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

In 2013, Kathryn Edin co-authored Doing the Best I Can: Fatherhood in the Inner City. How do the examinations of low-income fatherhood in this book build on or contrast with arguments made in Promises I Can Keep?

Edin and Kefalas chose to combine quantitative and qualitative data for their study. What effect does living within a researched community have on the study? How does it differ from purely quantitative studies? What are the arguments for and against developing personal relationships with research subjects?

Compare middle-class perspectives on poor, unwed mothers to the reality of those mothers’ lives and perspectives of children and marriage. What misconceptions do the middle class have about these women, and how are they subverted by this study?

This book references societal stereotypes about low-income single mothers, particularly women of color. Read a Black feminist text that focuses on the family, birth control, and reproduction, such as Women, Race, and Class by Angela Davis or Killing the Black Body by Dorothy Roberts. Where do these texts have common ground with Promises I Can Keep, and where do they provide new insights?

What is relational poverty, and what role does it play in the lives of the mothers studied? Since the book’s publication in 2005, American society has entered what some sociologists call a “loneliness epidemic”; how does this relate to relational poverty and its consequences?

This book studies a particular northeastern American social context. Choose a book or article that discusses poverty and/or motherhood in another region of the United States, such as the West Coast or Midwest. Where are the findings similar, and where do they diverge?

The book discusses many specifically American factors that contribute to poverty; for example, the implementation of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) made social welfare less available and reliable. How do the statistics about marriage and motherhood explored in this book compare to those in countries with more robust social safety nets?

Ten years after this book’s publication, Kathryn Edin wrote an editorial critiquing TANF: “20 Years Since Welfare ‘Reform’” (The Atlantic, 2016). How does this article build on or intervene with arguments made in Promises I Can Keep?