Poor And Getting Poorer

That women are poor is nothing new; that women are poor is nothing unusual. Women have been exploited as property to be bought and sold, as goods to be bargained and bartered, since biblical times. Women have been forced to depend upon men for their economic survival in primitive, feudal, industrial, capitalist, socialist, communist, and even our most "advanced" societies. Women have been oppressed, and even their very nature has been maligned, by Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and other religions. Economic, political, professional, and sexual discrimination have been experienced by women of every race, class, and culture.

Women have always been disproportionately poor, and many women have been poor their entire lives. But many of the social movements of the past 20 years, particularly the women's movement, have attempted to redress the social and economic inequalities suffered by women throughout history. Yet for all our "progress," for all the gains made in women's rights, there is still not only a large number of poor women in the United States--and throughout the world--but now there are more poor women than ever, and they are getting poorer.

Two out of every three poor adults in this country are women. And a 1981 study by the National Advisory Council on Economic Opportunity, to stress its point about the rapidly growing impoverishment of women, concluded that if the current trend were to continue "to increase at the same rate as it did from 1967 to 1978, the poverty population would be composed solely of women and their children before the year 2000." It is the frightening picture painted by these sobering statistics that social scientists and feminists have labeled the "feminization of poverty."

Forty-six-year-old Nona, like many black women from the South, wears poverty like a birthright:

I've been poor all my life. I've never owned anything. I have always had to get out and work....I never had anything where I could go to the bank and get money. Most things I own are secondhand.

So effective was Nona's society in lowering her expectations that she doesn't think of her poverty as related to the fact that she is a black woman. Her life has been "sorta tough," she says, quickly and proudly adding that she's managed all right and humbly mentioning that she can't complain because, after all, she's made some mistakes.

However, many problems and "mistakes" that might appear to be causes of poverty actually are the effects or manifestations of long-term poverty. Nona talks openly about her lack of education, her now-reformed alcoholism, the fact that she wasn't married to any of the three men who fathered her five children, and that, although she is unemployed and receives welfare payments, she recently turned down a job offer. But she discusses the many difficult circumstances of her life--many of them completely beyond her control--only after more direct questioning.

Nona was born in South Carolina to a poor, unmarried woman. She describes her mother as an alcoholic who never married but lived with a man who sold whiskey and ran an in-house gambling operation. "Life was sorta tough....I didn't have too much of a childhood before I was a mother [ at age 15]....I wasn't married to the father of any of my children....I was married for a few years. We lived together for two years before we married, and that time was better than after we married. He beat me."

Fourteen years later Nona still remembers the biggest paycheck she ever got: $189.17 for two weeks' work, plus overtime, running the electric knife and saw at a turkey factory. But the work was sporadic and offered little pay and no benefits, so in 1971 Nona moved to Washington, D.C., hoping to find better work. She often worked two jobs at a time--housekeeping and commercial laundry most often--but due to alcoholism and unrelated health problems, she hasn't been employed for several years now.

She "barely makes it" supporting her two youngest children--one slightly mentally retarded--and one of her seven grandchildren on her welfare and Medicaid benefits, food stamps, and some support from the children's father. But she recently decided not to take a job cleaning dormitories at Washington's Howard University because she would have earned less on her minimum-wage salary than she now receives in welfare benefits.

Asked what keeps her going, Nona mentions her "faith in the Lord," her volunteer food-distribution work at Sojourners Neighborhood Center, and her children. "Even though things have been hard, I see other people and know it could have been a lot worse," she says. "And I think I've done a good job in some ways bringing the kids up....A close family makes it much easier."

Nona also is fed by her modest hopes and dreams for her children. "Even though she is a girl," she says of her 7-year-old daughter, "I want her to make a decent living for herself. Even though they say girls just get married...even if she does, I want her not to have to depend on someone else."

But throughout history most social and economic systems have been based, in part, on women's economic dependence and their subjugation to men and the male-ordained values of profit, power, and patriarchy. And while American women have made many social, economic, educational, and political advances in the last 20 years, their contributions to the labor market continue to be valued far below those of their male counterparts--an inequity that further perpetuates their dependence. Yet the very male-dominated system that fosters such dependence has become less and less dependable.

