Originally Published in _Humanity and Society_, 1987, Vol. 11, No. 4 (November: 420-439). Reprinted with permission.

Reflexive Statement

The CBS special on the black family avoided a structural analysis of the determinants of female headed household and teen age pregnancies. Such avoidance is typical of cultural explanations of poverty as well as of voluntaristic analysis of patriarchy or racism. Taking as a methodological guideline the idea that (to paraphrase Marx) we all make history but under circumstances not chosen by ourselves, I decided to write this essay exploring the conditions leading to the proliferation of such households. I strongly believe that, while it is important to struggle against racism and sexism, it is also important to acknowledge that the most pressing problems now facing the poorest layers of the U.S. working class, particularly the non-white layers, are rooted in the socioeconomic organization itself. To the extent policy objectives are limited to affirmative action, or to facilitate the incorporation of women into the labor force, the important role of male employment in family formation and stability is neglected. More effective policy objectives have to address the effects of structural economic change on the employment possibilities of millions of men and women, and the short and long term social costs of keeping a substantial proportion of the population outside the mainstream of American society.

Introduction

This essay is the result of long term concern with the theoretical analysis of the determinants of sexual inequality, and of my reaction to a Bill Moyers CBS documentary, "The Vanishing Black Family: Crisis in Black America." I will describe the documentary and interpret its content using sociological, socialist and Marxist feminist theories, with the purpose of developing not only a theoretical analysis of the phenomena it portrayed, but also a set of possible policy recommendations.

The notion that the Black family is "vanishing" refers to the growing proportion of female headed families among Blacks. Prior to describing the documentary, I will present data about the issues it intended to portray. In 1984, 20% of all us families were headed by a woman (up from 9.4% in 1959); 52% of them were headed by Black women while White and Spanish origin percentages were, respectively, 16% and 25% respectively (Rodgers Jr., 1986:5). While about half of all the poor lived in female headed households in 1984, 68% of the Black poor lived in female headed households. The number of poor living in White and Black female headed households (WFHHS and BFHHs) increased 34% and 122%, respectively, between 1959 and 1984. On the other hand the poverty rate for White and Black female headed families (WFHFs and BFHFs) has remained relatively stable; it averaged 27.6% for WFHFs between 1970 and 1984 and 56% for BFHFs between 1966 and 1984. In 1984, the poverty rate for BFHHs was 52.9% (27.1% for WFHHs) and for BFHFs it was 54.6% (29.7% for WFHFs). The number of BFHHs increased from 947,000 in 1959 to 2,964 million in 1984; over 50% of them, 1,553 million, were poor in 1984 (Rodgers, Jr., 1986: 17-27).

Increases in the numbers of female headed families and the prevalence of poverty among them entails increases in the poverty of children. In 1984 there were almost 13 million poor children in the US; 62.5% White and 33.5% Black. The poverty rate for all children was 21%; 16.1% for White and 33.4% for Black children. Poverty rates are higher for poor children living in female headed families ; the number of poor children in female headed families rose from 4,145 million in 1959 to 6,772 million in 1984; in 1959 these children were only 24.1% of all poor children but their poverty rate was 72.2%, whereas in 1984 they were 52% of all poor children with a poverty rate of 54%. In 1959, 21.2% of White and 29.4% of Black poor children lived in female headed families; their poverty rates were, respectively, 64% and 81.6%. In 1984, 41% of White and 74.8% of Black poor children lived in female headed families while their poverty rates were 45.9% and 66% respectively. The number of poor White children living in female headed families increased by 39% since 1959 (from 2,420 to 3,377 millions) while the number of their Black counterparts increased by 119% during the same time period (from 1,475 to 3,234 millions (Rodgers, Jr., 1986: 29-33).

