz, a contributing editor of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal, provides some interesting observations in her review.