Free eBooks Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage, With A New Preface Available To Downloads
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.
Paperback: 320 pages
Publisher: University of California Press; Revised edition (October 4, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0520271467
ISBN-13: 978-0520271463
Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.9 x 9 inches
Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
Best Sellers Rank: #126,146 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #142 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Poverty #207 in Books > Textbooks > Social Sciences > Gender Studies #221 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Sociology > Marriage & Family
I couldn't put it down. The book was very well written. I found the book to be very objective primarily. The author is trying to make sense of why women in underprivileged communities choose to bear children but also choose for the most part to forgo marriage indefinitely. There are a few salient points she really drives home. 1. These women really love their children and would not be the women they are today without them (does that give them a right to screw up a future adults life to save their own?) 2. The men that impregnate these women are not marriageable material (domestic violence, drugs, incarceration, etc.) in any sense of the word for the overwhelming majority (half of those children born to these women are those same men) and 3. They see marriage as something they aspire to someday when they have a house, a career, an education, and some material comfort. In the event the marriage doesn't work out they can kick the guy to the curb and still have their stuff in tact to care for the children. As with any good social science book, it begs more questions than answers. That is where I part ways with the soft brushstrokes of this book. My questions are ones that disturb me. A fifteen year old teenage girl wants nothing but to leave her home, strike out on her own, have independence, not be under anyone's rule. That is a typical teenager under the best of circumstances in any class in America. The big difference is these kids have no parental guidance at that point. The easiest thing in the world to do is be a bad parent. All you have to do is nothing. When a teenager becomes too hard to deal with by a person who was never allowed to fully mature herself, let her get pregnant and start a whole new life cycle.
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