When Unwed Mothers Marry

Abstract

The promotion of marriage and two-parent families as a strategy to reduce welfare dependency continues to be a major public policy goal of the 1996 welfare reform. Based on the assumption that women will marry employed men and that their earnings will lift poor mothers and their children from public dependency, this objective raises important policy questions. In this article, the authors investigate the extent to which unwed mothers—a large proportion of all welfare mothers—enter into and maintain stable cohabiting and marital relationships with economically attractive men. Using retrospective data on relationship histories for 3,872 women from the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth, the authors examine the marital life course of unwed mothers and document the social and economic characteristics of their partners at midlife. Their marital search model shows that nonmarital childbearing is adversely associated with the ability to marry economically attractive men and maintain long-term marital unions.