Women & Poverty in the U.S.

Both the political conservatives and the political liberals have foused on the feminization of poverty in the United States, although with different perspectives and recommendations for changing the situations. The conservatives have blamed both feminism and the welfare state for the increased incidence of female-headed households living in poverty, while liberals have pointed to discrimination as a major issue. All, agree, however, that the problem has been increasing over the past two decades and that more children live in poverty now than lived in poverty in the 1970s.

According to Mayra Buvinic (1997), the problem is even more widespread. She termed the feminization of poverty a global trend, rather than just a trend in the United States or the industrialized nations. As she noted, women are traditionally found to be more impoverished than men. Current trends indicate, moreover, that women actually account for a growing proportion of people considered poor based on specific income standards. Thus, in relationship to men, women's economic position is declining worldwide. In addition, Buvinic (1997) noted, women seem to be disproportionately represented among those who are calculated as poor based on indices of well-being. According to the UN Development Programme in their 1996 Human Development Report, 37 percent of people in developing countries lacked at least three essentials of well-being, while only 21 perc

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o a society's understanding of itself. Structural functionalism focuses on the way in which human structures and organizations are functional for that society. It looks at the way in which society is constructed and how that works to maintain order and the status quo within the society. A structural functionalist approach would look at the function that the poverty of women and children serves. Is there a purpose to that which would serve the needs of the society as a whole as it is presently constituted? There are several ways of thinking about this. For example, social cohesion can be served by having specific categories of people in the society and assigning specific status and meaning to those categories. Thus, poor women, or welfare mothers, are lumped together and generally stigmatized in several ways. They are seen as unfit, immoral, lazy, and ignorant, among other things, rather than as suffering from the exigencies of an unequal society (Sidel, 1996). How does this serve the purpose of the society as a whole? There are three major ways in which this is useful in ensuring social stability and shoring up the status quo. First, it makes people fearful of entering that stigmatized category. Women in particular m
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Approximate Word count = 2643
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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