to be shocked that Jack Monroe

[samandi]

was on £27,000 a year just back in 2011?

This is a woman I associate with desperate poverty and yet in the space of one and a half years ? she managed to go from having a prosperous job at a pretty young age to struggling to feed her son?

At the age of 22 she had about a £20,000 net income, which is more than many people can dream about. £27,000 is way more than I've ever earned in my life and I'm over ten years older than her.

Am I being unreasonable to think this detracts a bit from her message? Or am I just living in a different world.

Ragamuffin - thanks, sorry. While I don't think it's particularly tasteful to comment on Jack's personal circumstances I do think that women's choice in general to have kids is very relevant to the subject of poverty.

Right, but the questions should be more along the lines of: Why are we not forcing men to take financial responsibility for their offspring and why is the CSA so shite? Why is there not more support for single parents who need to work (especially shift work)? Are women getting access to comprehensive sex education and sexual health services? Are there barriers to women RE employment when they are single parents? etc etc.

HopALongOn - yes, all these things should definitely be looked at.

samandi I do agree with you there. The general issue surrounding women having children and ending up in poverty is one which needs to be discussed. A lot. One person's individual circumstances however, not so much..

agirlcalled jack thank you for posting. Just wanted to say that I love your recipies (chickpea burgers are a big and cheap hit in my house).

It is true that having a baby does sometimes tip women into poverty. But then so do mental health issues, feckless fathers who won't pay child support,cancer, general sickness, becoming a carer for an elderly relative/child/spouse, the death of a relative who was providing the free childcare, employers who like to talk about flexible working but strangely have no senior women on the board/in the higher echelons, shift systems which run on a rolling three week basis and change weekly...

Circumstances change, and people just have to deal with it. My own family went from comfortable middle class to the verge of bankruptcy (due to the death of a parent and the severe depression of the survivor) over the space of a few months. Took a decade to straighted everything out.

Jack's blog would've come in very handy during that period. 'Cause we were fucked.

Having children was definitely the reason I ended up in poverty. They were planned as part of a stable LTR of years. Money was saved to pay for childcare from birth until they started school. A change of circumstance was all it took to get through 5 years worth of money in 12 months. I ended up going without food to pay for childcare to keep the job that meant that at least I was poor with prospects rather than poor with none, although the lack of childcare suitable for my needs meant I had to abandon any attempt at career development for several years.

Without children, I would not have had to pay for childcare and could have worked extra hours, downsized, etc. I am resourceful and resilient. Without children I could relocate anywhere at short notice, live in a room/bedsit and earn enough to start improving my life my life slowly but surely. If I had few prospects, living life on the cheap like that would mean I could juggle work with some form of study.

And that's ok to some extent. Having children changes your life. You accept the responsibilities and loss of freedoms that accompany them. What isn't ok is that this is borne disproportionately by women when a child has two parents.

So what are we proposing , some sort of eugenics policy where only a women with x amount of savings and who is married to someone who has signed a contract stating that they will always support the child until 18 , women whos parents promise to commit suicide before any infirmity sets in , who has been gene tested to ensure that they will never get cancer or any other debilitating or life changing illness , who will only ever have one healthy child ?

who is proposing that, frumpet?

agirlcalledjack - if you read this i just want to say thankyou.
my husband has had a rocky time employmentg wise in this recession, and once again we are in a situation where my (4 days per week) part time job is our only source of income. We are borrowing from relatives to pay our mortgage (we are in SE in a 3 bed semi) and have dropped childcare (thank god for understanding childminder) to 2 days a week to cut costs but to enable job hunting husband to have some time to seek work when he isnt caring for DS.
we have no nearby relatives either so its up to us. What im trying to say is that we arent that far from falling into difficulty too. Your recipes are practical, tasty and nurtitious, something much appreciated by 2 struggling parents of a little boy (2.5) trying to avoid sinking.
Thankyou and well done on being able to find a new job

That's it frumpet - isn't it. Life is messy and people are imperfect. Sense and good planning can certainly skew the odds, but life is a game of chance and even the most skilled player can suffer bad luck.

When you analyse society on a macro level, however, you see patterns. One of those is just how much money influences life chances. Not a lot you can do about that apart from introduce social measures that really encourage social mobility. At present, our country is going backwards in that respect, as agreed by pretty much every think tank engaged to study the subject.

