From the culture of poverty to the culture of single motherhood: The new poverty paradigm

Abstract

Women in the United States have long suffered high rates of poverty,yet it was only in the late 1970s that the "feminization of poverty" was recognized. Instead of using the emerging gender-based theoretical framework to explain women's impoverishment, however, a core of mainstream researchers relied on a familiar male-centered "culture of poverty" analysis. Rather than simply grafting women onto the extant paradigm, these scholars instead replaced male with female pathologies as central to their poverty analysis. The resulting revised paradigm, which I call the culture of single motherhood, marks a turning point in poverty scholarship in the U.S. To the belief that men were the primary victims and perpetrators of impoverishment has been added the idea that women themselves could be the cause of their own, even men's, poverty. The central thesis of this paper is that even in themost recent theorizing about poverty and its allevation we are again faced with the culture of poverty controversy albeit updated...