Abstract
Karen grew up in inner city Philadelphia. She started seeing Bill, a 20 year-old handyman, when she was 16 and soon became pregnant. Karen dropped out of high school during her third trimester, and moved in with Bill. Karen and Bill lived together for about a year and a half before they broke up. Karen now lives at home in a small apartment with her mother and her young daughter, Alexis. Karen hopes to earn her GED 1 day, but for the time being, she is busy raising Alexis and looking for a job with decent pay. Felicia grew up in Winnetka, Illinois, a northern suburb of Chicago. She received a Bachelor’s Degree from Wesleyan University and then went on to earn an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Felicia then moved to New York City to take a position as an investment banker for a large firm in the financial industry.
Contributed by Christine A. Bachrach, Pamela Smock, and Lynette Hoelter.
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Notes
- 1.
Throughout the paper, we focus primarily on the distinction between marital and nonmarital childbearing. Increasingly, nonmarital childbearing occurs within cohabitation (Raley, 2001). Although cohabitation has increased among couples of all classes, childbearing within cohabitation is higher among LC women (Manning, 2001).
- 2.
We use the term family formation to reference both union formation (e.g., marriage) and childbearing.
- 3.
Race/ethnicity and social class both interact and have independent effects. As to the former, Blacks and several subgroups of Hispanics are economically disadvantaged compared to Whites, making it sometimes difficult to disentangle race/ethnicity from social class. Among married-couple families, for example, the percentage living under the poverty threshold is 14% for Hispanics, 8% for Blacks, and just 3% for non-Hispanic Whites. For mother-only families the analogous figures are 43, 42, and 26% (Proctor & Dalaker, 2001). Evidence of independent effects includes the finding that more highly educated individuals in all racial and ethnic groups are more likely to marry and to stay married (Goldstein & Kenney, 2001; Martin, 2006), but that Blacks of all social classes are less likely to do so than Whites. One study examines the marriage intentions of White, Black, and Hispanic cohabiting women. It finds that Black cohabiting women are less likely than White or Hispanic women to expect to marry their partners, even after controlling for the education of both the women and their partners, and their partners’ incomes (Manning & Smock, 2002). A general observation about the body of research on race/ethnicity and family patterns is that it has been unable to “explain away” racial and ethnic differences even when controlling for a host of independent variables.
- 4.
The metaphor of a societal ecosystem is a useful one. The elements of an ecosystem in nature can be large or small—ranging from a climatic zone to a small ant colony. The elements of the ecosystem are interdependent, and over time they collaborate in supporting the status quo and compete for the ability to change it. The actions of individual plants and animals are critical to affecting the dynamics of the system as a whole.
- 5.
Some scholars point to the close interrelationships among indicators of socioeconomic status and argue that social locations form meaningful categories such as poor, working class, lower middle class, middle class, upper middle class and so on (Lareau, 2003). Others contend that the concept of discrete social classes is not meaningful in socioeconomically fluid societies, and that continuous measures of income, education, or the “SEI” (i.e., a measure composed of income, education, and occupational prestige) better capture the location of an individual or family in the hierarchy. The debate on categorical versus continuous measures is longstanding (e.g., Grusky & Sørensen, 1998; Hout & DiPrete, 2006; Weeden & Grusky, 2005). Because our aim in this chapter is to contrast individuals and families with different relative social locations, we adopt an agnostic stance with respect to this debate.
- 6.
We rely on mother’s education to tap social class for some measures of family formation given the endogeneity of schooling and family formation decisions (e.g., Brien, Lillard, & Waite, 1999; Upchurch, Lillard, & Panis, 2002). We use less than high school given temporal trends in educational attainment; when using mother’s education as an indicator of class, we believe not finishing high school better taps low social class.
- 7.
We organize our discussion around structures that are defined in terms of life domains, especially work and family. One can also conceptualize structures in terms of locations in social space—e.g., sex, race and ethnic group membership, and socioeconomic status. One might also conceptualize the relevant structures as “class structures”, but we believe it is most appropriate to place the central focus on essential life domains and explore how they vary over social space rather than taking the opposite approach.
- 8.
The concept of a job as a “calling” demanding single-minded allegiance reflects traditional sex roles that assigned bread-winning responsibilities exclusively to men. Women have adopted the schema while at the same time developing competing schemas for “work-family balance.”
- 9.
Among those UMC women unable to conceive, adoption and assisted reproductive technologies provide alternative pathways to parenthood.
- 10.
This is a speculative claim. Access to information may vary across class lines either because of differentials in the actual availability of abortion services or differences in the extent to which information about abortion is shared within social networks or viewed as accessible through electronic media or other sources. However, existing evidence sheds little light on such differences.
- 11.
The relationship between parental or own education and the likelihood of resolving a premarital pregnancy through abortion does not likely to be an artifact of differential underreporting of abortions in surveys, since studies that use vital and medical records to assess pregnancy outcomes (e.g., Udry et al., 1996; Liu, 1995; Powell-Griner & Trent, 1987) report the same robust relationships as those relying on survey data.
- 12.
This may reflect social desirability bias, or the desire on the part of UMC women to portray themselves as tolerant of a behavior common in other groups. It may also reflect a different schema of nonmarital childbearing—i.e. one embodied in television character Murphy Brown’s decision to have a child as a well-off career woman—from than held by LC women.
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Johnson-Hanks, J.A., Bachrach, C.A., Morgan, S.P., Kohler, HP. (2011). Social Class and the Timing and Context of Childbearing. In: Understanding Family Change and Variation. Understanding Population Trends and Processes, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1945-3_4
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