Linked to the increase in female headed households is the increase in teenage pregnancies and the number of single mothers. An examination of data on the reproductive behavior of young women yields the following results: in 1983, among white married women 20 years of age and younger, the abortion rate was 30/1000 and the access to the material conditions of physical and social reproduction is contingent on their kinship support network, their own employment, or their relationship with an employed male. When those sources are unavailable, there is welfare. Feminists have been very critical of the problems inherent in family relations and their critique has been very useful to identify sources of conflict and aspects that need to be changed. On the other hand, they have neglected the, positive dimensions of family life and its economic and psychological importance for the vast majority of women. In this essay I am not suggesting that families are problem free and that all would be well if only all men had jobs and could support their wives and children. I am simply indicating that the family has an economic base, and that the extraordinary growth in BFHFs is an indicator of the dire economic conditions in which a vast proportion of the Black population live.

Women and children can benefit from the relationship with men, as husbands/partners and fathers, in so far as the relationship is based upon stable material conditions; i.e., well paid, steady employment. When access to such conditions is precarious or totally unavailable, working class men and women--regardless of race--must barely survive under the restrictive conditions imposed by the welfare state. It must be remembered that the relationship between unemployment, teenage pregnancy and growth in the numbers of families headed by women also obtains among whites. As a PBS FRONTLINE documentary, "Growing up Poor," showed, white teenagers growing up in poverty are also having babies. Among white married women 20 years of age and younger, the abortion rate was 30/1000 and the abortion ratio was 5/100. Among unmarried white women of the same age, the abortion rate was 40/1000 and the abortion ratio 66/100. 1 Among non-white married women of the same age group, the abortion rate and the abortion ratio were more than two times higher: 63/1000 and 11/100; among the unmarried, the abortion rate was almost twice as high as the white unmarried rate, 73/1000 while the abortion ratio (i.e., the percentage of pregnancies that end in abortion) was lower than the white unmarried ratio: 45/100 (Henshaw, 1987: 8). This difference reflects higher birth rates among non-white teenagers as well as a higher incidence of still births and miscarriages. Among women age 15-44, the same pattern can be found; the abortion rates and abortion ratios are much higher among the unmarried, for both white and non-[white women, but the abortion ratio among unmarried white women is higher (70/100) than the non-white ratio (52.9), reflecting higher non-white birth rates (Henshaw, 1987: 7). Non-white consistently higher abortion) pregnancy, and birth rates than white teenagers although it should be noted there has been a decrease in the non-white pregnancy rate and an increase in the white teen pregnancy rate.

1978 1981 1982 1983 All Races

 Abortion rate             39.7        43.3           42.9         43.5
 Birthrate                 52.8        52.7           52.6         51.7
 Pregnancy rate           104.6       110.8
 
 White                                               110.3        109.9
 Abortion rate             34.9        38.5           38.1         38.2
 Birthrate                 42.9        44.7           44.5         43.6
 Pregnancy rate            89.9        96.0           95.2         94.3

Non-white

 Abortion rate            64.7        66.1            66.5         67.9
 Birthrate                96.0        91.3            90.7         89.3
 Pregnancy rate          186.3       182.3           180.9        181.9

Given that Blacks are the largest non-white group, these patterns can be safely taken as representative of the reproduction behavior of Black teenagers.

The data presented above clearly show that the majority of US female headed families are headed by Black women; that the poverty rate of BFHFs and BFHHs is almost twice as high as the poverty rate of WFHFs and WFHHS, and that almost 70% of the Black poor and 75% of poor Black children live in female headed families. The data also show that non-white teenagers have much higher abortion and birth rates than white teenagers and that their pregnancy rate is almost twice as high, despite its decline. While the facts are incontrovertible, their meaning is not and varies according to the theoretical perspective or the ideology of the observer.

