Mitigating Material Hardship:
The Strategies Low-Income Families Employ to Reduce the Consequences of Poverty
Colleen Heflin, University of Missouri
Andrew London, Syracuse University
Ellen Scott, University of Oregon
March 2009
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ABSTRACT
According to the largely uncontested and hegemonic logic of individualism in the United States,
the material hardship that accompanies poverty is a problem that derives from cultural deficits
and lack of motivation rather than an unequal distribution of power and wealth. A different logic
emerges from the findings presented here: observable hardship occurs at the intersection of the
structural causes of poverty, social policy, and individual actions by the poor to prevent it,
respond to it, and mitigate its effects. In this paper, we use data from in-depth interviews
conducted in Cleveland between 1997 and 2001 to examine how very low-income mothers
respond to the threat or occurrence of housing, bill-paying, food, medical, and clothing
hardships. We find that they engage multiple, innovative strategies to alleviate material
hardship, including reliance on personal networks, social program participation, and individual
action, and that the patchwork of strategies they employ varies across domains of hardship.
Without the substantial individual efforts that women employ to mitigate material hardships,
experienced hardship would increase. Yet, despite these efforts, low-income mothers often lack
the resources necessary to eliminate the hardships common to poverty. This evidence counters
discourses that locate personal responsibility primarily in the domain of work and suggests the
need for renewed efforts to address the structural causes of poverty and expand the social safety
net.
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INTRODUCTION
The passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act
(PRWORA) with bipartisan support in 1996 represented the triumph of the linked ideological
tenets of individualism and market fundamentalism in the United States (Kingfisher 2002;
Morgen and Maskovsky 2003; O‘Connor 2001; Somers and Block 2005). In that era of neoliberal welfare reform, ―dependency,‖ as it had been constructed in legislative, political, media,
and popular discourses (Fraser and Gordon 1994; Misra, Moller, and Karides 2003; Naples
1997), rather than poverty and hardship, was constructed as the problem; welfare reliance was
seen as diminishing women‘s motivation to work for pay and thereby be self-sufficient
(Kingfisher 2002; Lens 2002). As noted by Somers and Block (2005: 265): ―The logic behind
the rhetoric is impeccable—if assistance is actually hurting the poor by creating dependence,
then denying it is not cruel but compassionate.‖
Within this ideological nexus, women‘s unpaid carework on behalf of their dependent
children and families was rendered invisible (Cancian and Oliker 2000; Cancian, Kurz, London,
Reviere, and Tuominen 2002). Politicians and the public adopted in mutually reinforcing ways a
―rhetoric of perversity‖ (Somers and Block 2005: 265) to criticize and transform the welfare
system and the limited notion of personal responsibility through work became the conceptual
currency of welfare reform in public discourse (Lens 2002; Misra, Moller, and Karides 2003).
The hegemonic ―work first‖ policy discourse of welfare reform and the other discourses that
supported it provided policymakers and welfare administrators a culturally-acceptable means to
reorder poor women‘s apparently disordered priorities, practices, and relationships to the state
without generating a moral imperative for the state to take responsibility for addressing the
actual, embodied lives and circumstances of poor, single mothers, who often had extensive
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personal histories of disadvantage and prior hardship. Ignoring these histories and the exigencies
of the low-wage labor market, this public narrative often ignored or denied the enormity and
complexity of the problems in the lives of some women, their needs to provide care, and the
limits of labor market opportunity, which together contributed to these same women‘s reliance
on welfare (London, Scott, and Hunter 2002; Polit, London, and Martinez 2001; Scott, London,
and Myers 2002).
The hegemonic discourse surrounding welfare reform erased from view the life stories of
those who might contradict the claims that the welfare system produced dependency and laziness
and that welfare reform had been an unmitigated success with few negative consequences
(Marchevsky and Theoharis 2006; Scott and London 2008). The ―rhetoric of perversity‖ was
used to argue that the very system that was intended to reduce poverty or mitigate some of its
most negative consequences caused laziness and dependence and ―thus inexorably exacerbate[d]
the very social ills that [it] was meant to cure‖ (Somers and Block 2005: 265). Women‘s lived
experiences, knowledge, and claims for the right to living wages, food, housing, health care
coverage, and resources to care for themselves and their children were generally excluded,
marginalized, or rendered secondary to other concerns in both the policy debates about welfare
reform and the evaluations of TANF programs that followed (Christopher 2004; Lens 2002;
Mink 1998). The substantial, often labor-intensive efforts that mothers made to take personal
responsibility for coping with poverty and mitigating hardship in their families were rendered
invisible or greatly discounted. Moreover, as we discuss further at the end of this paper, these
efforts have been largely ignored in many approaches to measuring material hardships. We
argue this constitutes a serious oversight in the literature. Observed hardship occurs at the
intersection of the structural causes of poverty, social policy, and actions taken by mothers to
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mitigate hardship. Rates of hardship would be higher in the absence of such efforts to cope with
poverty and thus, we believe, they should be made more visible in the measurement of hardship.
In this article we draw upon longitudinal, qualitative interviews to make visible and
describe the often under-valued labor that welfare-reliant and working poor mothers living in
urban neighborhoods of concentrated poverty do to mitigate hardship and meet the basic needs of
their dependent children and families. We examine five different domains of material hardship in
detail: housing, bill-paying, food, medical, and clothing hardships. As poor mothers try to stretch
inadequate resources to meet their families‘ basic needs they employ three main strategies and
make intricate calculations regarding allocation tradeoffs, timing of expenditures, and
deprivation to try to prevent hardships in their own, but especially their children‘s, lives. These
three approaches to hardship mitigation are: (1) reliance on personal networks of family and
friends; (2) social program participation; and (3) individual strategies. We describe and
document the ways these mothers combine and prioritize strategies within and across domains of
hardship in an intricate juggling act that aims to prevent hardships, and what they do when their
substantial efforts fail. In short, our aim is to understand the strategies mothers use to avert
hardship, and whether and how these strategies differ across domains of hardship.
Below we review the literature on material hardship and the survival strategies lowincome women use to avert hardship. Then, we outline our methods and present our findings on
coping strategies used by low-income women by material hardship type. We conclude with a
discussion of the implications of our findings for public policies, research on poverty and
hardship, and welfare-related discourses about individual responsibility, self-sufficiency, and
dependency.
BACKGROUND
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Relying primarily on survey data, poverty researchers have focused on three main
concerns in their work on material hardship: measures of hardship, rates and prevalence of
hardship, and determinants of hardship. In a few studies relying primarily on qualitative data,
researchers have investigated coping strategies employed in low-income families to alleviate
hardship. This body of work has provided critical insights into the problems of hardship that
typically accompany poverty, but, as we indicate below, there are still deficits in our knowledge
about material hardship that we hope this paper will help address.
The development of material hardship measures originated with a 1989 study by
Christopher Jencks and Susan Mayer based on two surveys of Chicago residents. Mayer and
Jencks documented that the income-to-needs ratio explained only 0.24 percent of the variation in
families‘ ability to afford food, housing, and medical care. Adjustments for family size, age,
health, noncash benefits, home ownership, and access to credit explained about another 0.15
percent. They concluded this study with a call for direct measurement of material hardship on a
―regular, national basis‖ (1989: 111). Partly as a result of this influential study, in 1991, the
Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) began including material hardship measures
as part of the Adult Well-being topic module. The SIPP is a nationally representative,
longitudinal panel data set. Each subsequent panel to the 1991 SIPP includes the Adult Wellbeing topic module once.