MOST RESEARCHERS studying the poverty of women cite the segregated labor market--which pays women less than men--and the fact that women have always carried the primary responsibility for raising and caring for children as the main reasons for the feminization of poverty. Others view the poverty of women as a historical phenomenon due largely to the structural factors of race and class. They argue that the recent emphasis on the feminization of poverty ignores the significance of race and class as" indicators of poverty and minimizes the centuries-old suffering of working-class women, particularly black and Hispanic women.

But neither argument alone should hold sway. It is the interaction, the combined effect of the "gender factor" and the "structural factor," that accounts for the increasing pauperization of women. The structural factors of race and class mean that women of color are more likely to be poor than white women and women in working or lower classes are more likely to be and stay poor than are women in the middle class. The gender factor accounts for the fact that women of any race are poorer than men of the same race and that women of any class are more likely to become poor than men in the same economic class.

The various unjust economic, political, and social characteristics of our society produce and tolerate poverty at intolerably high levels, and minorities and women have always suffered the most. While a greater percentage of black women were poor in 1982 than were black men--35.8 percent and 23.8 percent, respectively--and while a greater percentage of white women were poor than were white men--12 percent and 8.8 percent, respectively--it also is true that the percentage of black women or black men alone who were poor was greater than the total percentage of poor whites.

But women are suffering more than men, and some of the reasons are unique to their gender. The feminization of poverty reinforces rather than underestimates the importance of the poverty experienced historically by blacks and other minorities. The focus on women in poverty in feminist and economic literature simply mirrors the changing economic realities and seeks to offer explanations for a disturbing pattern.

In 1959, when the U.S. Census Bureau began to publish poverty statistics regularly, about 50 percent of the poor were women. Today the figure is 62 percent. Income and poverty statistics indicate that "the burden of poverty has shifted from two-parent black or Hispanic families to families sustained by women alone, so that now almost three-fourths of poor minority families are headed by women," says the Women's Economic Agenda Working Group. Fifty percent of all poor families--minority and white--are now headed by women, an increase of 14 percent in the last 10 years.

Our current society is one in which:

More than 33 million Americans now eke out an existence below a bare-bones standard of living. Millions more live in constant risk of poverty's "revolving door." ...In the economy as a whole, the gaps are widening, the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer. Income inequality is greater now than at any time since the statistic has been measured--it is measuring the erosion of the American Dream.

This was the conclusion of an analysis released last November by Thanksgiving Action on Poverty, a coalition of 35 religious, social, and political groups. The analysis, performed by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, concluded that 14.4 percent of Americans are entrenched in poverty, the highest poverty rate since 1966, except for "the recession years of 1982 and 1983," when the poverty rate climbed to 15.2 percent. This represents an increase of 4.4 million poor persons since 1980 and 8.3 million more than in 1970.

Clearly, these figures reflect a society whose structures are contributing to the increasing poverty of both genders, of all races and classes. Middle-class status or full-time work no longer protect Americans against poverty, according to the Thanksgiving analysis. About two million Americans work full time "at or slightly above the minimum wage--stagnant at $3.35 an hour since 1981," yet they remain in poverty. One of every four Americans slips below the poverty level every 10 years, and one of three Americans now lives on half the poverty-level income, the analysis concluded. And, just as clearly, these conditions portend even greater economic suffering for women.

In 1986 our society's economic deck is stacked against women--particularly black and Hispanic women--more than any other group in our society. In addition to our society's structural factors that affect all people, certain gender factors also are at work to increase the likelihood that a certain woman, and women as a class, will be poor. There are two major factors unique to women's economic status: women's unequal position in the labor market and women's child care responsibilities.

UNTIL VERY RECENTLY the structures and demands of the American economic system--legitimized, supported, and reinforced by religion, patriarchal families, education, and popular culture--dictated that family and career were mutually exclusive for most women. At the end of the 19th century, more than 95 percent of all married women in the United States stayed at home to do unpaid household work. As late as 1940, only 15 percent of married women were being paid for work outside the home.

