NEWSWOMEN IN POVERTY

After hearing that Kelley Williams-Bolar, a single mom, was sentenced to jail for sending her kids to school in a safe neighborhood, Change.org member Caitlin Lord decided to take a stand on her behalf. And so far, over 6,000 people have stood with her.

Williams-Bolar received 10 days in jail and 3 years probation after found guilty of a felony crime: sending her children to school. As Carol Scott reports on the Education cause, the Akron, Ohio, mom registered her children as living with their grandfather because she feared for their safety, and wanted them to attend school in a more secure location. The school wasted $6,000 to bring the case to trial, hiring a private investigator to spy on and videotape Williams-Bolar's children to prove that they lived with her in a different district, although she maintains that they split their time between the two homes.

"I wanted to do whatever was within my power to ensure that this travesty of justice would not slip between the cracks of our fast-paced, 24-hour news cycle," says Lord of her decision to start a Change.org petition asking Ohio Governor John Kasich and officials in Williams-Bolar's case to reduce her sentence on appeal. "I am also a single mother, and can identify with Williams-Bolar's desire to do everything and anything possible to ensure that her daughters were safe and receiving the quality education they deserved."

As Cara points out on The Curvature, it's also impossible to ignore the fact that Williams-Bolar "a black mother who has been jailed for sending her kids to a white school district." She lives in a predominantly minority housing project, while Copley, where she sent her kids for school, is mostly lily-white and middle class. While the Copley school district screams about lost property taxes, the broader problem is that we've set up a fundamentally unequal education system in which it's a crime to send your children to a school where you can trust that they will be safe. The judge wants her sentence to send a message of deterrence. How about a message about the deep-rooted injustice of our educational system?

Eleven women who live in El Paso, TX, and are either from or have family in the border region around El Paso and Ciudad Juarez in Mexico have ended a ten-day hunger strike in front of The White House. Amidst the Washington, D.C. rain, the vigil has wrapped. Their efforts, however, to draw attention to the extreme poverty and ever present violence in the El Paso/Ciudad Juarez border region are still strong.

They are part of the almost twenty-year-old group La Mujer Obrera; an organization that works for women’s empowerment, as well as economic and community development in this embattled region. And they are fierce. Despite their accomplishments – creating “social purpose” businesses, with the help of displaced women workers, for the women and their families, they cannot do it alone.

In a letter to First Lady Michelle Obama, the group speaks woman-to-woman, asking the First Lady for an in-person thirty-minute meeting. Why? Because the women and families in this region have been all but forgotten by the federal powers-that-be more invested in border security, protecting international trade agreements that harm workers, and fighting a "war on drugs" than on empowering communities.

New research on the "motherhood penalty" confirms that when poorer women have children, their careers suffer more than their wealthy counterparts'.

While studies have previously confirmed that women's wages and careers suffer when they have children, a new study by sociologists Michelle J. Budig and Melissa J. Hodges looks at the motherhood penalty for women at different income levels and stages in their careers. The higher a woman climbs, the less likely she is to be a mother, forced to make a choice between career and family that men don't generally have to. Women who do make it to the top of their fields and manage to have children benefit greatly from family-friendly policies (as well as the resources to hire a nanny) and their careers do not suffer. But for the bottom 95% of women, the opposite is true.

From who's suffering from the recession to who's dropping out of schools, the answer is always those who have less.  As the report states, women who are less affected by the motherhood penalty earn more, are farther along in their careers, and work at organizations with women-friendly policies that prefer to cultivate talent over high turnover. That's rarely true at the other end of the spectrum, where women are fired for taking too much time if they suffer medical complications or because they can't afford expensive childcare. This not a random cruel joke society is playing on the poor: it's a direct result of state and federal laws that allow employers to punish women, especially young and poor women, for having children. As economist Nancy Folbre on the Economix blog concludes, "More universal family policies, such as early-childhood education, paid family leave, paid sick days and paid vacation time could help most working mothers substantially increase their earnings."

October means a lot to women. It is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. It is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. And now, it is a month where you have the opportunity to put your money where your heart is. Pathfinder International, an incredible organization that works to provide women all over the globe with comprehensive reproductive health care, has a fundraising campaign running this month called Make a Choice that gives you the chance to have your impact doubled.

Through the end of October, every donation made online to Pathfinder International will be matched by a generous donor, for a total of up to $50,000. Given the broad range of services Pathfinder provides — everything from providing contraceptives to pre-natal care to HIV/AID awareness and testing — that money could have a major impact on women and families.

Take, for example, the story of Esther:

It's awkward and ironic that October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. The very need for an awareness campaign means we still have a long way to go in preventing and ending partner abuse. It means that violence behind closed doors, no matter how immoral and illegal, still affects families from every walk of life, many of whom suffer in silence. Every so often, month-long awareness campaigns aside, reminders of this often invisible problem seep into the media.

On last week's episode of MTV's Teen Mom, viewers witnessed a particularly disturbing hour of television. Gary and Amber, the couple who compelled me to tune into the show since they first appeared on 16 and Pregnant (they're from my hometown), have always had a volatile relationship. But after Amber slapped Gary across the face last season, it became apparent that her intimidating, threatening behavior would only get worse. This week, Amber not only escalated her name-calling and irate screaming that often seems to come out of nowhere; she began hitting Gary again and even punched him in the face. Gary never fought back. He took his things and their daughter — who is often present during their disputes — and left.