In the mid-1990s, motivated by the need to track the well-being of welfare recipients
transitioning from welfare to work after the implementation of the PRWORA in 1996, survey
researchers began to design and field measures of material hardship based on work by Mayer and
Jencks (1989) to supplement the existing poverty measure and to assess the well-being of women
and their families. Each of the so-called ―leaver studies‖ funded by the U.S. Department of
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Health and Human Services (Acs and Loprest 2001) included some measure of material
hardship, as did many independent studies of women on welfare (Cancian and Meyer 2004;
Danziger et al. 2000; Hartley, Seccombe, and Hoffman 2005; Lindhorst and Mancoske 2006;
Polit, London, and Martinez 2000; Seccombe et al. 2007). The different measurement tools,
sampling schemes, and time periods referenced in these studies resulted in a wide range of
reported prevalence rates. As a result, the United States Department of Health and Human
Services convened a roundtable meeting to discuss survey measurement issues for material
hardship (Ouellette 2004). More recently, there have been discussions related to the possible
expansion of the monitoring of material hardships using ongoing federally-funded, populationbased surveys as the vehicle for such measurement. While there remains considerable
disagreement on best practices for the measurement of material hardship, a growing consensus is
emerging that alterative measures to the federal poverty measure are needed to supplement our
knowledge of the well-being of America‘s low-income population (Blank 2007; Iceland and
Bauman 2004).
In general, reports of an inability to meet basic needs are quite low in the SIPP. For
example, in the 2001 SIPP, 2.2 percent of respondents reported having insufficient amounts of
food to eat, 5.5 percent reported unpaid rent or mortgage, 8.7 percent unpaid utilities, and 12.9
percent unpaid essential expenses (Bauman 2007). Surveys of low-income women or those on
welfare tend to have higher prevalence rates. Using data from one such study of recently or
currently welfare-reliant women, MDRC‘s Project on Devolution and Urban Change, Brock et
al. (2002) examined families‘ experiences of material hardships in multiple domains from 1998
to 2001 in Cleveland.1 The results indicate that food and housing hardships were high and
1
Our paper is based on the qualitative data collected in Cleveland under the auspices of
MDRC‘s Project on Devolution and Urban Change, which is why we focus here on the rates of
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generally did not change significantly over time. Overall, 40.5 percent of families reported food
insecurity in the 12-month period prior to the 2001 interview and 26.3 percent reported two or
more out of the following housing problems: broken windows, leaky roof / ceilings, roaches /
vermin, and problems with wiring, plumbing, heating, and appliances. Reported rates of having
the gas or electricity turned off one or more times in the prior year were 13.9 percent in 1998 and
10.5 percent in 2001. Health care hardships were high, with roughly one-third of respondents
indicating that they had been uninsured at some point in the prior year and more than 20 percent
indicating that a member of their family had an unmet need for medical care. Unmet need for
dental care increased over the three-year period from 22.2 to 27.3 percent.
Due to the keen policy-interest in these high levels of reported material hardship, there is
now a growing literature focused on identifying determinants of different forms of material
hardship, such as individual physical and mental health characteristics (Heflin, Corcoran, and
Siefert 2007), being sanctioned while on TANF (Kalil, Seefeldt and Wang 2002; Reichman,
Teitler, and Curtis 2005; Lee, Slack, and Lewis 2004; Lindhorst and Mancoske 2006),
employment or marriage (Teitler, Reichman, and Napomnyaschy 2004; Meyers and Lee 2003),
Food Stamp program participation (Casey et al. 2004), and macroeconomic conditions (Heflin
2008). A related literature examines the correlation between measures of material hardship and
other measures of income and consumption (Iceland and Bauman 2004; Mayer and Jencks 1989;
Short 2005; Sullivan, Turner, and Danziger 2008; Heflin 2006).
What is missing from this body of research on material hardship is an understanding of
the processes that households go through to mitigate material hardship that begin when
household finances are tight. This sort of rich description is largely missing from quantitative
hardship reported from the survey component of Urban Change in Cleveland. We provide
further details about our methods below.
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studies of material hardship because such processes cannot be easily measured with survey data.
Survey data can only reveal to researchers if a household experienced an inability to meet a basic
need during some time frame with the measures of hardship being dichotomous categories that
indicate whether hardship is present or not. The core focus of this project, how households
experience and respond to the inability to meet a basic need, is best answered using qualitative
data. We begin our analysis before the actual point of hardship in order to describe the strategies
low-income mothers employ to avoid or mitigate the actual shortage.
Our focus on the survival strategies that low-income women use to avoid material
hardship builds upon prior important work in this area, most of it drawing on qualitative data as
we do. One of the most widely cited books to examine the coping strategies of welfare recipients
compared to low-wage workers is Kathyrn Edin and Laura Lein‘s Making Ends Meet (1997).
With data collected through in-depth interviews, Edin and Lein explore the tradeoffs of paid
work and welfare receipt. In addition to participating in formal social service programs, Edin
and Lein describe how low-income women combine work-based strategies, network-based
strategies, and agency-based strategies to survive. Network-based strategies, which include
receiving help from friends, family, boyfriends, and biological fathers, were the preferred source
of assistance among the three types, reported by 77 percent of the welfare-reliant and 82 percent
of the wage-reliant mothers in the study. Work-based strategies, including reported work
(working extra hours or extra jobs), unreported work, and underground work were reported by 46
percent of welfare-reliant mothers and 39 percent of work-based mothers. Agency-based
strategies, which include obtaining help from churches and private charities, were the least
preferred method of assistance; 31 percent of welfare-reliant and 22 percent of work-reliant
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mothers reported using agency-based strategies. Similar observations are echoed in a morerecent qualitative study of 16 women in Iowa by Hill and Kauff (2001).
There are several gaps and limitations in the existing literature on coping with material
hardship. One limitation is that the discussion of material hardship is often separate from that of
coping strategies so it is difficult to understand the work families do to make certain that specific
domains of hardship are mitigated or the trade-offs that families make between necessities.
Additionally, descriptions of the ways in which women cope with scarce resources to provide the
necessities for their families often do not address how the strategies are different or similar
across material hardship types or the ways that women both work to prevent the occurrence of
hardship and cope with it once it has emerged in their lives. Finally, some of the best research
on this topic, such as the landmark Edin and Lein study, was conducted prior to the passage of
the PRWORA in 1996 and thus reflects different policy conditions than women face today.
In this paper, we use detailed descriptions from ethnographic data drawn from lengthy,
longitudinal interviews with welfare-reliant and working poor women in Cleveland, Ohio, to
address these gaps and limitations in the extant literature. We identify coping strategies that
remain unobservable in most quantitative datasets; focus on similarities and differences in the
strategies women use to prevent or mitigate housing, bill-paying, food, medical, and clothing
hardships; and describe intra-household decisions about resource allocation and tradeoffs across
domains of hardship. Additionally, because all the interviews were conducted in the post-TANF
policy environment, we are able to provide insights that are more reflective of current policy
conditions than prior analyses.
Data and Methods
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Data come from interviews conducted in Cleveland, Ohio, between 1997 and 2001 under
the auspices of Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation‘s Project on Devolution and
Urban Change (Brock et al. 2002). We interviewed women living in three highly disadvantaged
neighborhoods (one predominantly white and two predominantly African American) in order to
study welfare reform and the transition to employment, for better or worse, where it might have
had its largest effects.
We carefully screened study applicants in order to recruit a sample that was diverse along
theoretically important dimensions and varied with respect to factors known to be correlated with
welfare receipt, such as education, work history, and family structure (Danziger et al. 2000).
We minimized the participation of women who had substantial additional economic supports,
such as subsidized housing or Social Security Income, in order to evaluate better the effects of
welfare reform and the transition to work where alternative resources were most scarce. We
sought to interview respondents annually, and after some attrition early in the study, 38 women
remained through 2001. In order to protect the confidentiality of study participants, all
respondents are identified by pseudonyms.