The Documentary

The CBS documentary showed how single mothers on welfare live in the inner city of Newark. The viewers were shown a teenager who had to quit high school after becoming pregnant at 15; she was pregnant again two months after the birth of her daughter and had an abortion. She was attending a special school for dropouts, but her lack of reading and writing skills made it obvious to the viewer that she might not be able to gain sufficient skills to support herself in the future. She lives with her mother who, like her grandmother, was also a teenage mother and is the recipient of the welfare check that supports them. Her boyfriend, an unemployed high school drop out, spends his time on the street, listening to the radio with his friends. They are not on good terms and will not marry. The baby was not a mistake, it just happened. She did not want an abortion but a baby to cuddle and love; her baby was her life, the only person she really loved. She wanted to have somebody to live for, somebody to love. Another young woman, age 23, already had two small children and was pregnant with her third. She had finished high school, had had a year of college and steady work. She became pregnant, decided to keep the child, and this decision pushed her to poverty and welfare dependency. She did not talk with her lover about child support and he does nothing for them. She lives now on $385 from welfare plus $112 in food stamps, but would prefer to work; she believes that welfare makes her lazy and does not like her life, it is not what she wanted to be and do. She herself is afraid of birth control and her boyfriend, an unemployed high school dropout who has six children by three different women does not help her in that respect. He feels proud of his sexuality and his ability to have fathered these children; they are his art work. He hopes they will succeed in the future, so that he can proudly say, "that's my boy or my girl." He acknowledged all the children were "accidents;" he was having a good time and the woman had a choice., she could have had abortions, but did not. When asked why she puts up with him, this young woman said she loved him and felt lonely without him. Although she often became angry, she also missed him. Another woman, 30 years old with four children from three different fathers, felt that her children were her world, her friends. Lacking a man, a husband, she said, it is important having children, someone you can call your own. She was 14 when she had her first child. Like the others, she also lives on welfare. once a year she takes them to her extended family in the South, but her oldest son states he could not possibly live there - for him, the life of the inner city is better. There, in the streets, men and boys can be seen, rapping, smoking, listening to a radio, hanging out. Every time children go out into the streets, women fear for their lives. Women spend the time working at home; the day welfare checks arrive, everyone knows it and gathers by the mail boxes in the apartment buildings. Although men are not entitled to welfare, it get a share from the money the women they are involved with receive.

The documentary showed the division in the inner city between two worlds: a) the world of women, in their apartments, engaged in domestic work and child care, waiting for their welfare checks, living a life in which the main joys came from their children and sporadic encounters with their men; and b) the world of men, who spend time mostly in the streets, unemployed and unskilled, without any real possibilities for finding employment, exploiting the women sexually and even economically, fathering babies at an early age without assuming any responsibility for the women or their children. The question repeatedly asked throughout the documentary was: can this cycle of teenage pregnancy and poverty be stopped? if so, how? The answers that came from the people interviewed were framed in the discourse of morality and religion. What did the panelists say about the situation? Their answers stressed the importance of values and morality, and one of the panelists spoke of the "moral degeneracy" produced by the inner city environment. They saw a problem the Black community should confront, taking responsibility for the children, teaching them moral values; this task, they thought, should be shared by parents, churches and schools. Although society needed a safety net, welfare undermined moral values, making it easy for women to have children on their own. They also pointed out that values emphasizing unrestrained sex, drugs, and crime were not indigenous to the Black community but impinged upon it through the mass media, particularly television. One panelist indicated the documentary had an important flaw: it had neglected to portray the Black single mothers who were able to work, even if that meant leaving their children alone or with whoever may care for them. The panelists recognized the role of unemployment as an important contributor to the situation, the complex nature of the problem, and the almost insurmountable difficulties teenagers growing up in that environment must face; nevertheless, they kept the discussion primarily at a moralizing level. As a sociologist who wrote an excellent commentary on this documentary stated, the panelists failed to place the issue in its proper social context; i.e., making the viewers aware of the structural determinants of the problem. Instead, their comments reinforced the common sense notion, forcefully depicted by the documentary itself, that poor Black people on welfare are themselves to blame for their situation (Williams, 1986: 11-12).

