Barbara Ehrenreich: Can Marriage Fix Poverty?

By Barbara Ehrenreich, AlterNet. Posted June 6, 2006.

There are quite a few surprising -- and surprisingly viable -- alternatives to Bush's marriage-minded anti-poverty program.

I was on panel discussion on poverty a few weeks ago, when NY Times reporter Jason de Parle asked me, in what he said was a spirit of devil’s advocacy, why I slighted marriage as a solution to poverty. Actually, I’d barely begun to slight it—I’d just mentioned that it is the Bush administration’s favored anti-poverty strategy, when the audience, and especially the women in it, broke out into laughter.

De Parle was right to say that married couples do much better financially than single mothers, if only because the single moms lack a male breadwinner. But every time I think of marriage as an anti-poverty program, my mind flips back to a woman I met while researching Nickel and Dimed. She was a deeply religious African American woman, an evangelical Christian, and she broke into tears as she told me that her husband beat her when he got drunk, which was as often as he could find the time for it. (Just to confound any residual racial stereotypes you may have, the husband, whom I met, was white.)