This theoretical sampling strategy yielded a self-selected convenience sample from a
specific subset of the urban welfare population. As we have detailed elsewhere (Scott, London,
and Hurst (2005; Table 1), approximately 55% of the 38 women who constitute the sample are
African American, and the remainder White. At the baseline interview, the women ranged in age
from 19 - 50 years, with a mean age of 31.6 years. Almost two thirds had a high school diploma
or GED, and less than 20% were married and living with their spouse. Three women who were
separated and did not live with their spouse were categorized as not married. At baseline, these
women had between 1 and 5 children under the age of 18 living with them, with an average of
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2.2 children; all of the women received welfare when they entered the study and about one in
four did some work for pay.
To conduct the analysis for this paper, we employed a traditional grounded theory
approach (Glaser and Straus 1967). Over the course of the larger project from which these data
are drawn, trained research assistants coded all data from all interviews using 22 primary codes
and subcodes defined by the literature and our core research questions. We used the verbatim
transcript data collected in the ―Material Hardship‖ code as the starting point for our analysis.
We analyzed these data in relation to each of the five domains of material hardship that are the
subject of this investigation. Within each domain, we identified all of the strategies that were
used by the women and wrote memos summarizing those within-domain approaches to
preventing and mitigating hardship. We then read the memos together in order to identify key
themes and similarities and differences across hardship domains. This analytic approach allowed
us to identify patterns related to women‘s strategies for mitigating material hardships in their
own and their children‘s lives and the circumstances under which material hardships of various
types emerged despite those efforts.
Results
In our analysis of the in-depth interview data, we found three broad categories that
encompass the strategies that low-income families pursued to try to mitigate hardship in their
families: (1) reliance on personal networks of family and friends; (2) social program
participation; and (3) individual strategies. Some strategies were easily implemented, while
others required a great deal of creativity and time; some strategies were not uniquely employed
by low-income households, while others reflected the desperation of the situation. Across the
domains of hardship, respondents often employed aspects of all three approaches to mitigating
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hardship. However, within each domain one approach tended to be preferred and the others were
employed as secondary responses to the threat or existence of hardship. In this paper, we
organize the presentation of results by hardship type. We examine therein the intricate juggling
act and concerted effort required to prevent or diminish hardship, which provides direct evidence
of the extent of women‘s engaged mothering and persistent personal responsibility in taking care
of their dependents.
Housing Hardship
Poor housing conditions, multiple moves, and the stress of living in dangerous
neighborhoods that lacked services constituted the norm for many of the women we interviewed
in Cleveland between 1997 and 2001. Twelve women lived in severe housing conditions for
some or all of the study. The housing problems they cited were many and included: broken
windows, doors, and screens; electrical and plumbing problems; leaky rooftops or leaky pipes
and attendant problems with stained and rotting drywall and ceilings; infestations of mold,
insects, and/or rodents; malfunctioning furnaces and lack of heat; incomplete renovations to
bathrooms and kitchens; exposed electrical sockets; no working stove or refrigerator; and broken
locks. When they expressed concern about their neighborhoods, they typically cited drug
dealing, abandoned properties, lack of safe places for children to play, and concerns about street
violence and gang activity. All but three women moved one or more times over the course of the
four years during which we interviewed them.
Many women engaged multiple strategies to reduce their housing hardship, although they
were often unable to improve their housing conditions or avoid hardships completely. The
strategies that led to the best outcomes were reliance on network members by renting from them
or doubling up and use of housing subsidies (primarily Section 8); both of these strategies
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provided substantial protection from the worst housing conditions. Finally, their individual
strategies reveal the hard work they were willing to do in order to alleviate housing hardship.
These strategies included moves to new housing, trying to convince landlords to fix problems,
and/or fixing problems themselves. Moving in search of better housing was a successful strategy
in some instances, but not in others. For all of the families, moving meant considerable
instability and disruption to their and their children‘s lives. Fixing housing problems often
constituted a desperate last resort that was initiated after unsuccessfully attempting to get a
landlord to respond. Lawsuits against inactive landlords did not have positive outcomes for the
women we interviewed. Rather, they typically meant that residents lost their housing, even when
a court sided with the plaintiff and ordered the landlord to do the repairs.
Twenty respondents described what they felt was fairly decent housing. Reliance on
network members gave some respondents access to housing with few problems and sometimes
offered them the greatest housing stability. With one exception, women who rented from family
or network members described their housing as adequate, having few or no problems. Rochelle
rented the upstairs apartment of her mother‘s house at the time of the first and second interviews.
Her mother lived downstairs and Rochelle joked when she said she was satisfied with the quality
of her housing: ―I‘ve got an excellent landlady.‖ When her children broke a window, she
planned to fix it herself. Renting from her mother did not alleviate all hardships—as we discuss
below, Rochelle had difficulties paying her utility bills and had her electricity shut off on more
than one occasion. With assistance from a Section 8 subsidy, Rochelle moved by our third
annual interview with her. Although she found her new apartment to be of similar quality, she
was not satisfied with the neighborhood. She told the interviewer: ―The kids don‘t have too
much to play around because it‘s a main street…no playgrounds, just fields….It‘s the ghetto.
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The buildings, abandoned parks, you know, lots, you know?‖ She reported that there was also
gang activity in the neighborhood, so she kept close tabs on her children to prevent their
involvement.
Susan, who had one of the best employment situations and highest incomes of any
woman in the sample, reported that her housing quality was high and that she was satisfied with
her neighborhood. She rented a house from her father-in-law and her rent was quite reasonable:
it increased from $200 to $300 per month over the course of the study. Susan described a
number of housing problems during our second annual interview with her. These included
roaches, a leaky roof, a faulty furnace, a malfunctioning stove, and a broken window. But, she
indicated that she, her brother, or her father-in-law had fixed or were fixing all of the problems.
These repairs and improvements happened around the same time that her rent went up, so
perhaps they were part of an intra-familial exchange of resources that was mutually beneficial for
her, her children, and her father-in-law.
A few respondents doubled up with network members. This strategy may have helped
some women and their children avoid severe housing hardships, but it did not necessarily
eliminate housing or other types of hardship from their lived experience. Geraldine lived with
her mother throughout the study. She reported that the housing quality was good, but the
neighborhood was dangerous: ―This neighborhood sucks. It‘s the ghetto. I dream about
moving.‖ Given the considerable drug activity in the neighborhood, Geraldine worried about
being ―in the wrong place at the wrong time.‖ During our third annual interview with her, she
told the interviewer that she had ―a lot of restless nights….I be scared to walk down the street.‖
Hallie, one of the youngest women in the sample, moved numerous times from one
relative‘s household to another over the course of the study, but, as we describe in more detail
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later in our discussion of medical hardship, she also spent some time living out of a motel in
quite dire circumstances. Prior to the initial move in with her parents that we observed, Hallie
had lived on her own in an apartment infested with rats, mice, and roaches, with leaky plumbing,
and a landlord who fixed nothing but broken windows. She could not afford to live on her own
in a better apartment, so she decided to move in with her parents. When her sister moved into
the household with her new baby, the overcrowding prompted conflict and Hallie found it too
stressful. She then moved in with her brother and his family. Despite the fact there were eight
children in the duplex, four of whom lived in her brother‘s apartment, Hallie found it less
stressful there than at her parents. It was, nonetheless, difficult, but she still couldn‘t afford a
place of her own: ―If I was going to rent a place of my own with Austin [her son], I would have
to give up my whole check plus more in order to just make the rent. And that‘s not counting
utilities or anything like that. So it‘s better to live with a family member.‖ By our third annual
interview with her, Hallie was back with her parents. It‘s not clear whether they made a move
during this time, but for the first time Hallie complained about the conditions of the housing—
mice, roaches, a bathroom floor that was ―falling through the basement,‖ and a sewer that backed
up. The latter housing problem was the only one that the landlord fixed.