A second is that women are much more likely to end up in poverty than men, and this is mostly due to having children. Only women can have children so we can't equalise the playing field biologically, but since it takes two parents to create a child, what we can do is again introduce social measures that mean men bear the same degree of impact on becoming fathers as women do when they become mothers. To some extent that means the loss of some women's rights and the rise in men's rights, which we've already seen happening - the starting basis of 50/50 residency arrangements and the increase in paternity rights for example. What is conspicuous in its absence is the lack of any measures designed to make father's suffer any financial consequences for becoming a parent. I'd like to see massively incentivised paternity leave, the CSA given far greater powers, women to have automatic rights over men's pensions irrespective of marriage if they end up sacrificing work to look after a child, and men being made to contribute to childcare costs as well as maintenance costs if the couple separate. Obviously this legislation should be non-gender specific so it could apply in the rare cases where dad is primary carer and mum is the breadwinner.

Right now, in 2013, it remains the case that many, many women still have to make a choice between parenthood and career in a way that doesn't even enter the consciousness of most men. A pregnancy of 9 months should not have that kind of long-term impact. It does because of structural inequality in our society.

Well said Dahlen I find it interesting that Jack has said the fire service (traditionally very much a male employer) has all the right policies, but when it came to getting the right working arrangements in place for her, nothing happened. I'm guessing therefore that not very many male firefighters are getting flexible working either - so there's a fairly large public sector employer who is disadvantaging all parents. But yet again, women bear the brunt.

We could make a start with getting the goverment agencies to communicate with one another . My friends ex husband is supposed to pay ( a pittance) towards his two much planned for children . He has increased his pension contributions to reduce his payments , his company has forgotton to pay the payment and recieved not so much as a smack on the hand for doing it . He is responsible for telling them if he has a pay rise / bonus payment , something he is massively disinclined to do . And yet the goverment is also responsible for taxing this man , surely they would know what he earns ? Apparently not, they rely on the cheating pig to be honest

Sorry samandi I missed that and that is your decision. It is rather difficult to abort a child once they are born and when your dp becomes your ex-dp. That is the situation the majority of single parents find themselves in.

Good quality subsidised and affordable childcare for all pre-school children would be a good start too .

I see tedious DM churnalist Littlejohn shares some of the OP's opinions about Jack.

Her reply includes a screenshot of the sneery DM article so you can read it without giving them the hits.

agirlcalledjack.com/2013/11/01/dear-richard-littlejohn-heres-some-polish-for-that-turd/

At the end of the day, what Jack's situation teaches us is that bad times can happen to anyone.

Richard Littlejohn is a piece of shit on her shoe.

Vile man.

Jack wiped the floor with him. Seeing as he lives in Florida most of the time, what the hell would he know about real life over here, right now for so many people?

His article is actually libelous in it's smears.

Unfortunately, it will still have the effect of neutralising Jack's message as more people will read it than will see Jack's rebuttal on her blog.

It does seem as if there's a deliberate strategy at the moment, from right wing commentators and sock puppets, to try to undermine Jack's campaigning by discrediting her personally.

It's not just the back to back disparaging articles in the Daily Mail, two days in a row now. There are tons of comments under her Guardian articles, either trying to deflect attention from what she's saying by implying that she hasn't been honest about her circumstances, or dismissing her writing about her experiences as "poverty porn".

And now similar commentary on mumsnet.

It's not really surprising that people want to discredit her and to weaken her argument. It's depressing to think it may be effective though.

Good to see that her reply is now on the home page of the Guardian website along with a film of her cooking.

Good to see that her reply is now on the home page of the Guardian website along with a film of her cooking.

That's excellent news, bisjo

This was an article in the Mail a day or so before Littlejohn's article.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2480664/The-phoney-ordinary-folk-Labours-TV-broadcast-Millionaire-restaurateur-Guardian-journalist-interviewees-saying-afford-fuel-bills.html

I am amazed at Labour who are almost giving an open goal to the Tories. Lots of people will feel that Labour's message is undermined.

Laceyshoes is right.

I see a few inconsistencies in her replies actually.. and I cant help but wonder at this comment of hers -

"My son’s father DID and DOES look after him, but at the time it was impossible to match our work shifts up with friends, family and childcare to cover my working hours. Because he works too"

So if thats the case, where was this wonderful caring working father when his son was starving and almost homeless?? Why did he not lend her some money while she waited for her housing benefit..

My other gripe would be that while she may have paid that money for her numerous tattoos while she was working, if she knew she was going to leave a job without any new job to go into, why not save as much as possible before quitting so that you have a little bit saved just in case..

I don't get the impression that she had that much time to think about it nor did she think she would be unemployed for 18 months.

The point is is that she did find herself in a position with an extremely limited budget and made the best of it. How she ended up there is completely irrelevant to me.

I'm guessing that she didn't know she was going to have to leave her job, what with her not being blessed with the gift of precognition.

squoosh spot on but detractors want to focus on the how and why instead of looking at the inspiration her blog has become for those who are of limited means.