Rationalizing Bad Behavior by Poor Women

The Postnuclear Family: Last Comes Marriage by Eve Tushnet

She reviews Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas’s 2005 sociological study Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage.

1. The patterns of out-of-wedlock childbearing, and the beliefs and attitudes which support those patterns, are making their way up the class ladder. Middle-class women are increasingly putting motherhood before marriage, and marriage is retreating from middle-class lives.
2. Edin and Kefalas lived in the communities they studied—poor neighborhoods in Philadelphia—and let the women there speak for themselves. They noted when the women judged them and pointed out what was lacking in their own upper-class lifestyles; the women found it sad and almost incomprehensible that one of the researchers didn’t have children, for example.
3. The authors take love and morality seriously as motivations. The women they study have deep longings, loneliness, tenderness, and fairly stern moral beliefs, and while these elements of their lives may be shaped by material conditions, they also shape how the women respond to economic challenges.
4. The most striking thing about this book is the clarity with which it shows that women who have children out of wedlock are often trying very, very hard to follow the rules and norms of their own community. Again and again I hear people say that the breakdown of marriage in our country is caused by narcissism, individualism, or relativism. Those forces probably play a role in shaping our values. (For example, we are far too quick to identify personal happiness as an end in itself, a form of virtue rather than what we hope may be one fruit of practicing actual virtues.) But the women in Promises I Can Keep, as the title suggests, are not narcissists or individualists. They believe in family obligations and self-sacrifice for their children. They hold marriage in extremely high regard—even too high regard, viewing it as something you can only have once you have already achieved most of your other life goals, such as economic stability. They do not need to be convinced that marriage is good. They simply believe it is irresponsible to marry before you’re economically stable, and both irresponsible and tragic to wait too long to have children. The combination of these two beliefs plus their own precarious economic situations produces a community in which marriage is an endlessly receding horizon, always tantalizingly out of reach. And to return to our first point, the moral beliefs these low-income women hold about when to marry and how to get to the altar are shared by people up and down the income ladder. The main difference is that higher-income women are more willing to postpone childbearing.

What of the fact that it is irresponsible to have children before you're able to take care of them and financially support them, and to do so without a father for them? Is deliberately having children out of wedlock without a father to help consonant with the good of the children? Fathers for the children are of no importance, apparently. (Sound familiar?) The importance of being a mother trumps all other [moral] considerations. Their motivation may not be properly characterized as narcissistic but it is disordered self-love. Would we excuse male fornication because he seeks comfort with a woman, but is not ready for marriage? Why should we deprive him the benefit of female companionship when he recognizes that he is not ready for marriage yet, or thinks marriage 2.0 is unfair? What we see is an attempt to excuse bad behavior instead of holding women responsible. After all, teenage moms can make the same claims; it's nice and fun to be a mom and to have a cute baby, and it's the norm in the surrounding community.

The inclination to have sex or have children is natural, but it is not moral unless directed by right reason. When this inclination is actualized into an intention, the intention of a good does not justify immoral actions. Another example of the separation of the procreative from the unitive aspect of sex, according to Humanae Vitae.


The appeal to "community norms" strikes me as being an example of the "herd thinking" characterizing interfemale reasoning and socializing by various people in the androsphere. They are doing what is acceptable and trying to make it sound more noble than it really is.