Although family networks were a critical source of higher quality housing for some of the
women in our sample, subsidized housing was also crucial for accessing better housing. Eight of
the twenty women who reported living in housing with no or few problems at some point in the
study received housing subsidies, typically Section 8. When there were problems, most of the
women with housing subsidies reported their landlords were responsive. With the assistance of
Section 8, Flora moved from East Cleveland, a highly impoverished inner-city neighborhood, to
Euclid, a mixed-income, more suburban area. She reported that housing quality and
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neighborhood conditions motivated her move. In Euclid, she found a safer, ―more peaceful and
quiet‖ neighborhood with better schools. She reported that it was a good place to raise her
children.
Wanda did not receive Section 8 until the midpoint of the study. She lived in an
apartment that she described as being relatively problem-free in the first year, with the exception
that it had windows that were painted shut. In our second annual interview with her, Wanda
described problems with mice and roaches, which the landlord addressed; however, a number of
other problems had gone unaddressed: the windows were still painted shut, a furnace was old and
inefficient, water damage from a flood in her upstairs neighbor‘s apartment had not been
repaired, and one of the doors did not have a lock. Additionally, after her keys were stolen, the
landlord did not replace them for two weeks. She had to threaten him with legal action to get
him to let her back into the house. With assistance from Section 8, Wanda moved into another
apartment with no significant problems. She found her landlord to be highly responsive to any
problems she encountered. In general, Section 8 provided respondents with an important buffer
against homelessness due to inability to pay the rent and against the more severe housing
conditions that many of the women who did not have family support or housing subsidies faced.
Finally, in addition to reliance on family and subsidy program participation, the women
with whom we spoke engaged in a range of individual strategies to improve their housing
quality: all but three respondents moved at least once during the course of the study, typically in
search of better housing; many worked hard at advocating for themselves and trying to convince
landlords to do repairs on the property they were renting; and the women often fixed problems
themselves. Many employed all of these strategies at different times.
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Sarah, who received a Section 8 housing subsidy, and Gloria both moved to single family
homes over the course of the study. In our first interview with her, Sarah indicated that her
apartment had been roach- and rodent-infested, but that her landlord had taken care of the
problem. She stated she wanted to live in a single-family home and by the second annual
interview she had moved to a house with no problems, in a neighborhood she thought was safer
because it had less drug activity. When we first met Gloria, she lived in an apartment that she
reported was a major improvement over her previous residence. It only had electrical problems,
―switches, wires, hanging out the wall.‖ Her neighbors were ―struggling,‖ as she put it, and she
commented on the drug activity in the neighborhood: ―The guys around here sell drugs…they
call this the Wasteland. Little kids ain‘t got enough front yard to play on, so they stay on the
sidewalk. And then somebody ran up the sidewalk and ran them over, you know?‖ By our
second annual interview with her, Gloria had moved her children to a single family home with a
yard in a neighborhood with less drug activity. She reported no problems in her new house.
Wendy moved between the first and second annual interviews because she found her
living conditions intolerable. The problems were many: insects, a bathroom sink that didn‘t
work, mold, shoddy wiring, broken locks and doors, and lead paint. The landlord was aware of
the problems, but was only willing to address the insect problem. She took her landlord to court,
but this resulted in her eviction rather than repairs to the apartment. She found a place that was
in good condition, but in a neighborhood with considerably more drug activity, as well as more
gang activity and violence.
Janice lived in a house infested by both mice and roaches. She tried to tackle this
problem herself by spraying, but had little success. In fact, our interviewer recorded in her
fieldnotes that during the interview a roach crawled between the pages of the interview guide on
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the kitchen table and several roaches were seen crawling on the walls and floor. Asked why her
landlady had not addressed the problem, Janice replied: ―She‘s a slum landlady…She doesn‘t
want to spend money or she doesn‘t have the time to deal with it.‖ Janice also said there were
several broken windows, electrical problems, holes in the walls, and that the bathroom was in
terrible condition. She had fixed one of the windows herself and planned to fix the others even
though she would not be reimbursed for the expense of these repairs. But, she couldn‘t fix the
bathroom herself: ―The floor is ready to fall in. The toilet blocks up and you have to keep
plunging it. The bathtub is up on cinder blocks. This place is a mess. The landlady keeps
saying, ‗I‘m gonna get to it, I‘m gonna get to it,‘ you know. She‘s gonna bring us a bath tub and
she still hasn‘t made it, since I moved here [two years prior].‖ Challenging the landlord to
address these housing problems got Janice nowhere.
Cindy‘s circumstances were similar. She commented: ―[The broken windows] are duct
taped up, boarded up, I‘ve cardboarded it up. When he fixes windows, you can tell, he duct
tapes them…In January, we had the bad snow storm, it kept freezing and going down. We had
an icicle maybe about three feet wide. It froze and it broke and it went down my back window, it
broke one of the windows, the window is still boarded up.‖ With an unresponsive landlord,
Cindy tried to address some of the problems herself, but they were bigger than her budget and
available time and beyond her expertise and skills.
Bill-Paying Hardship
Unlike other hardships, the consequences of bill-paying hardships are rarely immediate.
When residents are late in a payment on a utility or phone bill, most companies and landlords
will allow them to make partial payments in order to avoid eviction or utility termination.
However, like housing hardship, once the consequence for nonpayment has been triggered, the
19
entire household experiences the impact. Furthermore, there may be legal consequences for
extended nonpayment, as well as involvement with a collection agency and damage to individual
credit ratings.
Thirty-one women reported some difficulty in paying essential bills, such as rent or
mortgage, gas or electric utilities, and telephone service. However, due to careful juggling of
finances, assistance from social service programs, and the intervention of friends and family,
evictions and utility terminations were relatively rare. When utility terminations did occur,
however, they had devastating effects on the home environment. Telephone terminations, in
contrast, were more likely to occur more regularly and over longer periods of time. For some
women, telephone disconnection caused emotional distress because they were unable to maintain
contact with their children while they were at work and because they worried about being unable
to telephone for help in the case of an emergency.
In our interviews, we found that the most common strategy to alleviate bill hardship was
an individual strategy unique to this hardship: bill juggling and partial payment. Nineteen
women did not pay the full amount of the utility bill until a shut-off notice was received. For
example, Gayle regularly paid only enough on her utility bills to keep them from being shut-off.
Even though she had received several shut off notices, through carefully-timed strategic partial
payments, none of her utilities had actually been terminated. In order to be successful at this
strategy, a high level of attentiveness to financial management is necessary. The payments have
to be high enough to induce the landlord or utility to continue service and must convey the
impression that full payment is forthcoming if not imminent. The penalty for misjudging the
minimum payment necessary is that the service is terminated, often leading to a hefty
reconnection fee, as well as possible legal action.
20
In addition to partial payment and bill juggling, women employed other individual
strategies related to bill-paying hardship. For example, several women who had medical
problems that required regular asthma treatment from an electric powered device or had children
who required such treatment were able to petition the utility company for a continuation of
service despite their history of nonpayment. Georgia explained: ―They can‘t cut my electric off,
because I got a medical document. I got asthma and the light company can‘t cut my lights off
‗cause I need my machine.‖ In one instance, a women strategically used nonpayment of rent as a
strategy for addressing housing hardship. Gayle and her daughters were living in relatively poor
housing conditions with a serious roach infestation problem in addition to broken windows,
exposed electrical wires, and a broken heating system. She reported that she had not paid her
rent for a month and was not planning to do so; she said that in order to get into the Section 8
housing subsidy program to which she had applied she had to receive an eviction notice from the
landlord. She was not paying her rent in hopes of getting evicted, which would enable her to
move to better housing. Thus, while eligibility requirements for formal social programs
sometimes created perverse incentives, this demonstrates the lengths to which some women will
go to try to mitigate hardship in their families.
