ABSTRACT
Rural poverty is a problem that remains largely overlooked in late 20th Century America. The rural poor are virtually unseen, and offer no major threat to the civil order. In some strange way, the authors have a tendency to romanticize their plight. Despite the fact that nearly half of all Americans officially defined as poor reside in rural areas, the designers of most social, economic, and welfare programs have taken only scant notice until recently. The nation’s principal approach to the alleviation of rural poverty has been a non-policy—the hope that the problem will vanish as a result of continued migration toward the urban centers. Rural poor people tend to be older, less well educated, less adequately housed, and less healthy than their urban counterparts. Their children, when and if the opportunity arises, move into the central cities, where, as often as not, they serve their lifetime in poverty and deprivation.