Sociologically, the analysis presented by the panelists mirrors a "social disorganization" sociological approach to the problems inherent in the inner cities. it would appear that their plight is due to a breakdown in the intergenerational transmission of values. Boys and girls grow up in an environment where they have no working parents as role models from whom they could learn how to become successful members of the society. instead, girls grow up to be teenage mothers like their mothers (and, often, their grandmothers), while boys learn to survive in the streets, realistically expecting a hard life, going to jail once in a while like their fathers, making a livelihood largely out of illegal activities in addition to a little help from the women who bear their children. From a structural-functional sociological standpoint, female headed families are failing in their socializing functions; i.e., in the task of teaching children how to fulfill adequately the adult economic and family roles society expects them to play. From the standpoint of the culture of poverty, on the other hand, BFHFs are fulfilling their socializing functions only too well, reproducing cultural patterns that will lock the young into self-defeating patterns which will keep the majority of them marginal to the mainstream of American society. This interpretation is focused only on the "visible," common sense level of analysis. Socialist and Marxist feminist theories, on the other hand, are useful to go beyond sociological common sense and it is the relevance of their insights I will examine in the next sections of this essay.

The Socialist Feminist Interpretation

>From a socialist feminist standpoint, how could one proceed to think about these questions? What theoretical tools is it possible to find in socialist feminist writings? The central question, for this perspective, is the following: 11 ... how and why are women oppressed as women?" (Hartmann, 1981: 5; emphasis added). To pose the question using women, an ahistorical category of analysis, leads to an ahistorical answer: it is men who oppress women, who created a system of male dominance who still allow them to rule over women. This starting point unavoidably leads to primordial, ahistorical theories of the origin of sexual inequality: male dominance is grounded in the psychosexual consequences of biological differences in reproduction (Firestone, 1970); the exchange of women (Rubin, 1975); the fact women mother (Chodorow, 1978); the fact men chose (sic) to interpret and use to their advantage women's reproductive capacity (Eisenstein, 1979); or in men's control over the labor of women and children in the family (Hartmann, 1976). This is the ahistorical kernel of theories of patriarchy; the crucial and still unresolved problem for socialist feminist theory has been, consequently, how to bring patriarchy into history. For the purposes of this essay, I will focus on the contribution of the most influential statement of patriarchy in the U.S. context, that of Hartmann's (1976; 1981) which led to a debate within socialist feminist circles (Sargent, 1981). Her definition of patriarchy and the connections she establishes between patriarchy and capitalism are clearly formulated and useful for exploring the potential of the socialist feminist perspective for generating an adequate interpretation of the persistence and increase in the number of BFHFS. Patriarchy is:

a set of social relations which has a material base and in which there are hierarchical relations between men and solidarity among them which enable them in turn to dominate women. The material basis of patriarchy is man's control over women's labor power. The control is maintained by excluding women from access to necessary economically productive resources and by restricting women's sexuality. Man exercise their control in receiving personal service work from women, in not having to do housework or rear children, in having access to women's bodies for sex, and in feeling powerful and being powerful (Hartmann, 1981: 8).

It is possible to detect patriarchal structures in any institution simply by identifying its sexual division of labor or sex/gender system (a concept equivalent to the sociological categories of sexual stratification and sexual differentiation). The sex/gender system also includes institutions in which people are reproduced; the economy reproduces things and the sex-gender system reproduces people. Neither the production of things nor the production of people exist independently; to understand the nature of current forms of production and reproduction, we must speak of patriarchal capitalism (Hartmann, 1981: 16-17) whose major elements are:

... heterosexual marriage (and ... homophobia); female childrearing and housework, women's economic dependence on men (enforced by arrangements in the labor market), the state, and numerous institutions based on social relations among men--clubs, sports, unions, professions, universities, churches, corporations, and armies. All of these elements need to be examined if we are to understand patriarchal capitalism (Hartmann, 1981: 19).