The second most common approach to preventing or mitigating bill-paying hardship was
reliance on public programs to cover heat and other utility costs. Fifteen women used this
strategy. Eight households that experienced problems paying their utilities turned to the LowIncome Heat Assistance Emergency Program (LIHEAP), which provides direct assistance with
winter heating or summer cooling bills for the low-income and elderly. Seven women
participated in the Percentage of Income Plan (PIP) directly through the utility company. Some
combined both LIHEAP and PIP to keep their utilities on. For example, Tanya‘s electric service
21
was nearly shut off, but emergency HEAP paid her overdue balance and she was able to get on
PIP for subsequent months. However, reflecting in part the absence of programs to support
phone access, she allowed her phone service to be shut off twice due to bill non-payment. Each
time it was reconnected she had to pay a substantial re-connection fee.
The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is another formal social program that acted as an
important buffer against utility disconnection. Margie is the mother of three children, the
youngest an 11 year old with extreme asthma. After not being able to pay her electric bill for
several months and receiving a shut-off notice from the utility company, she used her income tax
refund, which included the EITC, to pay off the bill and avoid termination. She had not allowed
her phone bill to go unpaid during this time because she felt that it was vital that her asthmatic
daughter have a way to call for help in the event of an attack.
The third strategy employed by seven women was reliance on network support, primarily
family members or occasionally ex-boyfriends/husbands, but never friends, for assistance. When
families did offer support, it was not always immediately upon termination. For example, Janice,
who spent her own money fixing broken windows and addressing other housing problems that
her landlady would not fix, had her phone disconnected for 4-5 months. Because of the high
unpaid balance on her account she could not have phone service established in her own name.
Janice‘s mother helped her out by putting the phone in her name. Sometimes, network support
was necessary on a regular basis. For example, early in the study, Susan was enrolled in school
to get a nursing degree and had two teen-age sons to support. Her mother paid her telephone bill
each month while Susan was finishing school; that arrangement ended once Susan became
employed. As discussed previously in the section on housing hardship, other women reported
living with family members to share daily living expenses, including rent and utility costs. But,
22
as noted previously with respect to Rochelle, such doubling up did not necessary eliminate utility
and phone bill-related hardships.
When ex-boyfriends/husbands helped pay bills it often created conflicts or potential
problems for women. For example, early in the study, Katie still received financial assistance
from the father of her youngest two children, who had abused her physically when they were
living together. This financial reliance not only forced her into contact with her formerly abusive
boyfriend, but also led her to lie to her welfare caseworker about her knowledge of his
whereabouts. She told our interviewer: ―You know, he helps me pay my lights and gas and my
phone bill. I can‘t tell welfare that. I gotta tell welfare, ‗oh yeah, I don‘t know where he‘s at and
blah, blah, blah.‘ ‗Cause, I even dare tell them that he gives me any money, then, you know, they
cut you off.‖ As we note below in the discussion of food hardship, at one point during the study,
Katie lost her TANF and Food Stamps because she did comply with paternity establishment
procedures for her children. Her dependence on this her former boyfriend for assistance with her
bills may have made her reluctant to push him to comply with this process if he didn‘t want to do
so. Thus, she was able to address one domain of hardship through her relationship with this man,
but that did not prevent her from experiencing hardship in another domain as a consequence.
Food Hardship
Food hardship as an indicator of material well-being has several features that distinguish
it in some ways from other hardship types. First, food consumption is very sensitive to income
fluctuations in that small amounts of money may be all that is required to improve or worsen the
experience of food hardships. In contrast, some other hardships require much higher income
thresholds to change. Second, perhaps as a result of the low threshold for remediation, food
hardships are often experienced over a very short time span such as a day or two a month. Many
23
households report experiencing food shortages only at the end of the month after their Food
Stamp allotment is consumed (Wilde and Ranney 2003). Third, food needs are recurrent and
food stores are not durable as are things like clothing, which means that there is continual
pressure on household budgets to provide for food. Finally, unlike housing and bill-paying
hardships, food hardships may not be spread equally over the family unit. It is clear that adults
will often cut back on food for themselves in order to allow their children to eat.
Among the different forms of material hardship considered in this paper, previous
research has perhaps paid the most analytic attention to the measurement of food hardships.
While the often-used food insufficiency measure only captures households who report
―sometimes‖ or ―often‖ not having enough food to eat, the more expansive food security
measure, designed by the USDA and fielded annually in the CPS, encompasses households who
are uncertain about their ability to supply sufficient food for their household through normal
channels (Nord et al. 2007). For the purposes of this study, we coded a household as
experiencing food hardships if they report supplementing their food supply through the use of
food pantries or friends and family, even if they did not report missing meals. Only 7 women in
the sample did not report any food hardship over the course of the study, although the depth and
length of the food hardship they reported varied. For some women, the food hardship was
irregular and easily remedied by going to a family member‘s house to eat at the end of the month
or using food pantries a few times a year. Other women, however, reported actual food
shortages in which family members, usually adults, went without food for days at a time.
In order of importance, the strategies the women employed to mitigate food hardship
were: reliance on social programs, especially Food Stamps, but also state-subsidized food banks
or church food pantry or meal programs; reliance on personal networks of family and friends;
24
and reliance on individual strategies. Formal participation in social programs provided the
greatest buffer against food hardships. Food Stamps comprised the foundation of the household
food supply with other sources used to fill in when Food Stamps ran out, typically in the last
week of the month. Instability in Food Stamps, either from administrative error or a failure to
meet recertification requirements, often resulted in dire circumstance. For example, at the
baseline interview, Katie described a time in the preceding year when she was cut off from
TANF and Food Stamp benefits as the one of the most difficult times in her life. Katie‘s
caseworker terminated her benefits because Katie had not complied with paternity establishment
for her two children. At the time, Katie was pregnant with her third child, experiencing domestic
violence from the father, and had no means of support. After receiving assistance from a
domestic violence shelter, Katie reapplied for Food Stamp benefits and began receiving them
again.
Use of food banks varied considerably in the sample. Some women who were
experiencing hardships of one type or another refused to use food banks, and the reasons they
cited were various; several women explicitly said that they would not use food banks because
they were for people who really needed them. Heather, who experienced multiple forms of
material hardship over the course of the study, told the interviewer: ―I won‘t do that [use a food
bank] unless I necessarily have to…To me that‘s not right. I don‘t care if I even have one pack of
hamburger and something else to make, make with it. I will not go.‖ Other women reported
using food banks regularly and included food banks as part of their monthly food supply. When
Food Stamps ran out towards the end of the month, the first place many women turned was to a
local food bank. However, each food bank had its own set of eligibility and benefit guidelines,
which some women were more effective at mastering than others. For example, in one case,
25
Linda supplemented her Food Stamp benefits with food from the bank where she volunteered.
While customers were allowed one bag per month, volunteers received two bags per month. She
waited until the end of the month when food was scarce and she had no more stamps to take
home her bags of food. Other women reported relying upon food banks so that they could trade
their Food Stamps for transportation or clothing; these tradeoffs were part of their sustained
efforts to prevent or mitigate hardship across multiple distinct domains.
While social programs are universally available to all who meet eligibility requirements,
one difference between those who experienced material hardship and those who did not is the
extent of the social support network they could draw upon. Having family members with
financial resources provided an important source of help. When Alice and her children had their
Medicaid and Food Stamps terminated because she failed to provide sufficient documentation to
her caseworker, she had a difficult time securing an adequate food supply for her family. She
credited her ability to make it through to scrimping on food and accepting help from others: ―We
probably could of ate more once or twice…but my mother and them, spontaneously showed up
at my house with a whole bunch of bags from the grocery store. And I didn‘t complain.‖
The women in our sample reported using some individual strategies that are commonly
employed by many American families, such as cutting coupons, looking for sales, being choosey
about the grocery store where they shop, and not eating the types of foods they desired.
