Welfare and Marriage

By June Carbone

In the midst of the latest round of welfare reform proposals, which include President Bush's plans to place greater emphasis on marriage, no one is looking at World Bank proposals that conclude that the most effective way to combat poverty is to increase the status of women. The World Bank Report, Engendering Development (2001), which the State Department embraced last December, explains that investment in women's education, autonomy, and income is critical to economic and social development -- and to the efforts in developing countries to decrease fertility and improve the well-being of children.

What does this have to do with American welfare efforts? Quite a bit. President Bush has embarked on a campaign to increase the emphasis on marriage without asking what historically produced high rates of marriage and what can do so today. The traditional answer involved policing women's sexuality, encouraging marriage soon after sexual maturity, and insisting that pregnancy trigger marriage. These marriages often led to more children, and the mother's resulting dependence discouraged divorce. In the modern era, however, there is no reason to believe that such unions will last. The states with the highest marital dissolution rates -- the Bible Belt states and Utah prominently among them -- are those still encouraging early marriage and child-rearing.

What is the alternative? It is certainly not a return to welfare policies that locked women into childrearing roles with no hope of advancement. A recent critic of Bush's proposals complained that politicians are naive about the realities of impoverished mothers' lives. "Often," she explained, "impoverished women have more than one child by different fathers. Which father should she marry, and what plans does government have to help her stabilize a complicated blended family?" The pattern she describes, however, is a recipe for disaster. Few events are better designed to marginalize a woman than an improvident pregnancy. The birth of a second child soon after the first increases the negative effect. The greater the number of children, the worse the likelihood of marriage or employment. Neither traditional welfare, which softened the consequences of such patterns without providing alternatives, nor traditional relationships tied to a woman's desperation or dependence offer much of a solution.

The World Bank offers a more hopeful approach. Research on teen pregnancy has long demonstrated that the better a woman believes her life chances to be the more likely she is to avoid early pregnancy. Other studies show that women who remain in school, and increase their income better their prospects for successful marriages. The World Bank emphasizes that investment in women pays off directly in terms of lowered fertility and healthier children. Why can't we incorporate the poverty fighting strategies our State Department is preaching to the rest of the world in our own welfare reform efforts?

A portion of this article appeared as a letter to the editor of the San Jose Mercury News, March 14, 2002.

Presidential Professor of Ethics and the Common Good, Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, Santa Clara University

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