Edin, Kathryn 1962-

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EDIN, Kathryn 1962-

PERSONAL: Born 1962; father ran a group of technical schools, mother an artist; married; husband's name, Nelson (a sociologist); children: Kaitlin, Marisa. Education: North Park College, B.A., 1984; Northwestern University, M.A., 1989, Ph.D., 1991.

ADDRESSES: Office—Sociology Department, University of Pennsylvania, 243 McNeil Bldg., 3718 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, PA 19194-6299. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Russell Sage Foundation, New York, NY, visiting scholar, 1992–93; Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, assistant professor of sociology, 1993–97; University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, began as assistant professor, became associate professor of sociology, 1997–2000, 2004—Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, associate professor of sociology, 2000–04.

AWARDS, HONORS: Grants and fellowships from numerous organizations, including Russell Sage Foundation, Ford Foundation, and MacArthur Foundation.

WRITINGS:

NONFICTION

There's a Lot of Month Left at the End of the Money: How Welfare Recipients Make Ends Meet in Chicago, Garland Publishing (New York, NY), 1993.

(With Laura Lein) Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work, Russell Sage Foundation (New York, NY), 1997.

(With Kathleen Mullan Harris and Gary Sandefur) Welfare to Work: Opportunities and Pitfalls: Congressional Seminar, March 10, 1997, Spivack Program in Applied Social Research and Social Policy, American Sociological Association (Washington, DC), 1998.

Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 2005.

Contributor to periodicals, including Journal of Marriage and the Family, Family Relations, and Social Problems. Member of editorial board, Social Politics, 1999–, and American Journal of Sociology, 2000–2003.

SIDELIGHTS: Kathryn Edin is a sociologist who specializes in studying families who receive welfare or other financial assistance from the government. She began her work in graduate school, when she was hired to help sociologist Christopher Jencks with his interviews of mothers who were raising children on public assistance. Edin and Jencks were perplexed by the fact that the average welfare check was ap-proximately 370 dollars per month, which at the time was about the cost of a month's rent in most cities. They wanted to investigate the strategies families used to survive when they so clearly did not have enough money to pay for the essentials. Edin found her research so absorbing that it became her life's work.

Much of what Edin's research has revealed is put forth in her book Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work, which she wrote with Laura Lein. Her findings dispute the image of the "welfare queen," a term used most infamously by former U.S. president Ronald Reagan to describe someone who defrauds the government while taking financial assistance and living in grand style. The authors used interviews with 379 families headed by a single mother in order to obtain data for their book. Edin did find that fraud is widespread, but also notes that it would be quite impossible to live on welfare payments alone. Fraud is not used as a means to get rich, but merely as a tactic to survive. She found virtually no subjects who had never held a job; most wanted to work, and did try to take jobs available to them. Yet taking a job automatically reduces or eliminates the money from assistance checks, and causes the family's Medicaid health insurance to be cancelled. Furthermore, most of those jobs paid so little that by the time the women met the expenses of child care, clothing suitable for work, and transportation, they were financially in more desperate straits than before, in addition to being uninsured. Those women who were able to keep a job usually could only do so because they had financial or practical help from other family members. The one woman in this study who relied on welfare alone lived a life of such hardship and frugality that her neighbors considered reporting her for child neglect.

Strategies used to help make ends meet included failing to report income from working and getting covert assistance from boyfriends and family members. While some women did use their welfare funds to purchase items that were not strictly necessary, this accounted for a very small portion of the funds tracked, and Edin also found many mothers who went without food for themselves in order to save enough money to purchase needed clothing for their children. Reviewer Stacey Oliker, writing in Signs, called Making Ends Meet "a powerful portrait of low-income single motherhood." Jane Waldfogel, reviewing the book for the Industrial and Labor Relations Review, called it an "immensely valuable book. It offers a chance—all too rare—to listen to the voices of welfare recipients and low-income working women. The stories they have to tell, and the authors' scrupulous accounting of their incomes and expenditures, make this book a terrific read and one that has much to teach students and scholars alike."

In Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage, written with Maria Kefalas, Edin explores the question of why low-income women who become pregnant out of wedlock choose to raise their children alone rather than give them up for adoption, or terminate their pregnancies. They focus on four particular women who relate their stories and their feelings that their children have added great meaning to their lives, despite the difficulties involved in raising them. Suzanne W. Wood, a reviewer for Library Journal, called Promises I Can Keep a "thought-provoking" work.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Journal of Sociology, March, 1998, Frances Fox Piven, review of Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work, p. 1461.

Houston Chronicle, August 3, 1997, Polly Ross Hughes, review of Making Ends Meet, p. 1.

Industrial and Labor Relations Review, April, 1998, Jane Waldfogel, review of Making Ends Meet, p. 529.

Library Journal, May 1, 1997, Mary Jane Brustman, review of Making Ends Meet, p. 127; February 1, 2005, Suzanne W. Wood, review of Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage, p. 105.

New York Times Book Review, May 4, 1997, Susan Jacoby, review of Making Ends Meet, pp. 10, 12.

New York Times Magazine, April 27, 1997, Jason DeParle, "Learning Poverty Firsthand," p. 32.

Signs, summer, 1998, Stacey Oliker, review of Making Ends Meet, p. 1086.

Women's Review of Books, September, 1997, Ruth Sidel, review of Making Ends Meet, p. 27.