However, even these typical cost-cutting strategies were more difficult to implement for these
low-income women. Geraldine, who lived within walking distance of a grocery store that she
described as ―nasty‖ and ―disgusting,‖ tried to do her grocery shopping in other neighborhoods
whenever possible. However, because she didn‘t have a car, she often had to shop at the store
that was close by.
26
While many middle-class families cannot afford to eat the types of food that would like
all the time, this takes on different meaning in low-income households. At a time when public
health officials are trying to encourage the public to eat more fresh fruits and vegetables (Guthrie
et al. 2007), Wendy reports that her children like fresh fruits and vegetables but that she often
purchases only canned versions of these foods in order to buy enough food for the month. In
order to increase the variety of foods that her kids can have over the summer months, she pools
resources with a friend so her children can have ―all the food they want, all the treats they want.‖
One common strategy used by low-income households, which is likely not regularly
employed by middle class households, is to cut back on the size of the meals served or even to go
without food. Most often, mothers reported that they or other adults in the household did not eat
in order to make certain that there was enough food for the children in the household. Kathy
explains: ―Sometimes we just might not make lunch, but there was always something for
breakfast and something for dinner…Sometimes I would skimp or cut back a bit. I would eat but
not as, not a very large portion of food for myself. But, I wouldn‘t skimp with the child…not for
her, unless we absolutely—I might give her, I might give her a little less but we weren‘t
starving…I would never allow her to go an entire day with no food. We wouldn‘t allow that!‖
Other strategies that were less frequently reported include stealing food from work,
sending children to stay with family members, earning money for food from donating plasma
and recycling cans, and smoking more to curb appetite. These strategies would seem alien to
most middle-class mothers and indicate the dire straits the mothers found themselves in. They
also underline the mother‘s commitment to shield their children from experiencing this form of
hardship.
Medical Hardship
27
Most of the women we interviewed reported either no or only minor medical hardship,
and small out-of-pocket expenses related to health care, although almost none had access to
private health insurance through their work or that of a spouse. This was a consequence of their
access to public insurance: because they were on TANF when we began interviewing them they
were also covered by Medicaid, and they worked hard throughout the study to continue their
access to Medicaid for themselves and their children. Mothers used the maintenance of
Medicaid through continued TANF receipt, activation of the one-year transitional benefit that
was available to those who left welfare for work, or linkage to SCHIP for their children as their
primary strategy for mitigating medical hardships. Some of the women reported that a spouse or
child received SSI Disability, which provided some additional, health-related state support to the
household. Most indicated that they also needed to employ various network- and individualbased strategies to try to cope with the difficulties brought by gaps in coverage or periods of
work- or sanction-related loss of insurance. When their network-based and individual strategies
were unavailable or inadequate, medical hardships emerged.
The mothers with whom we spoke were well-aware of the importance of maintaining
Medicaid benefits. As Kathy noted: ―The one good part about welfare is the medical coverage,
your HMO, your benefits…I think sometimes that‘s why most poor people are afraid to get off
of welfare and want to remain on it - not because they‘re really lazy, they don‘t want a job, but
[because] when they take a job, a lot of places, when they pay a low salary, you don‘t get
medical benefits.‖ Gayle was concerned that she would not have adequate health insurance for
her daughter after her one-year transitional Medicaid benefit ran out. She said: ―They give me
12 months of medical. It‘s not gonna be [enough]. My daughter‘s at the age right now, she just
wiped out her bike. She messed up her shoulder and her back, her leg, her head. You know, if
28
she would‘ve had to get stitches and I didn‘t have medical coverage...My job doesn‘t offer any
hospitalization or nothing. What am I supposed to do?‖ Our interviews make clear that the
mothers worried a lot about not being able to mitigate medical hardship in their children‘s lives
and that the maintenance of Medicaid, even if that meant staying on welfare, was critical to their
ability to do so.
Although the maintenance of state support via Medicaid, and to a lesser extent SSI
Disability, was fundamental to women‘s largely successful efforts to mitigate major medical
hardships in their families, sometimes there were gaps in coverage and women had to rely on
their social networks and individual actions to prevent medical hardship from emerging, or they
went without some form of needed care.
Women described borrowing money from a relative, friend, or employer to purchase a
needed prescription or over-the-counter medication. For example, Rochelle explained that there
was a time when she needed over-the-counter medicine and could not afford it: ―That was a trip,
boy. I had to go out here in the snow and rain, just to dig some money to get it [from] the people
that I knew.‖ Gloria indicated that she and her children were all covered by Medicaid and had
not experienced health-related hardship; however, when she could not afford needed over-thecounter medications, then she would borrow from her grandmother or friends to purchase them.
Sometimes the network extended beyond friends and family: Alice borrowed money from her
employer to get a needed over-the-counter medication: ―I had to spend $50 [on lice medication
for her family], didn‘t have no money. I had to put it on my tab at work, you know, cause I work
at a bar so we get a tab... So they put $50 on my tab at work, to deduct out my next check. But,
they gave the money and I had to go buy the Nix and the spray for everything and wash
everything. Oh my god! What a wild thing, you know?‖ Finally, Jackie‘s strategies illustrate
29
the desperation some women felt. She lost her health insurance while sanctioned by the welfare
office and resorted to taking medications that had been prescribed for her daughter. She told the
interviewer: ―I need to see a doctor now...but I haven‘t been able to go...Yeah, ‗cause I been
taking her medicine, I been taking her pain pills, I‘m not covered, you know? When she [her
daughter] went to the surgery and stuff and she didn‘t take, she didn‘t want to take ‗em. So she
left ‗em on the shelf, I been taking her pain pills, her antibiotics...I don‘t know.‖ Potentially
unsafe and ineffective, this strategy indicates the hardship that can result from a lack of access to
health insurance, network-based financial support, and individual resources.
Beyond state support and network-based strategies to fill gaps in coverage and mitigate
medical hardships, women also made a variety of individual decisions about resource allocation
and took various actions to try to meet the health care needs of their families. These individual
strategies included using earned income to pay for needed medicines or treatments, even if that
meant not paying other bills temporarily, and waiting for a period of insurance to begin to stock
up on medications that would be covered but would otherwise have to be paid out-of-pocket.
The individual strategies women employed also included some that are unlikely to be
used by persons in less-constrained economic circumstances. When Georgia was not able to
afford aspirin for her children when they were sick, she stole it from the store: ―I needed
children‘s Tylenol and I couldn‘t go buy none, so I went and stole some. Five finger discount.
Yeah. Open it up, take it out the box, and put the box back on the shelf. Now when are stores
gonna figure that shit out? They put the coder on the outside of the box.‖ Other women
described accumulating hospital bills that they don‘t pay. Tamara told the interviewer that she
wanted to go to work, but was extremely worried about losing her health coverage when she
went to work. She said that she owed over $700 for a hospital bill that she accumulated during a
30
time that she was working and did not have health insurance. She said that she could not afford
to pay it, but that even if she had the money she would not pay it. In a later interview, she said
that if she or her son needed health treatment that she could not afford, then she would go to the
hospital or clinic and tell them to bill her. She said that she already owed money to one hospital
that she did not intend to pay and she did not mind owing more.
Although the patchwork of state, network-based, and individual strategies often
prevented or reduced substantially medical hardships in the lives of these women and their
families, many women spoke of unmet needs for care in their families. Women often noted that
certain over-the-counter or prescription medications were not covered at all or completely and
that they went without out them because they could not afford them. These included such items
as the nicotine patch, contraceptives, lice shampoo, asthma medication, pain relievers, and dental
and mental health care.