Hartmann postulates a functional interaction or "partnership" between capitalism and patriarchy. This partnership was cemented in the collusion between working class men and capitalist men to exclude women and socially inferior men from the best jobs. The family wage, from this standpoint, was a bargain struck among men which gives profits to capitalist men and better wages to male workers; it resulted in the segmentation of the labor market by sex, which is the material basis for the economic dependence of women under capitalism.

Are BFHFs the product of capitalist patriarchy? Presumably capitalism interacts with patriarchy to produce the dismal conditions found in every inner city in the US. The nature of that "interaction" is, however, unclear. if we assume, for the sake of the argument that Black women are oppressed "as women," the determinants of their oppression should be independent from their class and race and that would lead us back, unerringly, to their reproductive roles. After all, what all women as women have in common is their biology; this would suggest that it is their role in reproduction which is at the root of their oppression: e.g., Black men oppress women because they use them sexually and do not assume responsibility for the consequences of sexual relations. Do Black men create the situation that leads to the emergence and increase in BFHFS? Do Black men benefit from the situation of Black single mothers? On the basis of what the documentary shows, it could be argued that young men benefit psychologically from their ability to engender children and have numerous sexual conquests. Black male children, on the other hand, clearly do not benefit and it may be argued that their adult behavior is in large degree a consequence of material deprivations experienced from birth. Do Black men really dominate Black women? If the material basis of patriarchy is not grounded in biology, but on men's control over women's labor power, Black men in the inner cities are clearly not acting like patriarchs. They are not deliberately depriving women from productive resources nor restricting their sexuality; they have access to their bodies, without any responsibility for economic support, housework, or childcare. They do not live with them, so they do not benefit from their labor on a regular basis. Men's sexual access to women is not based on their control of economic and social resources; they cannot, therefore, exert control over women's sexuality. The documentary suggested that most of these young unmarried fathers live with their families, where they benefit from their mothers' personal services. Are these young men oppressing their mothers? Could their behavior be considered, realistically, the main cause of the growth in the proportion of BFHFS? Perhaps these men "feel powerful and are powsexually; perhaps, in this sense, they may be considered "Patriarchs." The fact is that these men, who engage in practices that can be considered exploitative from a socialist feminist, and a common sense, moralistic understanding of the situation, are themselves quite powerless and cannot in any way be considered completely responsible for the situation in which they and the women in their lives have to exist. The fact is that vast numbers of would be "patriarchs" -- white and non-white -- are, in fact, socially, economically and politically powerless: they are dependent on wages for their own and their families'; survival. Loss of employment, or a decline in wages can undermine -- perhaps forever -- their families' stability and quality of life. Chronic unemployment and lack of skills can place family formation beyond their reach.

Patriarchy theory does not entirely overlook class, ethnic, racial and socioeconomic (i.e. intra-class) differences among men. These differences are explained in psychologistic and individualistic terms, as the outcome of capitalist men's behavior intended to divide the labor force and create segregated labor markets that differ in terms of the pay, skills, and type of workers they require. Working class white men cooperate with capitalist men in excluding women and non-white men from the best jobs. job segregation by sex 11... is the primary mechanism in capitalist society that maintains the superiority of men over women because it enforces lower wages for women in the labor market" (Hartmann, 1976: 139). Similar reasoning can explain job segregation by race which results in the occupational concentration of Blacks in the lower ranks of the occupational hierarchy, the gap between white and Black earnings, and the higher rate of unemployment among Blacks. Collusion among men determines sex and racial segregation; crucial in this process is the role played by white male workers. In the light of Hartmann's (1981: 18) definition of patriarchy, it seems that the absence of solidarity among men erodes the ability of less powerful men to control women; lack of intra-class, intra-racial and inter-racial male solidarity undermines the ability of poor and unemployed Black men to control the labor of women. In fact, the worse the effects of this lack of male solidarity across racial lines (i.e., temporary and chronic unemployment, and low wages), the less the ability of Black men to control and benefit from the labor of Black women: economic conditions do not enable them to form stable unions.

