Feminization of Poverty Only in America?

The authors show convincingly that the feminization of poverty, although most advanced in America, is an international trend. By examining the same set of factors in seven countries, they unravel the reasons why. Their special contribution is the integration of developments in each country's labor market with gender, social policy, and inequality. Lucid, careful, and systematic, the book builds a compelling explanation for the needless impoverishment experienced by millions of American women and offers a sensible, realistic agenda for its reduction. Michael B. Katz, Stanley I. Sheerr Professor of History, Director, Urban Studies Program, University of Pennsylvania . . . comprehensive and carefully organized . . . these studies reveal large differences in the circumstances of women in different countries, and help to illuminate the several developments in the labor market, the family and public policy which explains the extreme 'feminization of poverty' in the United States. Frances Fox Piven, Graduate School, City University of New York This study asks whether the feminization of poverty, the tendency of women and their families to become the majority of the poor, is unique to the United States, where the phenomenon was first discovered. Seven industrialized nations, both capitalist and socialist, with different degrees of commitment to social welfare are compared: Canada, Japan, France, Sweden, Poland, the Soviet Union, and the United States. In each of the countries the authors analyze information about women, labor market conditions, equalization policies, social welfare programs, and demographic variables such as the rates of divorce and single parenthood. According to Goldberg and Kremen, it is possible to predict the feminization of poverty when three conditions are present: 1) insufficient efforts to reduce work place and wage inequities for women; 2) the absence or ineffectiveness of social welfare programs which can redress the cost, both economic and personal, of the dual role that women have assumed in industrialized societies; and 3) the presence of increasing rates of divorce and single motherhood. An array of labor market and social welfare programs in use in the six other industrialized nations are then reviewed by the authors for possible adaptation in the United States. This important work will be a valuable resource for scholars across the academic and professional disciplines of political science, sociology, economics, social work, and women's studies.Kremen, Eleanor is the author of 'Feminization of Poverty Only in America?' with ISBN 9780275936914 and ISBN 0275936910.