Don’t Call Us Out of Name: The Untold Lives of Women and Girls in Poor America

266 Pages·1998·0.846 MB·English

by  Lisa Dodson

don’t call us out of name
Don’t Call Us
Beacon Press
Out of Name
THE UNTOLD LIVES
Lisa Dodson
OF WOMEN AND GIRLS
IN POOR AMERICA
BOSTON
Beacon Press
25Beacon Street
Boston, Massachusetts 02108-2892
www.beacon.org
Beacon Press books
are published under the auspices of
the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.
© 1998by Lisa Dodson
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Annette Van Howe, whose generous
bequest to Beacon Press helped make the publication of this book possible.
03 02 01 00 99 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
This book is printed on recycled acid-free paper that contains at least
20percent postconsumer waste and meets the uncoated paper ansi/niso
specifications for permanence as revised in 1992.
Text design by Wesley B. Tanner/Passim Editions
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dodson, Lisa.
Don’t call us out of name : the untold lives of women and girls in
poor America / Lisa Dodson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
isbn0-8070-4208-0(cloth)
isbn0-8070-4209-9(paper)
1. Poor women—United States. 2. Poor children—United States.
3. Welfare recipients—United States. 4. Public welfare—United
States. 5. Women—United States—Social conditions. 6. Women—
United Sates—Economic conditions. I. Title.
hv1445.d631998
305.42'086'942—dc21 98-16520
Contents
Preface vii
Introduction 1
Chapter One Daughters’ Work 14
Chapter Two Boyfriends, Love, and Sex 50
Chapter Three Choice and Motherhood in Poor America 83
Chapter Four Losses and Loathing in the Welfare Years 114
Chapter Five Moving On: “Don’t Call Me Out of Name” 147
Chapter Six A Common Woman’s Resistance 186
Coda 212
Notes 223
Methodology 241
Selected Bibliography 250
Acknowledgments 255

Preface
More than twenty years ago, I worked in a factory in
Charlestown, Massachusetts, packing crates of candy. I was a
member of the union and worked with its local leadership’s efforts to
improve the factory’s sweatshop conditions, but most of what I
learned about factory work came from the hours I spent listening to
the women who worked there with me. They were quite a combina-
tion of people: Italian women from Boston’s North End and Waltham,
Irish women from all over the city, some Portuguese workers, and then
the tough young newcomers—Irish and African American girls from
Boston’s segregated neighborhoods. These women worked hard all
day, packing and lifting crates in steady rhythm with conveyer belts
that carried the chocolates through refrigerated rooms. At night, they
went home to take care of their families.
Many people were laid off each year. They went on and off wel-
fare propelled by cycles of hiring and layoffs. One day our supervisor,
Joe, posted a sign saying, until further notice, our division of 250
women had to work a sixty-hour week, a speedup which was then
followed by a six-week shutdown. About forty mothers walked out.
Many of them went on welfare. I can remember thinking that these
were not your average welfare recipients.
After my stint in the candy factory, I worked night shift in an elec-
tronics factory while finishing school. There, I listened to more women
discuss their lives. They talked about men, mothers, cooking, family
vii
viii Preface
troubles, and children. And they talked about pivotal events in their
lives, moments which they believed transformed them. Black and Irish
women chatted together smoking cigarettes in an old bathroom, talked
about being beaten, about watching children go to kindergarten, and
about losing someone you love. Italian and Puerto Rican women
traded spicy recipes and spicier stories about rendezvous with lovers.
They talked about evictions, places to buy cheap fresh fruits, and how
the day boss liked to rub up against the new girls who never said any-
thing about it. I objected to this silence, but they told me to be real.
These young women wouldn’t speak out because they were “public
trainees.” They had just come off welfare.
Later, I worked in a community known as the “death zone” because
of a high mortality rate among the people who lived there. As an ob-
stetrics/gynecology nurse, I listened to adolescent girls and women
speak about intimate choices, about men in their lives, about having
babies or trying to stop babies from coming. One woman asked if I
would persuade the doctor to call her workplace to see if she could get
permission to sit down while she cut up chicken parts. She was only
four months pregnant, but nine hours of standing and her feet were al-
ready a mess. We called. They fired her instead. She came back to the
clinic on welfare, anxiously holding out a Medicaid card.
And I remember as though it happened yesterday when a stone-
closed teenager of fifteen, Bernadette, decided to tell me that it was her
foster father who had impregnated her. She finally spoke up because
this man had started to molest her thirteen-year-old foster sister. “It dis-
gusts me that he should start with her,” Bernadette told me, “she’s only
a child.”
Some patterns emerged as I listened. Without any particular expec-
tation of justice, these women and girls were weighing the cost of their
every move and the effect that it would have on a whole constellation
of people to whom they were tied. I remember my young self encour-
aging women not to think so much about their duties to others, to think
Preface ix
more about their own selves, to get mad, to insist on a humane life. One
day a woman, pregnant with her third child, patted my hand to settle
me down. She told me that this was her life and that her most essential
obligation was to tend to a difficult family and to mediate the brutal-
ity around them.
I was many years into these private lessons before I realized that I
needed to do more than listen. I saw that the hard labor which lifts up
families and communities in low-income America requires some seri-
ous publicity to bring it to national attention. But as this book devel-
oped, I gave up the idea that it would fit into the conventions of a pub-
lic policy discourse. The interviews, surveys, observations, and focus
group studies compiled in this research offer an excess of data about
growing up female in poor America. But as it turned out, this is not a
book about welfare reform, teen pregnancy, and work programs.
This is a book about people, about women who are savvy, complex,
and challenging. It’s about people who insistently bring with them their
attachments, attitudes, and loyalties, their colors, intonations, and
their own American histories. I could not find a way to truncate their
content, to prune them into the familiar, not without diminishing these
women, without whitewashing them or amputating the parts of their
lives which they told me they hold most dear.
In the places where the information in this book was gathered—in
parks, hallways, hair salons, health clinics, corner stores, and at the
kitchen tables of low-income America—women tend to talk about
people. They speak about parents, children, partners, losses, and loy-
alties. They debate local changes in their communities, schools, and
streets. They reflect about the way people behave, about race relations,
intolerance, rich peoples’ ways, and they consider the future of a
democracy.
Some of these women persist in detailing a history of individual
pain, stuck deep in their personal trauma. Others brag about their abil-
ity to withstand, to be tough and irreverent. Some speak of their lives
x Preface
as part of a shared legacy, an ethnicity, a race, or a religion, while oth-
ers speak only of fierce individuality.
What they do not talk much about are welfare reforms, get-to-work
rules, family caps, or the latest cutback schemes. They dismiss that
“stuff” as foreign and obdurate. “You mean, the government’s laws,”
they clarify for me. Or “that’s just those politicians’ game,” or “it’s the
white man’s plan.” Such public policy “stuff” is not viewed as rational
nor hopeful, and is never seen as having anything meaningful to do
with peoples’ lives. Millions of women and more millions of children
simply go on about their business, adjusting to what they view as irra-
tional policies, creatively, anxiously, and generally by ignoring the chill-
ing ways of power.
In time this book became a crossing, a class crossing, taking read-
ers into brief fellowship with people who are seldom invited to speak
what they know. It is a book about the lives of daughters, mothers, and
sisters who endlessly handle the mundane and sometimes the mon-
strous tasks of being female and poor in America. And in doing so, they
are raising a large part of a nation.