But as birth rates declined, mass schooling for children increased, and labor-saving devices in the home became more widely available, more women, including wives and mothers, moved into the labor force. The percentage of women who were wage workers increased from 18.2 percent in 1890 to 45 percent in 1974, and their representation in the labor force increased from 17 percent to 39 percent over the same period.

Yet women did not enter the labor market at the same level as their male counterparts. As a result, jobs--usually considered the best way to get out of poverty--offer no such ticket for women.

In 1870, when very few women were in the labor market, 97.5 percent of all clerical workers were men, and they earned twice as much as blue-collar workers. As women began taking jobs outside the home, several types of occupations became "women's work," and the pay was correspondingly lowered. Today 80 percent of all clerical workers are women, and their median income is $10,435 a year--considerably less than that of most blue-collar workers.

In 1984 almost 50 million women were employed, representing a record 43 percent of the U.S. labor force. More than 53 percent of all women over age 16, and 55 percent of all mothers, work outside the home. But about half of all working women work in occupations that are at least 80 percent female and that usually have lower pay and benefits than predominately male categories. Women earn, on the average, about 60 cents for every dollar a man earns; for minority women the figure falls as low as 54 cents per dollar.

Employers have used varying rationales to justify lower salaries for women. For years employers argued that women worked outside the home only for "pin money" rather than to support their families and, therefore, should not be paid as much as male laborers. Yet studies conducted by the Women's Bureau of the Department of Labor as early as the 1920s and 1930s--when women earned only 43 percent of what men did--found that about 90 percent of all working women were working out of economic necessity.

THE MALE-FEMALE PAY differential has been most commonly explained as a function of differences in skill, education, training, and experience. But a recent study concluded that "about 35-40 percent of the disparity in average earnings is due to sex segregation," which results in lower-paying "women's work." Occupational sex segregation was not created and has not been maintained by women's own career choices; it is due largely to discriminatory barriers such as "social stereotyping," hiring and training practices, and the education system's record of steering women into lower-paying jobs, the study found.

The two-year National Academy of Sciences study, sponsored by the Department of Labor, the Department of Education, and the Carnegie Corporation, found that sex segregation in jobs declined by 10 percent during the 1970s. Researchers attributed much of the change to the feminist movement and the active enforcement of affirmative-action regulations by the U.S. Labor Department and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

However, the Reagan administration has sharply decreased such enforcement, and it has even worked to nullify affirmative-action requirements. As a result, progress toward integrating workplaces has slowed considerably in the 1980s. "Decreases in federal enforcement that have occurred since 1981 and recent changes in the philosophy of enforcement, including reversals of federal civil rights policy in some areas, are likely to negatively affect women's future employment opportunities," the report said.

This current shift of the U.S. economy from manufacturing industries to service and information industries, particularly high technology industries, also has a big--and negative--impact on women's employment and earning opportunities. A 1981 study of the labor market found that 70 percent of all private sector jobs created between 1973 and 1980 were low-paying "women's jobs" in the retail and service industries. In 1982, 80 percent of women were employed in service occupations, and almost 70 percent of them were employed in only 13 low-paying service industries.

A recent study by 9to5, a national association of working women, concluded that women clerical workers are being hit hard by the trend toward automation and high technology. Since 1980 the number of jobs for secretaries, stenographers, and typists has dropped by about 100,000, and the pay decreased by about 1.5 percent. According to 9to5, the main reason is automation, which allows companies to trim the size of their payrolls and consolidate their clerical departments. In addition, "most of the new computer-related occupations are filled by men," the report concluded.

"Many policy makers have been depending on the service sector, of which clerical employment is a significant part, to provide jobs to make up for losses in the manufacturing sector," said Karen Nussbaum, executive director of 9to5. "Clerical workers may become as much victims of the changing economy as the dislocated steel and auto workers we hear so much about."

The U.S. Bureau of Labor predicts that through 1995 both women and men will be most likely to secure jobs as janitors, nurses' aides and orderlies, sales clerks, cashiers, and waitresses. "The effect of the sectoral shift to a 'service economy' is not to expand women's opportunities but to enlarge the ghetto of 'women's jobs,'" the Women's Economic Agenda Working Group concluded. "The impact of high technology is, on the whole, to further reduce economic opportunities and to reinforce the segregation of women in low-paid, low-skilled, clerical, assembly, and service jobs."

