ABSTRACT
Two seemingly contradictory trends describe the economic status of women in the United States in the 1980s. The first trend shows that increasing numbers of women, along with their children, have incomes that fall below the poverty line (officially less than $ 10,989 per year for a family of four in 1987). The total number of people living in poverty has been increasing consistently since at least 1969, and reached a high of 15.3 million in 1983, and women have constituted a larger and larger percentage of all those classified as being in poverty (Sidel 1986, 11). A 1978 study documented the fact that for each year between 1969 and 1978, 100,000 additional women with children fell below the poverty line. In 1983 two of every three poor adults were women. Women headed over half of all poor families (Stallard, Ehrenreich, and Sklar 1983).
