The Female Face of Poverty
JANUARY 09, 2014 – Let me state the obvious: I have never lived on the brink. Iāve never been in foreclosure, never applied for food stamps, never had to choose between feeding my children or paying the rent, and never feared Iād lose my paycheck when I had to take time off to care for a sick child or parent. I’m not thrown into crisis mode if I have to pay a parking ticket, or if the rent goes up. If my car breaks down, my life doesnāt descend into chaos.
But the fact is, one in three people in the United States do live with this kind of stress, struggle, and anxiety every day. More than 100 million Americans either live near the brink of poverty or churn in and out of it, and nearly 70 percent of these Americans are women and children.
Fifty years ago, President Lyndon Johnson envisioned the Great Society and called for a War on Poverty, naming my father, Sargent Shriver, the architect of that endeavor. The program worked: Over the next decade, the poverty rate fell by 43 percent.
In those days, the phrase āpoverty in Americaā came with images of poor children in Appalachian shacks and inner-city alleys. Fifty years later, the lines separating the middle class from the working poor and the working poor from those in absolute poverty have blurred. The new iconic image of the economically insecure American is a working mother dashing around getting ready in the morning, brushing her kidās hair with one hand and doling out medication to her own aging mother with the other.
For the millions of American women who live this way, the dream of āhaving it allā has morphed into ājust hanging on.ā Everywhere they look, every magazine cover and talk show and website tells them women are supposed to be feeling more āempoweredā than ever, but they donāt feel empowered. They feel exhausted.
Many of these women feel they are just a single incidentāone broken bone, one broken-down car, one missed paycheckāaway from the brink. And theyāre not crazy to feel that way:
- Women are nearly two-thirds of minimum-wage workers in the country.
- More than 70 percent of low-wage workers get no paid sick days at all.
- Forty percent of all households with children under the age of 18 include mothers who are either the sole or primary source of income.
- The median earnings of full-time female workers are still just 77 percent of the median earnings of their male counterparts.
For this yearās Shriver Report, A Womanās Nation Pushes Back from the Brink, we polled more than 3,000 adults to determine how Americans feel about the economy, gender, marriage, education, and the future. Here are some highlights from the poll respondents who are low-income women:
- Seventy-five percent of them wish they had put a higher priority on their education and career, compared to 58 percent of the general population.
- Seventy-three percent wish they had made better financial choices (as did 65 percent of all those we polled).
- They were less likely to be married (37 percent, compared to 49 percent of all the men and women we polled) ā¦
- And more likely than men to regret marrying when they did (52 percent, compared to 33 percent of low-income men).
- Nearly a third of those with children wished they had delayed having kids or had fewer of them.
Overwhelmingly they favor changes that will help balance work and family responsibilities. Eighty-seven percent of low-income womenāand 96 percent of single momsāidentify paid sick leave as something that would be very useful to their lives.
Whatās more, the opinion of the general public is on their side: 73 percent of Americans said that in order to raise the incomes of working women and families, the government should ensure that women get equal pay for equal work. And 78 percent said the government should expand access to high-quality, affordable childcare for working families.
The typical American family isnāt what it used to be. Only a fifth of our families have a male breadwinner and a female homemaker. The solutions we need today are also different. We donāt need a new New Deal, because the New Deal was an all-government solution, and thatās not enough anymore. And my fatherās War on Poverty isnāt enough anymore either.
Our government programs, business practices, educational system, and media messages donāt take into account a fundamental truth: This nation cannot have sustained economic prosperity and well-being until womenās central role is recognized and womenās economic health is used as a measure to shape policy.
In other words, leave out the women, and you donāt have a full and robust economy. Lead with the women, and you do. Itās that simple, and Americans know it.
Women have enormous power. Politicians knock themselves out wooing us because weāre the majority of voters in this country. Every corporate marketer and advertiser is after us because we make as much as 70 percent of this countryās consumer decisions and more than 80 percent of the healthcare decisions.
With this power, we women can exert real pressure on our government to change course on many of the issues we care about and deliver on what women need now. Isnāt it strange, for instance, that the United States is the only industrialized nation without mandatory paid maternity leave?
And how about those of us who arenāt in jeopardy? Do we pay the women we hire a living wageānot because itās the law, but because itās fair? Do we give them flexibility when they need to take time for caregiving? If we run businesses, do we educate our workers about public policies and programs that can help them?
But the truth is that for so long, Americaās women have been divided: women who are mothers versus women who are not, women who work at home versus women who work outside the home, those who are married versus those who arenāt, pro-life women versus pro-choice, white women versus women of color, Democrat versus Republican, gay versus straight, and young versus old. It feels like the last issue where women came together was fighting for the right to vote.
Itās time to come together again. By pushing back and putting into practice the solutions weāre proposing in The Shriver Report, we can re-ignite the American Dreamāfor ourselves, for our daughters and sons, for our mothers and fathers, for our nation. We have the powerānot just to launch a new War on Poverty, but a new campaign for equity, for visibility, for fairness, for worth, for care.
This story originally appeared on The Atlantic’s website Jan. 8, 2014
This piece is an excerpt from The Shriver Report: A Womanās Nation Pushes Back from the Brink in partnership with Center for America Progress. Beginning January 12th, you can download a full version of the report at ShriverReport.org. Sign up for our newsletter and we will send you a reminder when the report is available.