David Shipler Working Women Essay

Working Women Imagine being a single parent working full time trying to raise kids and provide for them, with a high school education at best. Employed with minimum wage, sometimes less, working single moms have the toughest jobs. They face problems at home with parenting issues and in the work place dealing with discrimination towards women or other inconveniences. Pulitzer Prize winning author, David Shipler, wrote in his book The Working Poor about working citizens, notably working mothers. Shipler has an excellent argument for working women, though on a personal level, he did not relate to the subject of a working single mom as he did for the other families, but as an awarding winning author he had the credentials of writing their stories

At the time he also used the most recent data to support his own findings. Such as the research he used from the Baltimore Malnutrition Clinic. “Such has been the discovery of a Baltimore malnutrition clinic that tapes low-income families with their kids to show parents their mistakes” (Shipler 162). Shipler then continues on about a mother parenting her son showing little affection and scolding him which has been videoed for the research (162-163). Shipler uses this research to support his point of parents especially women who have been mistreated by their own parents or partners leaving them with poor parenting skills as we have seen previously stated with Peaches. As Schwartz states in his essay Shipler uses the stories he has developed over the years to back up his argument. “His book is replete with stories of workers eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) who fail to take advantage of it, parents who ignore or misunderstand their doctors' instructions about administering medication to their children, and job seekers whose ‘corrosive suspicions of [their own] worthlessness’ make them unemployable, because they cannot master ‘the 'soft skills' of punctuality, diligence, and a can-do attitude’” (Schwartz). Shipler uses the stories of working women who face poverty to back up his argument of raising the minimum