Reading Assignment

"Anti-poverty advocates often point to drug abuse and depression as the prime “barriers to work” for poor women, but as DeParle observes, they neglect to mention the one he found the most destructive: what Angela calls the “too-cool, too-slick motherfucker men.” From the segregation-era South to the post-welfare-reform Midwest, the husbands available to poor black women have often been unfaithful, drunken, abusive, pimping—or all of the above. Father-hunger is epidemic throughout American Dream, and the sobs that fill the car as DeParle drives Angela and her children home from visiting their father in jail echo hauntingly in the mind of the reader."

Kay S. Hymowitz reviews "American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation’s Drive to End Welfare" by Jason DeParle