Melissa lost her health insurance when she was sanctioned. She and her children were
without health care for about four months. During that time, Melissa stopped her birth control
and she did not buy medicine for her son who had ADHD. Debbie explained that she did
without birth control pills because she could not afford to get the treatment that the doctor
wanted her to get in order to get the prescription: ―Well, I‘m kinda going without, going without
birth control pills this month and next month. ‗Cause I have to have an ultrasound and I don‘t
really have the money to pay for that...[The doctor] says I have like those little cysts...So I have
to, and it‘s hard to detect cancer. But she don‘t want to put me on, keep me on the hormones.‖
Heather, who had avoided housing hardship by repeatedly moving in with family
members, was covered by Medicaid but ended up foregoing care for her infant because she could
not afford it. Heather had a baby during the course of the study. The baby was on a heart
31
monitor in the hospital and for several weeks after she went ―home.‖ Due to financial difficulty,
Heather and the father of the child, Jimmy, were living in a hotel room, hustling each day to
come up with enough money to pay the room bill. The baby had been prescribed caffeine
treatments to help stimulate her heart, but that treatment was not covered by Medicaid. Due to
their financial instability, Heather and Jimmy could not afford the caffeine treatments, thus they
stopped giving them to the baby: ―It was pure caffeine and that was to keep her heart rate
up...But one day, we couldn‘t afford to get the refill. And it was like a couple days before we,
we would have any money, and that couple days she was fine without it. So I told Jimmy, ‗she
doesn‘t need them.‘ And then when I took her to the doctor I told him, ‗she‘s doing good
without it‘ and he told me ‗fine, if you think she‘s doing good without it, then leave her off it, but
to remember that if something happens, then it would be on you, because you‘re the one that
took her off of it.‘ But she‘s been fine since and that‘s been three months ago.‖
Clothing Hardship
Unlike the other domains of hardship in which state supports figure significantly if not
centrally in the prevention or mitigation of hardship in the family, in the case of clothing
hardship, network-based and individual strategies predominated. Mothers reported limited
access to state-subsidized support for clothing, which generally came in the form of a voucher
from the welfare office. More commonly, they reported that family and friends provided gifts of
clothing. Such gifts were often given in the context of Christmas or birthday presents from
grandmothers directly to their grandchildren, although some friends and other relatives also
provided hand-me-downs for newborns or clothes for older children. Sometimes, women also
said they borrowed money to buy clothing or indicated that they had received clothes from
churches and charitable organizations that provide free clothing to needy families. As was the
32
case with other hardships, mothers also employed a variety of individual strategies to prevent
clothing hardships. Often, these strategies were employed to try to mitigate clothing hardships
for children, and women tended to avoid purchases for themselves so that they had more
resources to expend on their children‘s clothing needs. Sometimes, the strategies they utilized
were like those used in families with more economic resources, while other strategies were less
normatively-acceptable and would likely not be used except by persons in relatively desperate
circumstances.
A few mothers reported that they received vouchers from the welfare office for clothing.
Karen and Debbie reported that they got clothing vouchers from welfare to buy school clothes
for her kids. When women needed clothing for work, a few lucky ones, like Tasha, got a
Prevention, Retention, and Contingency (PRC) grant from welfare. Others were not so lucky.
Hallie was told that she had to wait until the fall when school started, and Debbie was explicitly
told that she could not use the voucher for herself, despite her need for dress clothes for work: ―I
need like, I have to dress business attire and try, put heels on and stretch pants. I dress it up, but
I just need some clothes, some dress clothes.‖ Although she was turned down the first time, she
remained hopeful that she might be able to get clothing assistance for herself from the state: ―I‘m
gonna try it again...if they see I really need it, maybe they‘ll help me.‖
However, because the government clothing vouchers that these women received were not
entitlements (they required the women to make applications and consult with caseworkers), it
was much more common for women to use a variety of network-based strategies to mitigate
clothing hardships in their households. For example, their children received gifts of clothing,
which eased mothers‘ burden. Kathy said: ―Well my sister, sometimes, she just come over and
just give me clothes, you know, for nothin‘.‖ Melissa said that her friend gave her several outfits
33
for her youngest son; she estimates this saved her about $200 dollars. Sarah told us that she had
been unable to pay for clothing for her children in a while because she was trying to get her bills
paid off, but that her children did not go without clothes because their great-grandmother bought
them for them. Women also reported that when family members covered other expenses for
them, it allowed them to purchase clothing. Glenda shared a duplex with her parents, who were
―lenient‖ with her about how much rent she paid. Thus, Glenda, could afford shoes for her
children (―[which are] the only thing I buy new‖) by cutting back on how much rent she paid to
her parents.
Beyond direct transfers of money for clothes or gifts of clothes from relatives and friends,
several women reported other kinds of network-based strategies for mitigating clothing hardships
in their families. Rochelle employed a strategy that many would deem fraudulent and
objectionable: ―I can go to these little churches and get food from them, right? So, when I have
enough stocked up, I can use my stamps...I give my aunt my stamps and she goes and buys
clothing for me.‖ In this way, and with the assistance of a food bank and her aunt, she was able
to meet her family‘s needs for both food and clothing. Other women relied on clothing donated
through a church, school (for a disabled adolescent child), or community-based charitable
organizations. Kathy said: ―Well, sometimes when we go to church, if we needed help real bad
the church would give us clothes.‖ Georgia and Sarah said they visited the Salvation Army to
get some free clothes, including winter coats for her two sons.
Our data indicate that women did considerable amounts of work to mitigate clothing
hardships in their families. Beyond the efforts described thus far, they also employed other
individual resource allocation strategies to help reduce clothing hardships. These included
waiting to get tax returns to purchase clothing, delaying purchases for some period of time in
34
order to save up enough money to pay for them, paying for new clothes with increased earnings,
buying clothing at second-hand and thrift stores, not paying other bills in order to be able to
afford needed clothing, and bouncing checks to buy needed clothing. Often, these strategies
were employed to try to mitigate clothing hardships for children. As Glenda defiantly told her
mother when she confronted her about bouncing checks to pay for her children‘s school clothes:
―Well, you know, if I have to go to jail ‗cause I done bounced a few checks, I said, it will be well
worth it, cause I did it for my kids.‖
Consistent with this notion of putting children‘s needs ahead of their own, many mothers
reported that they went without new or needed clothes so that their children would not have to do
so. Gayle said that she had to go often without clothing she felt she needed in order to be able to
buy the clothing that her daughter needed and wanted. Linda reported that she and her husband
went without clothing all the time, but that their daughters rarely did; she utilized thrift stores
and church rummages to get discounted and free clothing for her family. Wendy went without a
winter coat to make sure there was enough money to buy food for her family, but she said that
her children have not gone without clothing. Georgia said that she did without basic necessities,
but that her child would not do without: ―Can‘t nobody walk in my house and say I don‘t take
care of my kids, they can say I‘m dunky, I‘m a packrat, I don‘t clean…But I will cook and I will
wash their clothes ‗cause they‘re going to be fed and look clean and neat when they go
somewhere with me. I could look like a bum, my shoes can be ran over, but you would never
see my baby looking like that.‖ By utilizing this intra-household resource allocation strategy,
these mothers were able to reduce clothing hardship for their children, while they increased it for
themselves and sometimes their husbands.
