The Feminization Of Poverty Essays - Feminist Economics,

The Feminization Of Poverty The Origins of the Feminization of Poverty The United Nations Development Fund for Women reports that women are still the poorest of the world's poor, representing 70% of the 1.3 billion people who live in absolute poverty. They also estimate that nearly 900 million women in the world have incomes of less than $1 a day. In the United States alone, women are about 50 percent more likely to be poor than men. The feminization of poverty in America has steadily increased since the 1950's. Researchers have investigated the reasons for this increase, citing everything from teenage pregnancy to the rise in ?deadbeat dads.? Over the last thirty-five years there have been several trends in our society that have contributed to the feminization of poverty. In 1978, Diana Pearce published a paper citing that poverty in America was becoming more and more ?feminized.? She cited that almost two-thirds of the poor over the age of 16 were women. Pearce also claimed that even though there were more women entering the labor force between 1950 and the mid-1970's, women's economic status had declined. She argued that the blame for this feminization of poverty belonged to the government because of their lack of support for divorced and single women. She argued, ?for many the price of that independence has been their pauperization and dependence on welfare? (McLanahan 1). Further examination of the issue has shown that various changes in the family have contributed to the feminization of poverty. The last thirty years has seen a steady increase in the amount of children born outside of wedlock. In 1960, about six percent of all births were to unmarried couples whereas by 1996 over a third fell into this category (McLanahan 5). This influx of births to single mothers has weighed greatly on women in poverty. The statistics of children born to unmarried black couples is even more dramatic increasing from 22% in 1960 to 70% in 1996 (McLanahan 5). Most women in the lowest quintile of the population have come from generations of poverty before them and their only hope of survival is to get on their own and try to get education or job training. With the birth of children, these impoverished women now have two or three dependents to support and the cycle of poverty continues. Most of these women do not have families to support them and they are left with only one option ? government support. This has contributed a great deal to the rise of single mother households. Another contribution to the rise in female-headed households has been the increase in divorces. Sarah McLanahan, a researcher at Princeton University, noted that in 1950, ?most people remained married until they or their spouses died, but today over half of all couples end their marriages voluntarily. The divorce rate ? the number of divorces each year per 1,000 married women ? rose steadily during the first half of the twentieth century and increased dramatically after 1960. Over half of all marriages contracted in the mid-1980's were projected to end in divorce.? After the marriages are ended the custody of the children almost always goes to the mother. Now the mother becomes the single provider in her family, facing a job that pays far less than the job her male counterparts have, and on top of that her needs are greater because she has custody of their children. Karen Holden and Pamela Smock noted the problems women face after their marriages have ended: ?Women's post-dissolution economic hardship is due to multiple interrelated factors, often only superficially coupled with the marital dissolution event. In particular, the division of labor during marriage, lower wages paid to women both during and after marriage, and the lack of adequate post-dissolution transfers to women imply that unless changes in women's work roles are mirrored by social policy initiatives and men's assumption of equal responsibility for children (both within and out of marriage), economic prospects for previously married women will remain poor (Holden 52).? As single mothers, these women are thrown into unfamiliar territory, and the outcome has been a greater amount of women below the poverty threshold. With this rise in female-headed households below the poverty line has

Settlement Patterns - Studying Societys Evolution

Settlement Patterns - Studying Societys Evolution In the scientific field of archaeology, the term settlement pattern refers to the evidence within a given region of the physical remnants of communities and networks. That evidence is used to interpret the way interdependent local groups of people interacted in the past. People have lived and interacted together for a very long time, and settlement patterns have been identified dating back to as long as humans have been on our planet. Settlement pattern as a concept was developed by social geographers in the late 19th century. The term referred then to how people live across a given landscape, in particular, what resources (water, arable land, transportation networks) they chose to live by and how they connected with one another: and the term is still a current study in geography of all flavors. Anthropological Underpinnings According to archaeologist Jeffrey Parsons, settlement patterns in anthropology began with the late 19th-century work of anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan who was interested in how modern Pueblo societies were organized. Julian Steward published his first work on aboriginal social organization in the American southwest in the 1930s: but the idea was first extensively used by archaeologists Phillip Phillips, James A. Ford and James B. Griffin in the Mississippi Valley of the United States during World War II, and by Gordon Willey in the Viru Valley of Peru in the first decades after the war. What led to that was the implementation of regional surface survey, also called pedestrian survey, archaeological studies not focused on a single site, but rather on an extensive area. Being able to systematically identify all the sites within a given region means archaeologists can look at not just how people lived at any one time, but rather how that pattern changed through time. Conducting regional survey means you can investigate the evolution of communities, and thats what archaeological settlement pattern studies do today. Patterns Versus Systems Archaeologists refer to both settlement pattern studies and settlement system studies, sometimes interchangeably. If there is a difference, and you could argue about that, it might be that pattern studies look at the observable distribution of sites, while system studies look at how the people living at those sites interacted: modern archaeology cant really do one with the other, but if youd like to follow through, see the discussion in Drennan 2008 for more information about the historical differentiation. History of Settlement Pattern Studies Settlement pattern studies were first conducted using regional survey, in which archaeologists systematically walked over hectares and hectares of land, typically within a given river valley. But the analysis only truly became feasible after remote sensing was developed, beginning with photographic methods such as those used by Pierre Paris at Oc Eo but now, of course, using satellite imagery. Modern settlement pattern studies combine with satellite imagery, background research, surface survey, sampling, testing, artifact analysis, radiocarbon and other dating techniques. And, as you might imagine, after decades of research and advances in technology, one of the challenges of settlement patterns studies has a very modern ring to it: big data. Now that GPS units and artifact and environmental analysis are all intertwined, how to do you analyze the huge amounts of data that are collected? By the end of the 1950s, regional studies had been performed in Mexico, the United States, Europe, and Mesopotamia; but they have since expanded throughout the world. Sources Balkansky AK. 2008. Settlement pattern analysis. In: Pearsall DM, editor. Encyclopedia of Archaeology. New York: Academic Press. p 1978-1980. doi: 10.1016/B978-012373962-9.00293-4 Drennan RD. 2008. Settlement system analysis. In: Pearsall DM, editor. Encyclopedia of Archaeology. New York: Academic Press. p 1980-1982. 10.1016/B978-012373962-9.00280-6 Kowalewski SA. 2008. Regional Settlement Pattern Studies. Journal of Archaeological Research 16:225–285. Parsons JR. 1972. Archaeological settlement patterns. Annual Review of Anthropology 1:127-150.