Do Black women benefit from Black men's plight? As the economic conditions that characterize BFHFs clearly indicate, their situation is far from desirable; it is, in fact, an extreme case that illustrates the economic and social disadvantages that affect families headed by women. A logical inference from the empirical fact that female headed families are generally worse off than complete families would be that men, as men, are not responsible for their situation. If women on their own are worse off, rather than better off, then patriarchy theory has some serious flaws. This problem is ingeniously solved by the notion of "public patriarchy" (Brown, 1981). Patriarchy, as a social system, has a public and a private dimension. Its private dimension is the relationship between individual men and women in the family, where men control their wives labor and the products of their labor, which includes children. Public patriarchy, on the other hand, refers to the control which men, as a collectivity, exert over the entire society; i.e., over the political system, the economy, education, and so forth. Men use this system to uphold the rights of all men as a collectivity, as well as the rights of individual men. Noticing that the process of capitalist development has led to changes in the economic value of children for their parents, Brown argues that these changes have also undermined the value of the family for patriarchy. Given that today children are a source of economic costs for families, men have lost their interest in them because they wish to avoid the costs that having children entail. Because men can purchase in the market all the goods and services women can offer, they have also lost interest in controlling the labor of women. Having a family is costly; men can benefit from women's labor in the many institutions in which women as a collectivity serve the collective interests of men (e.g., services performed in educational institutions, hospitals, restaurants, cleaning, etc.). Private patriarchy has consequently lost its value for patriarchy as a system of male domination. Divorce laws and custody regulations have changed accordingly, leaving women with the economic burden of raising the children (Brown, 1981: 239-267). When men cut their losses, women must support themselves, working for meager wages in jobs that serve men's interests, or remain marginal to the economy, supported by the State, the ultimate expression of public patriarchy.

Female headed families and the growth in the numbers of BFHFs could thus apparently be fully explained as the outcome of patriarchy in its public and private aspects. The collusion between capitalist men and working class men has excluded women from the best jobs, segregating them, particularly Black women, into low status, low paid, dead end jobs. The collusion between capitalist men and white working class men keeps most Black men locked into the worst jobs or unemployed. Individual men, whatever their race, are able to free themselves from the economic burdens of the family either avoiding marriage altogether, or through desertion, separation, or divorce.

The Marxist Feminist Interpretation

While the analysis seems compelling, it has serious flaws. From the standpoint of historical materialism, explanation of male dominance in terms of men's interpretation of biological differences in reproduction, in terms of men's desire to control women's reproductive power or women's labor power, or in terms of the economic, sexist and racist motives of capitalist and working class men, replicate the methodological individualism of classical political economists who wanted to explain the development of capitalism on the basis of individual characteristics: i.e., a utilitarian, "rational," profit seeking "human nature." The very use of men and women as categories of analysis betrays the profound ahistorical nature of this mode of thinking. Recognition of the social nature of sex roles (gender, in socialist feminist terminology) cannot surmount the individualistic and ahistorical nature of a theory whose main categories of analysis are simply men and women. Marx's concept of men as the ensemble of social relations is an important methodological principle: in abstraction of those historically specific relations which determine the kind of male behavior and motivations which socialist feminists are rightfully critical of, it is impossible to avoid the pitfalls of methodological individualism. In addition to their biological differences, men and women belong to social aggregates which shape their views and structure their opportunities. An analysis ultimately resting on the imputed common interests of men in controlling women overlooks, although it may acknowledge hierarchical relations among men, the fact that men and women are social beings. Marxist feminist theory is concerned, precisely, with the mechanisms which create and recreate unequal relations between men and women of different social classes, unlike socialist feminist theory, which gives a determinant role to the underlying capitalist determinants of male and female intentional behavior. Individuals' behavior and motives, from this standpoint, do not create social structure but must be explained in terms of their specific structural determinants. As a critic of the subjectivist and individualistic methodology inherent in feminist theories succinctly stated:

The fact that men are beneficiaries of patriarchy, ... does not in itself account for the existence of patriarchal social structures. In the same way that capitalism cannot be explained in terms of the consciousness or the will of capitalists, neither can patriarchy be explained on the basis of the power or the prerogatives of men (Burris, 1982: 57).