Some other statistics about women and work:
- It takes a woman nine days of full-time labor, on the average, to earn what a man makes in five days.
- Sixty percent of all female full-time, year-round workers earn less than $15,000 a year.
- Black mothers who work full time, year-round, have a poverty rate of 13 percent, the same rate as white men who do not work at all.
- Minority women are most likely to work in the lowest paid of all women's jobs and to experience the most extreme poverty of all.
- If wives and female heads of households were paid the same as similarly qualified men, half the families now living in poverty would not be poor.
- Women in labor unions earn more than 30 percent more than non-union members, but only 12 percent of working women are organized, compared to 33 percent of male laborers.
- Only six out of every 100 working women ever make it to management.
- Women with a college education earn less, on the average, than men with only a high school diploma.
- In 1979 the salary for a University of Washington secretary with two years' experience was $847 to $1,085 per month. The starting salary for a university truck driver was $1,168 to $1,289 per month.
- In Wisconsin bakers working for the state earn more than cooks, and upholsterers earn more than seamstresses. Bakers and upholsterers tend to be men, while almost all cooks and seamstresses are women.
- The city of Philadelphia advertised for two positions in 1984: one for a librarian with a degree in library science and two years' experience, and one for a "street light maintenance worker" with no experience. The librarian position paid $16,000; the maintenance worker position paid $18,000.

FEDERAL, STATE, AND city governments complement and reinforce the sexist structures of the private economic systems through their own business and employment practices. Occupational sex segregation and male-female pay differentials are as rampant in government jobs as they are in private-sector companies.

As a first step toward redressing some of the pay inequities suffered by women, government employees in several cities and states have sued their governments to adjust their salaries. These employees argue that workers who perform jobs of equal or near-equal value should be paid a similar wage. Women's jobs often require equal or greater levels of training, skill, and other relevant factors than do male-dominated occupations. But women, because their jobs are perceived as "women's work" and are performed almost entirely by women, are paid less than their male counterparts. These groups argue that women should be paid their "comparable worth."

Comparable worth studies, many of them commissioned by local and state governments, have confirmed the long-held assumption that employers value female employees and women's work less than male employees and the work they do and, consequently, pay women lower wages. The studies compare male-dominated occupations with jobs filled by women, gauging the jobs according to the levels of skill, training, experience, effort, and responsibility required. Points are allocated for each job factor and then tallied to give a total job score. A 1983 Illinois study found that nurses scored more than 200 points higher than electricians, but they earned $722 a month less.

Despite opposition from the federal government, comparable worth proponents have achieved limited success on the state and local levels. Idaho, Iowa, Minnesota, New Mexico, South Dakota, Washington, and Wisconsin have revised their pay scales to reflect comparable worth, as have the cities of Los Angeles, Chicago, Colorado Springs, and San Jose.

THE LOW-PAYING jobs and occupational discrimination women face in the labor market mean greater poverty in the home, especially in homes where no adult male is present. Women have always had the primary responsibility for raising children, but as more and more women are forced to raise their children alone, the impoverishment of women and children increases proportionately.

The number of one-parent families has doubled since 1970, increasing from 13 percent to 26 percent--more than one-quarter of all families with children under 18. Here again the problem is even more acute for minority families. Among white families the proportion of one-parent families has increased from 10 percent to 20 percent since 1970; for black families the increase was from 36 percent to 56 percent. But, even though nine-tenths of those families are headed by women, the statistics that focus strictly on female-headed families are even more staggering. The percentage of families headed by women has increased 84 percent since 1970.

There is no widely accepted explanation for the dramatic increase in single-parent families. But changing societal attitudes about sexuality and marriage certainly account for some of the shift. As premarital sex has become more and more widely accepted and as many couples have chosen to delay or reject marriage, the number of children born to unwed mothers has skyrocketed. In 1982 more than 55 percent of all black children were born to single mothers. And while ideas about sexual morality have changed, the perception of gender roles has not.

