Three Essays on Women, Low-wage Work, and Economic Well-being.

Abstract

Many changes during the last fifteen years have affected the well-being of low-income, single mothers living in the United States. The 1996 welfare reform law overhauled the nation’s cash welfare program. Under the new law, poor single mothers work in exchange for benefits or face termination of cash assistance., although going to work often renders a family ineligible for benefits. Due to welfare reform and other policy changes, poor single mothers are now more likely to work and derive a greater share of their income from the market than from public assistance. Also, changes in the financial sector opened up access to credit for lower-income individuals, who previously had been deemed too high-risk to receive this financial product. The essays in this dissertation use qualitative interview data to explore how single mothers make sense of their financial, employment, and family situations, given these policy changes. The first essay documents that lower-income women use debt as a way to manage their expenses rather than as a means to increase consumption. Women develop strategies to maintain their debt since they have no other options for economic support. The second essay focuses on challenges to the development of a worker identity for single mothers employed in low-wage jobs. Using the framework of symbolic interactionism, this essay demonstrates that the structure of women’s workplaces do not provide them with opportunities to display the identity of “worker” since they are often working alone or segregated from co-workers. Instead, it is during interactions with the public assistance system that women engage in “identity work,” asserting the role of worker. However, their presence as benefit claimants and the unequal relationship with welfare caseworkers makes this claim tenuous and one that is not necessarily recognized externally. The final essay highlights the work-family challenges low-income single mothers face and the strategies they use to manage those challenges. Using a life course framework, the essay shows that while single mothers make decisions to forgo opportunities to advance in the labor market, many plan to start their “careers” once their children are grown.