ABSTRACT
Research increasingly demonstrates that women comprise the majority of the poverty population. They are especially vulnerable in rural areas, where limited economic opportunity provides few means of escape. Yet the study of women's poverty at the empirical level is seldom matched by theoretical work which explicitly treats gender as a social process. Poverty rates rose for nearly all race/sex groups in the latter half of the recession-prone 1980s. African-American women did close part of the poverty gap relative to other groups by the end of the decade. Rural women's poverty has most often been conceptualized as an empirical phenomenon and has seldom been the object of theoretical work per se. This is doubtless due to the fact that gender and space have not been key themes of the social disciplines. Poverty of people theories direct attention to the social conditions in which deprivation is clearly apparent.