As a result, men now have new opportunities to avoid responsibility for supporting their children--leaving women to bear the load alone. Divorce and the high unemployment rate for young black men also play a role in the increase of single-parent families.

The welfare system also has been a factor. Until the 1960s families headed by men were automatically ineligible to receive Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) payments. Even now 29 states still refuse to make welfare or Medicaid payments available to two-parent families, no matter how poor. The inevitable result of such policies is to break up such families or discourage marriage between parents caught in poverty.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, of the 7.6 million women heads of families, 3.2 million are divorced, 2.1 million have never been married, 1.8 million are married but the husband is absent, and about half a million are widowed. Whatever the reasons for the astounding increase in female-headed families, the impact on women and their children has been devastating. While the poverty rate for the general population is 14.4 percent, 40 percent of all families headed by white women are poor, and the poverty rate for families headed by black women is 60 percent.

The increasing number of female-headed families and single-parent births also are major reasons for the increasing poverty of children; 22.2 percent of all children in the United States, almost one out of every four, was poor in 1983. A recent congressional study reported that nearly half of all poor children live in female-headed, one-parent families, and "for children in black, single, female-headed families where the mother is under 30 and did not complete high school, the poverty rate is 92.8 percent."

The poverty of women and the poverty of children are intimately related. As mothers become poor, the children are likely to become poor as well. And as the federal government cuts public assistance programs that benefit children, women are forced to try to support their children with little or no help from the government or the children's fathers. Yet the salaries earned by most women simply do not provide enough income.

EVEN IN THE very brightest moments of the history of the U.S. government, its welfare policies have been designed to treat only the symptoms of poverty rather than to address the systemic causes of widespread poverty. Rather than compensating for the racist and sexist injustices of the nation's economic system, government policy reinforces, maintains, strengthens, and, in many cases, encourages the injustices. But current U.S. government policy fails even to adequately compensate the victims of such systemic inequities, much less to attack the root causes of poverty. Current government policy blames the victims while reinforcing the injustices. The government's response to the increasing poverty of women has been no different.

The same Reagan administration that is attempting--and has, so far, achieved some success--to reverse civil rights legislation and affirmative-action policies, also is reducing social services for persons who cannot find jobs or who do not earn enough money from their jobs to support themselves and their families. While the number of female-headed families is increasing and the burden on mothers to support their children is greater than ever, the Reagan administration has slashed the school lunch, AFDC, and other programs that benefit children.

Federal spending programs to aid poor Americans--62 percent of whom are women--has decreased 16 percent in the last four years. Military spending, meanwhile, has increased by 38.5 percent. This shift of public resources represents a net transfer of roughly $30 billion a year from the poor to the Pentagon.

These governmental policies, like sexist and racist practices in the private sector, have a disproportionate impact on women. With each $1 billion increase in military spending and decrease in social spending, an estimated 9,500 women lose their jobs in social welfare programs and the private sector.

In the past, government welfare programs managed both to assuage liberal consciences and to keep the lid on poverty. Public assistance programs regulated the poor, giving them just enough to keep them relatively quiet. However, as the poverty levels increase and welfare programs decrease, the social order that has allowed the unjust structures to continue functioning will begin to disintegrate. The Thanksgiving Action on Poverty group, reporting on increasing poverty levels, acknowledged that "private charity is not enough, either to deal with poverty or to alleviate the economic stress of which poverty is the most extreme evidence. At stake is nothing less than the fiber of our society and the future of our nation...." Public charity, the government's assistance programs, is not enough either.

In their traditional roles as wives and mothers, women have provided the emotional, logistical, and physical sustenance, support, and stability that have often proved to be the very foundation of our society. Though they have often been relegated to menial positions or excluded from participation altogether, women have provided the labor and support most essential and intrinsic to the survival of the workplace, places of worship, and other social institutions.

Because women have offered our society so much, their poverty affects all of us. As increasing numbers of women become poor, society as a whole will suffer. Cracks already can be seen in our societal foundation; there are small rips in the social fabric. The increasing impoverishment of women must be arrested and reversed for women themselves, for their children, and for all of us.

Vicki Kemper was new editor of Sojourners when this article appeared.