NEWS: Book Review: Promises I Can Keep

CULTURE: Book Review: Promises I Can Keep

Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage is a rare kind of book: a great read, academically sound, emotionally and intellectually compelling, and genuinely groundbreaking. The authors, Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, spent five years living among and interviewing poor single mothers, mostly very young, in Philadelphia in order to understand how these women think about motherhood and marriage.



Everyone has a theory about single mothers, especially young ones: Edin and Kefalas provide actual evidence about why the women they interviewed got pregnant, why they didn't opt for abortion or adoption, why they didn't marry their children's fathers, and whether they regret their choices. Because the authors are both sociologists and ethnographers, they treat their interview subjects with real respect, but they also make their own observations and compare what they find to the existing research and theories about the rise of single motherhood among poor women in the last fifty years.



For a sample of some of the work that went into Promises I Can Keep, see the authors' article, "Unmarried With Children," an extremely readable academic article they published two years ago in Contexts, a journal of the American Sociological Association (by the way, the current issue's cover story is "Why Do People Get Tattoos?" -- and you can get a free sample article, or even a full issue, through the "content" link on the main page).

Sounds like a decent book.

If I'm correct you can become a mother before a lot of other things society says women can do, like getting married,voting and sometimes even working so it doesn't seem like much of a choice.

If you get "ooops I'm pregnant" then that IS your choice.

Too bad that no policy-maker will care and some economist will "model" their behavior in some way to justify more cut-backs and some Christian right-winger will still brand single mothers as pariahs.

Ethnography involves listening to people, and that's sorta out of style these days.

For proof of this and other sad trends in American life, please read through the comments on all your posts, BitchPhD.

Thanks for the review, and the pointer to Contexts.

Yes, the free PDF was pretty sweet and I wouldn't have found it otherwise.

We actually learned about this issue a week or so ago in Sociology. Interesting find!

What a prosaic title.

The title really struck me as well. The idea of poor women who have chosen to have children regardless of a man being in the equation challenges the myth that women who do not have money and have children are miserable, desperate, and want money from any source possible (honestly, though, who doesn't).

It also reminds me of a commercial I saw on televsion that tells you how to make your children happier through marriage. Complete propaganda but the idea of communicating with your partner is a valid one.
OMG make sure you watch the video!!!

Looks very interesting and the sample chapter was excellent. My order has been placed and yet another book has been added to the massive 'need to read' pile.