Reformed American Dreams: Welfare Mothers, Higher Education, and Activism

Cross-country studies on poverty show that in the United States, compared to other developed countries, single mothers currently have an extremely high risk of being poor—a risk that is about 35 percent. Many studies about poor single mothers in the United States have emphasized that policy-makers and prevailing societal ideology are likely to depict them as women that are irresponsible, since they had children in hard economic conditions (see, e.g., Furstenberg 2007). Social science literature is critical of this narrow viewpoint. Indeed, numerous studies have shown a multitude of similarities between poor and middle-class mothers in terms of aspirations, values, and orientations (e.g., Edin and Kefalas 2005).