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Middle Class Women and Bankruptcy
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Elizabeth Warren, the Leo Gottlieb Professor
of Law at Harvard Law School and a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute
for Advanced Study in 2001-02, analyzes the economic challenges befalling
today's American middle-class family, with a focus on the financial
status of the middle-class mother. Viewing the profound increases
in women's earnings, education, workforce participation, wages,
and child support enforcement over the past twenty-five years, mothers'
economic self-sufficiency should be at an all-time high, with fewer
women filing for bankruptcy.
Professor Warren maintains that today's reality is different
from that of twenty-five years ago. In the past twenty-five years, says Professor Warren, the amount of money that a median family has had to
spend on mortgages, childcare, health insurance, and on a second car
has dramatically risen. Although the median family's income
has risen 59% during the same period, their expenses on just these
four categories has risen 175%.
"What is it that's gone wrong here?" Professor Warren
says the answer lies in comparing the two-income family with the one-income
family of 1973: although the gross income has gone up, disposable
income has gone down, and the risk of an economic blow has risen. |
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