Just as the exploitation of labor power by the capitalist class is not the product of evil natured capitalists bent on destroying the working class, but is inherent in the capitalist organization of production, sexual inequality in general and the plight of Black women and BFHFs in particular are not the product of a conspiracy among men, but the unintended structural effect of the laws of capital accumulation. Among the effects of these laws are a secular relative decline in the demand for labor which makes full employment unattainable and competition for jobs a chronic feature of market relations; the creation of a reserve army of labor whose size and composition vary with the ups and downs of the economy; skilling and deskilling processes designed to cheapen labor power; and proletarianization and the universalization of commodity production, which make survival among the propertyless contingent on employment and/or kinship relations. Capitalist development undermines the relative economic power of individual propertyless men over propertyless women through underemployment and unemployment, and through labor allocation on the basis of nonmarket criteria (race/ethnicity and sex) intended to maximize profits, while eroding the ability of these workers to earn a living wage, or to find work at all. Unequal access to employment and, therefore, to the wage/salary necessary for individuals' self-maintenance and ability to form and support households, is the root of intra-class socioeconomic, sexual and racial/ethnic inequality. The effects of these processes among the propertyless are mediated by biology, which create the material conditions for cooperative, supportive relations between men and women workers which, at the same time, are of great economic importance. Workers can organize collectively to struggle for better wages and working conditions; a second survival strategy open to men and women workers is family formation (Humphreys, 1977). Feminist theories have an individualistic bias that stresses economic competition between individual men and women, while overlooking the material basis for male/female solidarity which finds expression in family formation. Under conditions of chronic job scarcity, marriage is still the most desirable "job" for most propertyless women. As recent statistics have shown, there are more dual-earner families than families where men are the sole breadwinner; declines in real wages are bringing back the "family wage economy" (Tilly and Scott, 1978: 104-145), making household formation a survival strategy for women and men as well.

Within the propertyless classes, therefore, the survival of families and individuals depends on their own employment and/or their kinship relations with an employed individual. Those who are unemployed, alone, sick, too old or too young to work, if they have no family to help them, must depend on charity, the state, or illegal activities to survive. Under advanced capitalism, family formation and membership in a kinship group are conditions for economic survival among the propertyless classes, especially for the less privileged strata of the working class. Unemployment, underemployment, drastic changes in the level of wages and decline in real wages undermine the stability of the family, pushing women into the labor force.

The increase of female headed families in the U.S. is the result of qualitative changes in the forces and relations of production which have had a very negative effect upon the working class as whole. In the struggle for wages the working class has lost and has experienced drastic reductions in its standard of living, while the reserve army and the poverty rate increased. Decline in employment in the manufacturing sector, which used to be the source of the best paid male blue collar jobs, the kind that paid a "family wage," and increase in low paid service jobs aimed primarily but not exclusively to recruit female labor, accompanied by extremely high rates of unemployment have eroded the basis for family formation and stability for vast sectors of the working class, particularly among less skilled workers and minority workers: the vast majority of workers must now rely on two paychecks to be able to support themselves and their children. This entails a drastic reduction in the price of labor, and an increase in the strains and tensions within households brought about by the contradictions between the requirements of work and those of biological reproduction. In many ways, it is almost like a return to 19th century conditions; the major difference, of course, is the welfare system which evolved as a means to cope with the social and political potential effects of structural unemployment. The combination of welfare, high unemployment, and low male and female wages have led to the break up of households and the emergence of conditions making household formation an impossibility. The rise in teenage pregnancy and out of wedlock births (which are not necessarily connected to teenage behavior) are important sources of female headed families, which cannot be explained purely by the lack of morals of the poor, the lack of responsibility of poor parents, social disorganization, failure in socialization, the culture of poverty, the irresponsibility and sexually exploitative behavior of men, or patriarchy. These issues must be placed squarely in the context of unemployment in general, the endemic unemployment that affects unskilled sectors of the working class, particularly Black workers, and the overall decline in the standard of living of the employed working class reflected in the decline of real wages and the demise of the family wage (for similar views, see Williams, 1986; Wilson, 1987: 237-238).

