Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage

Edin and Kefalas are sociologists and academics who spent five years during the late 1990s studying unwed mothers in eight linked inner-city communities in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Camden, New Jersey. Edin is a leading expert on the sociology of poverty with a specific focus on low-income, single mothers. Her co-author, Kefalas, is an expert on the growing rural-urban economic divide and published a book on the power of grief, shaped by her own mothering experience.

The authors relied on both quantitative survey data to understand these women’s feelings about motherhood and marriage and qualitative data, including interviews and sociological observations. They adopted the ethnographic approach of their anthropologist colleagues by fully integrating into the communities they studied. Edin lived alongside some of the women the two studied in Camden and shared her pregnancy journey with them, while Kefalas worked alongside and joined in the lives and communities of the subjects she studied. This integration into these communities gave them first-hand insights into their participants’ attitudes toward unwed pregnancy and motherhood, as well as their thoughts on marriage. Edin lived in an East Camden apartment for two and a half years, which facilitated connections with community members. She joined a local church and volunteered with “an after-school and summer youth employment program” (19).