Hidden From Sight: Women In Extreme Poverty Rising
By Ruth Rosen, www.alternet.org
December 26th, 2013
While the rest of the world debates America’s role in the Middle East or its use of drones in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the U.S. Congress is debating just how drastically it should cut food assistance to the 47 million Americans — one out of seven people — who suffer from “food insecurity,” the popular euphemism for those who go hungry.
snip
The words “women” or even “mothers” rarely appear. In a powerful column against the cuts, the liberal and compassionate New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, for example, argued that “two-thirds of recipients are children, elderly or disabled” and warned his readers about the long-range impact of malnourished children. He, too, never mentioned women, who are the main adult recipients of the SNAP program and who feed those children, elderly or disabled. Nor did he point out that those who apply for such assistance are the mothers and women who seek to nourish these children. It’s as though women are simply vehicles — not persons — in the reproduction process of the human race.
Yet the reality tells a different story. In 2010, for example, 42 percent of single mothers relied on SNAP; and in rural areas, the rate often rose as high as one half of all single mothers. What’s missing from this picture — on both sides — is the real faces of hunger, which is not “needy” families, or “poor Americans”, but single mothers with “food insecurity” for themselves and their families. According to the Center for Budget Priorities, women are twice as likely to use food stamps as anyone else in the population. They are the ones who apply for the SNAP debit card, go shopping, takes buses for hours to find discounted food supplies, and try to stretch their food to last throughout the month for their children, teenagers and, less often, husbands. They are the pregnant women with older children whose infants are born malnourished, and the “Americans” who, at the end of the month, make hasty runs to relatives, food banks and even join other dumpster divers.
When journalists do focus on the women who are recipients of food assistance, they discover a nightmare hiding in plain sight. These women are either unemployed, under-employed or service workers who don’t earn enough to feed themselves and their families. By the end of the month, they and their children frequently often skip meals or eat one meal a day until the next month’s SNAP assistant arrives.
Read More: http://www.popularresistance.org/hidden-from-sight-women-in-extreme-poverty-rising/
= new reply since forum marked as read
I found out I had two aunts that died as infants -- cause of death in one case was rickets (known to be a "disease of poverty"
! This was c. 1920 or so. 
& recommend.
and when he died in the late 1950s he got all of $75.00/mo. from them.
They cared for him in the end however.
Sad as all hell is right. 
This one sits on my bookshelf right next to Rosen's The World Split Open.
http://www.amazon.com/Keeping-Women-Children-Last-Revised-ebook/dp/B004LB4SKW/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1401673810&sr=1-5&keywords=Ruth+Sidel
Book Description
Publication Date: November 1, 1998
In Keeping Women and Children Last, Ruth Sidel shows how America, in its search for a post-Cold War enemy, has turned inward to target single mothers on welfare, and how politicians have scapegoated and stigmatized female-headed families both as a method of social control and to divert attention from the severe problems that Americans face. She reveals the real victims of poverty--the millions of children who suffer from societal neglect, inferior education, inadequate health care, hunger, and homelessness. In this new edition, focusing on the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, Sidel reevaluates our social policy, assessing the impact of the "end of welfare as we know it" on America's poor, especially its women and children.
Of course, even Sidel wasn't the first, nor was Michael Harrington 35 years earlier with The Other America in 1962. And I don't know what we can do to change it.