Perhaps there is no better topic of study to show the inadequacy of patriarchy theory than the examination of the effects of changes in the mode of production upon family formation and stability. Male unemployment contributes directly and indirectly to the poverty of women and children. Unemployed men are unable to continue to support their families, and the psychological strains connected with the sudden loss of income can lead to a variety of self-destructive forms of behavior and/or to domestic problems which eventually lead to separation and/or divorce. Unemployment not only breaks families but is a barrier to family formation. Unemployment is highest among Black men;" ... in 1982, while 78% of all working age white men were employed, only 54% of all working age Black men had jobs" (The Center for the Study of Social Policy 1986: 234). It is, therefore, not surprising that it is among Blacks that we find the highest proportion of female headed households (430/o) and highest poverty rate for that type of household (51.7%) (Rodgers, Jr., 1986: 12-26). Also contributing to the increase of BFHFs is the progressive immiseration of working class men, particularly Black men; men with higher incomes are more likely to be married than men with lower incomes. Given the earning gap between white and Black males, their high unemployment rate, and their concentration in low paid, semiskilled and unskilled sectors of the economy, growing numbers of BFHFs are to be expected. Furthermore, the economic situation of Black men is relatively worse than the economic situation of Black women; in 1977, 42.80/o of employed Black women were white collar workers, whereas only 21.7% of employed Black males were in white collar occupations. Given that marriage tends to take place among people with relatively similar resources, the disparities in education and income between black men and black women may impel many Black women to forego marriage altogether for lack of a desirable partner. The relative scarcity of Black males is intensified by the tendency of those in higher socioeconomic status to marry white females, by the disproportionate number of Black males in prisons, and by their higher mortality due to accidents and homicides (Williams, 1986: 12). But the major contributor to the growth of BFHFs is unemployment, as Sidel (1985) has so clearly stated:

American policymakers have an uncanny ability to obfuscate and compartmentalize social problems - to recognize ... that the U.S. has an unacceptably high level of unemployment, particularly among specific groups, and to recognize that we also have an incredibly high number of female headed families, particularly within the same groups; but to avoid the cause and effect relationship between the two phenomena. The unwillingness to recognize the obvious correlation between the lack of economic opportunities for millions of American men -- a lack of opportunities that will consign them, in all likelihood, for their entire lifetimes to the bottom of the class structure --and their lack of commitment to and steady participation in family life, is a shocking denial of the obvious impact of social and economic factors on the wellbeing of the family group (Sidel, 1986: 110).

Current patterns of capital investment do not bode well for the working class as a whole and for Black workers in particular. The reorganization of the economy means the relative decline in well paid blue collar jobs and the rise in the demand for labor in both low paid service and assembling jobs and well paid jobs in the sectors of the economy such as energy, technology and certain services from which Blacks are largely excluded.

Conclusion

There are many factors that contribute to the emergence of female headed families, specially BFHFS. It is my contention that these factors, sexism, racism, the sex and race segregated nature of the labor market, the gap between male and female and Black and white earnings, the detrimental economic effects of divorce, and the permanent unemployment among vast sectors of the population, particularly among Black males, can better account for the growing number of BFHFs than explanations stressing primarily "patriarchy" or "patriarchal capitalism," or racism. I am not minimizing the presence nor the effects of sexism and racism but, even if both were totally eliminated from the consciousness and practices of the entire U.S. population, the economic structures that affect the lives of millions of Americans, particularly Black Americans, would remain unchanged.