Don't Call Us Out of Name: The Untold Lives of Women and Girls in Poor America

Rating:
Summary: Like a gripping novel but a must-read for policy makers.
Review: Those of us comfortable in our suburban sprawl, our urban chic, our corporate climbs, and our hard work and diligence think that getting off welfare is as simple as getting a job--any job. Those of us born and bred on one side or the other of middle-class America look suspiciously at "welfare mothers" and believe that they have more babies for bigger checks. That they are lazy, dysfunctional drug addicts. That they lounge in the lap of luxury, compliments of our hard earned tax dollars. The middle-class, hard work ethic says that anyone can do as we do--work and prosper--and anyone who doesn't is a low-life.

Lisa Dodson, in Don't Call Us Out of Name: The Untold Lives of Women and Girls in Poor America, shows us an entirely different picture.

Over eight years of interviews, surveys, observations, and focus groups with women of many racial and ethnic backgrounds in the Boston area culminates in this frequently heart-wrenching account of what it's really like on the other side. On page after page and in their own words, Dodson allows hundreds of "savvy, complex, and challenging" women to come forth and tell their stories for themselves.

Contrary to the notion that poverty reflects character defects, Dodson stresses that these women uphold a tradition of family values and perform meaningful family care work that is neither paid nor recognized. They have grown up "deprived of basic material support in the midst of great national wealth," and that deprivation dictates not only a chaotic lifestyle, but it also generates a host of inherent challenges and difficulties. These women have not chosen a subsistence-level life of monthly welfare checks and food stamps because they like it; far too often, few choices are available and rising up is next to impossible.

So many of us--individuals, social workers, policy-makers--accuse poor women of irresponsible motherhood. We deplore the many unwed, teen-aged mothers that seem to come overwhelmingly from the ranks of poor America and who, too often, end up on welfare like their mothers before them. Why don't they wait for motherhood? But these young women say "Wait for what? What is coming anyway?" Dodson maintains that motherhood is the next logical step for these young women "who have no access to college, career ladders, and other entries into the dominant society."

Dodson explains that a key element and the primary fuel for the ongoing cycle of poverty among women is what she calls "daughters' work." While their middle-class peers develop skills and identities through school achievements, extra-curricular activities, team sports, and hobbies, many poor girls spend their developmental years "providing child care, performing house chores, and trying to help with troubles and instabilities faced by their parents." Among the women and girls she studied, Dodson reports that "the time girls provided for housework and child care ranged between sixteen and twenty hours each week." Instead of preparing for a career, developing an identity, and envisioning a dream, these girls "do very much the same work in their families as their mother's generation did before them." Their lives are filled not with schoolwork, friends, and socialization for middle class roles but with training for motherhood. Why, then, should they not do what they have been taught?

Clearly empathetic yet factual, Dodson lets these women tell their stories of stark reality as they struggle to raise families in conditions that are unthinkable to many of us. These women need more than an ultimatum of "get to work." They already are working and have been for years; now they need directions on a new road that is littered with "little erosions which finally wear you down into someone you don't want to be." As they turn their lives around, they need help with their situations of "chronic exhaustion . . . no car, no warm coats, no baby clothes, no functioning laundry in the building, no elevator and many stairs, no heat sometimes, no Pampers, no tampons, of long lines at clinics, and of being able to go only to stores that accept food stamps, and, above all, of having no one to 'offer a kind word.'"

Dodson concludes that the success of welfare reform will rely on "the degree to which these millions of girls in poor America can imagine another life." And that success will depend upon "a changed practice in the building of American public policy," one that acknowledges that "the people who will live with the policy consequences must be at the table."

Don't Call Us Out of Name reads much like a gripping novel, yet it belongs on every policy-maker's shelf. While it is a well-documented, carefully researched study, Dodson avoids highly technical or overinflated language, and it is therefore accessible to most readers. Most effective are the many exact quotes from the women who are the characters in this real life drama that is currently in the spotlight of public debate: their passion, their spirit, and their indomitable courage echo on every page of this most timely and necessary book.

Rating:
Summary: Eye Opening
Review: Very eye-opening to the problems that many people face on a daily basis. The stories in this book dispell many of the myths about women on welfare, and tells of the obstacles that these women face while trying to achieve a life off of welfare.