How to deal with single mothers' poverty? Marriage promotion, Welfare-to-work policies, and Welfare assistance in the US

Résumé du document

The living standards of single mothers is often low, and these women's welfare are not well perceived. For most of them, it is hard to take care of children and pursue a working career. They have no voice in society and are said to be not stable. This is a good example of how development can be questioned in so called 'developed countries'. The purpose of this paper is to examine different policies that are proposed to deal with single mothers poverty, to set their problems and propose alternatives, especially according to The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, a set of laws signed under President Clinton.

Extraits

[...] First of all, many welfare mothers have low educational level and lack recent job experience. It is hard to find a job and if one is finding, full-time low- wage work that these women can get is not enough to provide income to support families. Indeed, the study of Spalter in 1995 found that between 1984 and 1990 two out of three women moving from welfare, worked in sales, service, which are not the best paid jobs. Those who are already poor and receive welfare assistance are likely to become the working poor when entering the labor market. [...]

[...] Berkeley: University of California Press. Electronic sources Albelda, R. (Sep., 2001). Fallacies of Welfare-to-Work Policies. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol Reforming Welfare, Redefining Poverty, pp. 66-78. Retrieved from Jstor. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1049823 Cheng, W. (2007). Redefining independence: Voices of single mothers on welfare about motherhood, marriage, and welfare policy. Iowa State University. Greenwood, J., Guner, N., & Knowles, J. [...]

[...] It is not tolerable to depict single mothers on welfare as lazy freeloaders. Then, we have to acknowledge that this criticism is also addressed to other groups such as unemployed persons as a whole. Politicians and social workers have to go beyond theses ideas. Instead of categorizing people, we should try to understand -as we did for welfare mothers- why some people are on welfare and not employed. We have to study the macroeconomic situation but above all, to understand the persons themselves, to define their needs. [...]

[...] We have to look for the roots of the problem instead of saying that everybody should work. The first questions to be asked are: Why are they in this situation (low education, loneliness, etc)? Do they have the tools to improve their situation (follow-up, labor market opportunities, etc)? Values must guide our thought as all people deserve dignity. References Books Smith, A. M. (2007). Welfare Reform and Sexual Regulation. New York: Cambridge University Press. Thistle, S. (2006). From Marriage to the Market: The Transformation of Women's Lives and Work. [...]

[...] However, it is not the case, most of single mothers are in difficulty because they are widowed, young and left by their boyfriend and without job, divorced for some specific reasons such as violence, non-helped by their former husband. Eva Feder Kittay (1998, p.32), professor of philosophy, who has done work with homeless women notes that welfare assistance is central to their ability to survive. Besides, if we were in a no-welfare world, then the value of single life for mothers would fall down are marriage will increase (Greenwood p.386), and as we argued before, it cannot be accepted that a woman chooses to be married for economic well-being. [...]