Demographics are incredibly important when looking at classism and how it rears its head in the modern world. Two significant demographics when discussing the lower class are gender and age. This significance is due to the sheer number of women and children who live below the poverty line in the United States. 56% of people below the poverty line are women and, including overlap, 31.1% are below the age of eighteen. Assuming that half of those beneath the age of eighteen are men and the other half are women, roughly 70% of people below the poverty line in the United States are women and children.
These factors are important to look at because some very obvious conclusions can be drawn from the above statistics alone. The first is that there is wealth inequality between men and women in general. This is punctuated by the conjunction with children living in poverty, showing that many of these women are single mothers attempting to provide for their children. Specifically, one in four single mothers live below the poverty line.
This reality is a result of many societal factors, namely the costs of childcare and the low paying jobs available to many lower class women. For many low income families, especially single mothers, private childcare is unattainable. The options are either hiring a personal nanny or babysitter to take care of the children while the mother is working or to send them to a daycare with other children. Both of these options are incredibly expensive, with daycare costing thousands of dollars per child and babysitters working for hours every day. Assuming the average babysitter would charge at minimum five dollars per hour for their services, if a mother is working a minimum wage job, the majority of her pay is for the sitter. These factors take both options off of the table for single mothers in poverty.
This leaves public school as the final option available. Public school offers not only daycare for forty hours a week, but also two meals a day to the children.
The necessity for such safety nets for families, especially poor single parents, became more apparent during the coronavirus pandemic. Many of these parents lost their jobs due to business closings during the shutdown. On top of this, schools closed early in the spring, and there was some debate whether they would return in the fall with many schools returning and shutting down again because of outbreaks. This took away the one safety net that these parents had of a guaranteed caretaker and food for their children five days a week. This means that children needed their parents to care for them, which in turn means that the parents were unable to work and thus sunk even deeper into poverty.
The fact that one structure being removed spells doom for so many people speaks volumes. It illuminates the fact that there needs to be more support for poor families, specifically women and children. It illuminates the fact that socialist systems, such as public school, offer hope to people that need help getting by. It illuminates the fact that social structures often leave these people behind, people who are already at more risk than others. We as a society, as a united people, can do better and offer more aid to those that need us most in the fight to help everyone to live a comfortable life and fulfill their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