A lot of unhappily married couples have found that during the recession, sticking it out makes economic sense. But while divorce is expensive, hey, so are weddings. For the first time in more than a century, it looks like both are taking a hit, largely based on the terrible economy.

By analyzing the new Census Bureau data, the Population Reference Bureau has discovered that marriage rates are at their lowest recorded levels. The New York Times reports that some heterosexual couples are putting off marriage because their collective economic future seems too unstable to commit to anything else at the moment.

That seems fair enough, though I have to wonder: do you really need financial stability to fall and stay in love? It certainly helps, but isn't that a myopic view of relationships, legal or otherwise?

The study puts some of the marriage decline blame on gender equality, noting "that women's higher earning capacity, and the declining economic prospects of young men without a college degree, are key factors contributing to the decline in marriage in recent years." This may all be true, but as always, I'm troubled by language that women's economic equality should somehow be blamed for anything, particularly the decline of something — traditional marriage — that has also held women back.

The latest poverty rate figures from the Census Bureau are abysmal. With one in seven Americans living in poverty — and that's just according to the outdated poverty line cut-off — it's no wonder women and children are faring poorly in the recession. What's even worse is that many women aren't receiving crucial benefits that would help their families stay afloat.

A new report (pdf) from the Institute for Women's Policy Research shows that especially for the 15.5 million women currently living below the poverty line, government assistance in the form of TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families), SNAP (food stamps), and publicly provided health insurance can lessen the extraordinary hardships for poor women and their children. Unfortunately, the study's entire purpose is to highlight how government anti-poverty programs are failing poor women and children, and there's no shortage of data on how hard the recession is hitting them.

The study reveals — or rather, reiterates — that women of color and younger women are the most likely to live in poverty. Sixty-eight percent had some type of health care, while nearly one third of adult women in poverty lack health coverage. Many do not solely rely on subsidized care from the government.

Susan Retik and Patti Quigley were both pregnant when they lost their husbands in the 9/11 attacks. But instead of solely focusing on their own tragic loss, the two American women thought about the existence of other widows thousands of miles away, in Afghanistan. And they decided to transform their sorrow into help for women they had never met.

Choosing books and business over bombs, the group founded by these two women, Beyond the 11th, has aided over 1,000 widows to date to become entrepreneurs. Retik and Quigley recognized that to prevent attacks like 9/11, it is important to deal with the root causes that entrench fundamentalism and make people susceptible to recruitment by extremists: poverty and lack of education. It's the kind of project that can really win over hearts and minds, that shows the world America's better nature and that we are not an enemy to Muslims, a better message than that sent by events such as Koran-burning.

And by empowering women, many of whom were now single mothers like themselves, to run their own small businesses, these driven widows are helping progressive gender dynamics in Afghanistan as well. Meanwhile, the cost of nine years work — buying chicken flocks, starting a women's center for carpet weaving, offering literacy classes, training women to manage an entire soccer ball manufacturing company — is less than the outlay to keep one American soldier abroad for less than a year. Imagine what could be accomplished if all the money going into the military-industrial complex instead found its way into economic and development programs that reduce a population's susceptibility to fundamentalism and terrorist recruitment.

The flight attendant who recently decided to leave his job via airplane escape slide (beers in hand) captivated the public, sparking T-shirts and many a day-dream by people dissatisfied with their work. But there's more to this story than a dramatic exit. While Steven Slater's slide to freedom was immediately provoked by a belligerent passenger, flight attendants have to deal with frustrating passengers on top of insultingly low pay. Shhh: don't tell anybody though. Because admitting that you get paid poverty wages could get you canned.

As Josie Raymond reports at Poverty in America, Kirsten Arianejad was interviewed on T.V. saying that her full-time job as a flight attendant for Compass Airlines paid so poorly, she has been forced to resort to food stamps. Compass Airlines apparently doesn't feel that their wages are the problem: just making them public is. So, angry at Arianejad for airing its dirty laundry, the airline fired her.

The starting salary for a flight attendant is generally not more than $15,000 a year, well within the range of qualifying for food assistance. This piddling pay for a job that requires training and strong interpersonal skills for dealing with irritating customers without resorting to the escape slide just might have something to do with the fact that most flight attendants are women, and female-dominated industries often get the short end of the stick. At least they don't have official weight standards attendant must meet anymore. Progress?

You can send a message to Compass and other airlines that it's not acceptable to fire somebody for admitting that they use food stamps. If they want to avoid bad publicity, then they should pay their employees a living wage.

Photo credit: davitydave

When conservatives are looking to play the blame-game regarding what they refer to as the decline of the "traditional family," feminists, LGBT persons, and Hollywood liberal elites are generally on the dice. But Alex Henderson writes on Alternet that if they want to find the true culprit, they should look in the mirror.

What right-wingers mean by family values is something along the lines of a man and woman getting married, on the young side before they've sullied themselves with any premarital sex, pop out a bunch of children (sans contraception), and perish the thought of divorce. But one thing any parents (and most non-parents) know: kids are expensive. When people decide to have children later or not at all, when a greater number of people are interested in permanent sterilization, when marriage gets delayed, economic considerations are at the top of their reasons.

Wealth in America has become more concentrated in the hands of an elite few, while an average worker's wages have not kept up with inflation on basic necessities. Conservatives blocked comprehensive health care reform under the Clinton administration, while the bill that President Obama managed to squeeze through Congress falls far short of what the nation needs. We have inadequate or nonexistent maternity leave, paternity leave, sick days, subsidized day care, and other vital elements of a social safety net. What kind of impact do you think this would have on responsible individuals considering having a family?