What Is A Man What Is A Women
...being able to provide for a child, struggling every day just to survive. Poverty not only affects adults, but children as well. When we think of poverty in America what image comes to mind? An old rundown shack in southern Alabama? Or a rat infested tenement house in New York City? The United States defines poverty for a family of four as being less than $16,036 per year, or $4,009 per person (Leone 2000:12). People find themselves under this line for an innumerable amount of reasons. Poverty in America varies by age, race, region and family composition.
Oscar Lewis introduced the "culture of poverty" while studying poor families in Mexico and Puerto Rican families in San Juan and New York. "The theory maintains that culturally based attitudes or predisposition such as present-mindedness and obsessive-consumption is the major barriers to economic mobility for many of the poor."
(Lewis 19 :1965). Lewis and others agree that poor people in such societies display certain characteristics and values that are not held by non-poor in those same societies.
"These characteristics are the absence of childhood as a specially prolonged and protected state in the life-cycle, early initiation into sex, free unions or consensual marriages, a relatively high incidents of abandonment of wives and children, a tend toward female or mother centered families, a strong predisposition toward authoritarianism, lack of privacy, verbal emphasis upon family solidarity which is only rarely achieved because of sibling rivalry, and competition for limited goods and material affection."(Lewis 1965)
The official rate of poverty for children aged 0-17 is much higher than for other age groups. In 1998 the child poverty rate was 13.5 million children "Children under the age of six with single mothers are much more likely to be poor than those living with two parents" (Kozol 52). Women...
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