Suppose that the woman shoulders 90% of household expenses and the man can contribute only 10% of them (as opposed to the man willing to contribute only 10% even though he can do more if he chooses to) -- who is dependent on whom?
In any case, conservatives are chagrined to find poor women insufficiently eager to marry, so they have come up with an array of wastefully tax-funded, futile marriage promotion schemes:
***** Lose That Poor Citizen Guilt: Get Married! By Alana Kumbier, PopPolitics.com April 8, 2002
"In the contemporary United States it is almost always the people at the bottom of the virtue/value scale - the adult poor, the non-white, the unmarried, the non-heterosexual, and the nonreproductive - who are said to be creating the crisis that is mobilizing the mainstream public sphere to fight the good fight on behalf of normal national culture, while those in power are left relatively immune." - Lauren Berlant
. . . The issue that best reflects Berlant's argument . . . is the emphasis on state and federal efforts to encourage, through funding allocated for governmental programs and individual incentives, single welfare mothers to marry the fathers of their children. Consider that in West Virginia, a couple's welfare benefits are augmented if they wed, while the state has reduced the welfare benefits cohabitating non-married adults receive by 25 percent. Arizona has used welfare funds to produce marriage guidebooks for couples applying for a marriage license and to sponsor marriage skills classes (for which low-income couples may receive vouchers). Arkansas and Louisiana have adopted legislation that makes the divorce process more difficult for married couples.
In Oklahoma, the Department of Health and Human Services has allocated 10 percent of the state's welfare funds to the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative, which, according to a recent Newsweek article, has included $250,000 for "relationship rallies" on college campuses run by evangelical-Christian marriage counselors and for training counselors and educators to offer Prevention and Relationship Enhancement Programs. As the article points out, the "programs are open to the public, but the state encourages welfare recipients to attend by tying attendance to their monthly benefits."
Finally, Bush outlined his proposal for federal welfare reform in a speech earlier this month urging Congress to toughen the 1996 welfare law, which it will reevaluate this year. Under Bush's plan, $200 million in federal funds, and $100 million in matching state funds, would be allocated for marriage incentive programs. . . .
<http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=12803> *****
Such schemes are futile, simply because there are few men on the low-income end of the working class who can have women economically depend on them:
***** Marriage, Poverty, and Public Policy A Discussion Paper from the Council on Contemporary Families Prepared for the Fifth Annual CCF Conference, April 26-28, 2002 by Stephanie Coontz and Nancy Folbre
. . . Poor mothers tend to live in neighborhoods in which their potential marriage partners are also likely to be poorly educated and irregularly employed. Low-earning men are less likely to get married and more likely to divorce than men with higher earnings.26 Over the past thirty years, labor market opportunities for men with low levels of education have declined substantially.27 Several studies suggest that the decrease in real wages for low-income men during the 1980s and early 1990s contributed significantly to lower marriage rates in those years.28
This trend has been exacerbated by the high incarceration rates for men convicted of non-violent crimes, such as drug use. While in jail, these men are not available for women to marry and their diminished job prospects after release permanently impair their marriageability. High rates of incarceration among black males, combined with high rates of mortality, have led to a decidedly tilted sex ratio within the African-American population, and a resulting scarcity of marriageable men.29 One study of the marriage market in the 1980s found that at age 25 there were three unmarried black women for every black man who had adequate earnings.30 . . .
. . . 26. Robert Nakosteen and Michael Zimmer, "Man, Money, and Marriage: Are High Earners More Prone than Low Earners to Marry?" Social Science Quarterly 78 (1997): pp. 66-82.
27. Francine D. Blau, Lawrence W. Kahn and Jane Waldfogel, "Understanding Young Women's Marriage Decisions: The Role of Labor and Marriage Market Conditions," Industrial and Labor Relations Review 53, no. 4 (July 2000): pp. 624-48.
28.Robert Nakosteen and Michael Zimmer, "Men, Money, and Marriage" Social Science Quarterly 78 (1997), pp. ; Frank F. Furstenberg, Jr. "The Future of Marriage," American Demographics 18 (June 1996), pp. 39-40; Francine Blau, Lawrence Kahn, and Jane Waldfogel, "Understanding Young Women's Marriage Decisions," Industrial and Labor Relations Review 53 (2000): pp. 624-48.
29. William A. Darity, Jr. and Samuel L. Myers, Jr., "Family Structure and the Marginalization of Black Men," Policy Implications" in The Decline in Marriage Among African Americans: Causes, Consequences, and Policy Implications, ed. M. Belinda Tucker and Claudia Mitchell-Kernan. (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1995), pp. 263-308.
30. Daniel.T. Lichter, D. McLaughlin, F. LeClere, G. Kephart, and D. Landry, "Race and the Retreat from Marriage: A Shortage of Marriageable Men?" American Sociological Review 57 (December 1992): pp. 781-99. . . .
(<http://www.contemporaryfamilies.org/public/briefing.html> & <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/marriage/etc/poverty.html>) ***** -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>