Kathryn Edin

Maria Kefalas

The authors provide a wholly new framework for understanding why poor women have lower rates of marriage and have children outside of wedlock.

Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage

Promises I Can Keep

A portrait of Chicago's Southwest Side looks at the firefighters, police officers, stay-at-home mothers, and office workers living in the stable working-class community known as Beltway, considering the significance of home, community, and nation in the lives of Beltway residents.

Protecting Home, Community, and Nation in a Chicago Neighborhood

Working-Class Heroes

Millie Acevedo bore her first child before the age of 16 and dropped out of high school to care for her newborn. Now 27, she is the unmarried mother of three and is raising her kids in one of Philadelphia's poorest neighborhoods. Would she and her children be better off if she had waited to have them and had married their father first? Why do so many poor American youth like Millie continue to have children before they can afford to take care of them? Over a span of five years, sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas talked in-depth with 162 low-income single moms like Millie to learn how they think about marriage and family. Promises I Can Keep offers an intimate look at what marriage and motherhood mean to these women and provides the most extensive on-the-ground study to date of why they put children before marriage despite the daunting challenges they know lie ahead.

Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage

Over a span of five years, [the authors] talked in-depth with 162 low-income single moms ... to learn how they think about marriage and family. [This book] offers an intimate look at what marriage and motherhood mean to these women and provides [an] extensive on-the-ground study ... of why they put children before marriage despite the daunting challenges they know lie ahead.. [This book] argues that until poor young women and men have greater access to jobs that lead to financial security - that is, until they can hope for a rewarding life outside of bearing and raising children - they will continue to have children far sooner than most Americans think they should, and in less than ideal circumstances.-Dust jacket.

Mary C. Waters

Patrick Joseph Carr

Jennifer Ann Holdaway

What is it like to become an adult in twenty-first-century America? This book takes us to four very different places—New York City, San Diego, rural Iowa, and Saint Paul, Minnesota—to explore the dramatic shifts in coming-of-age experiences across the country. Drawing from in-depth interviews with people in their twenties and early thirties, it probes experiences and decisions surrounding education, work, marriage, parenthood, and housing. The first study to systematically explore this phenomenon from a qualitative perspective, Coming of Age in America offers a clear view of how traditional patterns and expectations are changing, of the range of forces that are shaping these changes, and of how young people themselves view their lives.

The Transition to Adulthood in the Twenty-First Century

Coming of Age in America

Chicago's Southwest Side is one of the last remaining footholds for the city's white working class, a little-studied and little-understood segment of the American population. This book paints a nuanced and complex portrait of the firefighters, police officers, stay-at-home mothers, and office workers living in the stable working-class community known as Beltway. Building on the classic Chicago School of urban studies and incorporating new perspectives from cultural geography and sociology, Maria Kefalas considers the significance of home, community, and nation for Beltway residents.

Maria Kefalas

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