35
Although women used a variety of strategies to mitigate clothing hardships in their
families, such hardships were often reported by women for themselves, and sometimes for their
children. Often, women did without winter clothing. Kathy said that she and her children often
go without needed clothing because they could not afford it: ―We need undergarments and shoes
maybe...We need underwear.‖ She went on to say: ―There‘s things we need that we can‘t have
or whatever because we don‘t have the money to get them...maybe we couldn‘t even buy a pair
of shoes or something because we were that low. And welfare doesn‘t give you money for
material things...We scrimp and pinch what we can now.‖ Jannelle said she and her family had
done without needed clothing in the previous year. She explained, ―Yeah, a lot of things...They
don‘t [get], you know, brand name shoes, coats...and a lot of stuff is hand me down from [my
oldest daughter] to them. You know, things like that. And me, this winter, I went without a
winter coat up until maybe January. I didn‘t have a winter coat, but it was okay.‖ In a later
interview, Jannelle again indicated that she did without a winter coat because she could not
afford one: ―I went through most of winter without a winter coat. I didn‘t get a winter coat ‗til
March; it was on sale. You know, I make myself last on the list of things, you know, because
that‘s my mission, is to be the best mom that I can be.‖
DISCUSSION
In this paper we described the strategies welfare-reliant and working poor women living
in urban neighborhoods of concentrated poverty employ as they labor in and out of the low-wage
labor market to try to ensure that their families‘ basic needs are met with respect to housing, billpaying, food, medical care, and clothing. While we identify three main strategies families use to
cope with scarce financial resources (social program participation, reliance on social networks,
and individual strategies), the dominance of these strategies and their specific applications shift
36
for each domain of hardship. While social programs are the dominant strategies for securing
food and medical care, clothing and housing hardships were best prevented or remedied by
turning to a network of family and friends. In contrast to the other domains of hardship, billpaying hardships were most often addressed by what we term an individual strategy—―bill
juggling.‖ Our data provide substantial evidence that women use multiple strategies to prevent
or mitigate the consequences of hardship in specific domains, while at the same time making
calculated tradeoffs across strategies and domains. Despite their substantial efforts, hardship
often materialized in the lives of the poor women in our sample, and in their children‘s lives.
By describing the strategies that low-income households use to avoid or mitigate specific
domains of hardship, as well as the similarities and differences of the use of strategies across
domains, we make a significant contribution to the literature. In particular, we are able to
describe the complex social processes underlying the mitigation of specific types of material
hardship in low-income households. This evidence provides important context for the findings
reported by Heflin, Sandberg, and Rafail (2009). These authors use confirmatory factor analysis
and nationally representative data to test different conceptual models of material hardship. They
conclude that the domain of experience identified in the literature as ―material hardship‖ does not
identify a single consistent process. Rather, each domain of material hardship identifies an
individual and distinct latent construct. In both survey data and lived experience, poverty-related
material hardships are multiple and require distinct attention.
Our evidence also contributes to the literature in other ways. First, Lee, Slack, and Lewis
(2004) reported that higher levels of perceived social support are associated with significantly
reduced food and perception of hardship overall, while being associated marginally with reduced
rent hardship. We show that network support is critical to hardship prevention and mitigation,
37
but that is varies across domains of hardship. Second, prior literature (Edin and Lein, 1997; Hill
and Kauff 2001) has identified this same set of strategies as being employed by low-income
families, but has not made distinctions regarding their use across different domains of material
hardship. We find that strategies to avoid hardship vary by the type of hardship confronted and
that women make strategic tradeoffs across domains of hardship. Our findings extend the
quantitative research literature in which there has been speculation that such competing
priorities, stark choices, and tradeoffs might be taking place. For example, Lee et al. (2004: 394)
reported: ―Not having a car or driver‘s license is found to decrease rent and utility hardships and
to increase food hardships to a statistically significant degree. One speculation is that there are
competing priorities between rent and utility payments, as well as between car payments and
maintenance. On the other hand, transportation problems may be related to an inability to travel
to grocery stores that offer a better selection and more economical prices, thereby increasing the
risk of food hardship.‖ Finally, our data are more recent that those used in other qualitative
studies and thus reflect the TANF policy period.
Our analyses highlight the amount of work women do to mitigate hardship that is
missing, in some cases by design, from quantitative analyses of material hardship. For example,
the Household Food Security Scale (HFSS) was designed to measure food security, is considered
to be reliable and valid for both individual and population uses (Frongillo 1999), and has been
included in the United State Census Bureau‘s Current Population Survey since 1995 (Carlson,
Andrews & Bickel 1999). By design the HFSS measures whether families are food secure, but it
does not address the effort that is expended to attain food security. The HFSS was developed as
a unidimensional scale using factor analysis and nearly all the items fit onto that factor. The one
general type of item that did not fit the model was ―indicators of coping strategies that a food-
38
insecure or at-risk household might use to improve its food supply from emergency sources, such
as obtaining food from a food bank or borrowing money for food‖ (Carlson, Andrews & Bickel
1999: 512S). Such coping items were explicitly excluded from the scale because they were
viewed by the scale‘s developers as representing a domain that was distinct from food security.
But, our evidence suggests that such efforts are not so easily detached from the domains of
material hardship. Material hardships emerge at the intersections of poverty, social policies, and
the actions taken by families to mitigate hardship. In the absence of such actions, which in
themselves add substantially to the workload of low-income women, measured rates of material
hardships – otherwise known as unmet basic needs – would be higher. This work should be
accounted for in survey measures and public policies.
By investigating qualitatively food and four other domains of hardship we reveal in great
detail the labor involved with coping with limited resources and developing creative strategies
for juggling competing household needs. We find that these largely invisible social processes
suggest neither lazy nor irresponsible behavior. Although it is true that to avoid the worst of the
potential material hardship that can accompany poverty, the women we spoke with were
dependent on a host of critical social programs, network support, and individual strategies. But
in engaging this range of strategies, in varying combinations, to address housing, bill-paying,
food, medical and clothing hardships for themselves and their children, they demonstrated
extraordinary personal responsibility and willingness to work hard to care adequately for their
families. By failing to fully recognize this labor and its implications, poverty knowledge can
unwittingly contribute to the ―rhetoric of perversity‖ which argues that public assistance creates
the very dependency it seeks to eliminate (Somers and Block 2005). By linking the experience
of material hardship with the coping strategies employed to mitigate that experience, this paper
39
counters that tendency and contributes to the understanding of how strategies vary across
domains of material hardship and how intensively women labor to prevent or cope with the
occurrence of hardship.
The current economic downturn gives increased salience to the need to understand how
families cope with scarce financial resources and what they may need to ensure that their
families‘ basic needs are met. While soaring unemployment rates and Food Stamp caseloads are
accompanied by news reports providing narrative accounts about the difficulties families are
facing, systematic collection of data on material hardship is lacking. One area that needs further
illumination is that of how low-income households prioritize among the basic needs (food,
housing, medical care, clothing, utilities). While there are suggestions of competing priorities in
our findings and those Lee et al. (2004), tradeoffs between basic needs are rarely examined in
detail or directly. Recent research suggests that many policies changes affecting low-income
populations often result in stark choices. For example, Jones and Flores (2009: 213) describe the
tradeoffs associated with changes in Medicaid that required increased copayments and premiums
for patients, benefit reductions, and increased documentation requirements for citizen eligibility:
―Financial hardship was cited as a major potential consequence of reform, leading to increased
use of government entitlement programs, greater debt, and bankruptcy…Parents also expressed
concerns about sacrifices they would have to make to pay copayments for their children. Major
sacrifices included food, utility bills, clothing, taking additional jobs, working longer hours, and
cutting back on parental medications. In response to copays and premiums, parents would defer
needed preventive and sick care for children, rely more on charity care, and increase use of the
emergency department. Many parents expressed concern that the reform would negatively
impact overall family well-being.‖ Additional research on these issues and those raised in our
40
work is needed to guide policy-makers in their attempts to ensure that basic needs are met for all
Americans.
41
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