Page 68 - Impact: Collected Essays on Expanding Access to Justice

moving Women out of Poverty: A Call to Action for Legal Aid
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Catherine Carr1
I became a lawyer because of interest in the equality of women and justice for women in a time when equality of women was being much discussed and change was in the air . Over three decades later, I look back on a legal career spent in legal aid working on poverty issues; early on my path veered from “women’s rights” to “poverty law .” However, there was no disconnect with this transition . I now am convinced that anti-poverty work is perhaps the most essential work one can do to advance women and their position in our nation . It is not something we in the legal aid advocacy world talk about often enough: poverty is a women’s issue and it is time we framed it that way and recognize that addressing poverty is critical for women’s equality .
It took me a while to understand the connection between women’s rights and poverty . As an undergraduate in the 1970s I met women law students working on the Equal Rights Amendment, struggling with the issues around what equality would look like and how it could be achieved . Discrimination against women was something I could see and feel every day around me; it was personal, and I wanted to join the cause .
So I went to law school, and it was there, while working in a legal aid office, that I was really exposed face to face with injustices that far exceeded any I myself had experienced: the injustices faced by poor people, and in particular, poor women . I met older women who had worked all their life and now were struggling to keep a roof over their heads . I met young women with children whose partners had died suddenly and had no idea how to feed their children; they had given up any dreams of continuing their own education . I met women who were ill and alcoholic, abandoned by men or determined to stay safely away from one, none with a family safety net like the one I grew up with . Yes, I had faced discrimination and hurdles, but the women I met faced so much more . My heart went out to them, but so did my newly developing lawyer brain: where was American justice for people who did nothing wrong except be born to a family without resources?
We know that poverty is a huge problem in our country, we note that it has important and troubling racial connections, but in our talk about it, we don’t always recognize that poverty is especially a women’s problem . About 60 percent of the poor in this country are women .2 To rephrase that, almost 50 percent more women live in poverty than men . As the media frequently informs us, women make less money than men, and that contributes to the problem both when they are working and when they are older and retired .3 More women live with children, thus
1 Adjunct Professor, university of Pennsylvania Law School, and Executive Director, Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania from 1995 to 2015.
2 The u.S. Census Bureau reported 12.75 million adult men in poverty and 18.37 million women in poverty in 2014, making women just over 59 percent of the adult poverty population. See alana eichner & kaTherine gallagher robbins, naTional women’s law cenTer, naTional snaPshoT: PoVerTy among women & families, 2014 (2015) (citing 2015 u.s. census bureau, currenT PoPulaTion surVey, annual social and economic suPPlemenT), available at http://nwlc.org/ wp-content/uploads/2015/08/povertysnapshot2014.pdf.
3 See council of economic adVisors, gender Pay gaP: recenT Trends and exPlanaTions (April 2015) (citing Bureau of Labor Statistics census data showing that the median full time working woman makes 78 percent of what the median full time working man makes), available at https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/equal_ pay_issue_brief_final.pdf.
Impact: Collected Essays on Expanding Access to Justice