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Promises I Can Keep
Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage
University of California Press
This is the most important study ever written on motherhood and marriage among low-income urban women.
—William Julius Wilson, author of The Bridge Over the Racial Divide
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.
Winner of the William J. Goode Best Book Length Contibution to Family Sociology Award from the American Sociological Association
Kathryn Edin is professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and Maria Kefalas is assistant professor of sociology at St. Joseph’s University.
Foreign editions of Promises I Can Keep
To inquire about international rights please contact University of California Press.
