Press Releases

December 17, 1998
New Book Chronicles Journey from Welfare Mom to College Professor

Contact:
Jane Finalborgo
(516) 287 8313
Fax: (516) 283 4081

Southampton, NY -- Sociology Professor Barbara J. Peters' research on Head Start mothers addresses a topic she knows well from personal experience. A single mother on welfare and expecting her second child at the age of 24, she enrolled her four-year-old daughter in the Head Start program in a small Wisconsin town in 1971.

She credits her experience as a Head Start mother with motivating her to get a college degree, despite a therapist's warning that she had delusions of grandeur in thinking she could go to college. She went on to earn her Ph.D. in Sociology from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in 1997, and today she is a professor at Southampton College of Long Island University

This fall her book, The Head Start Mother: Low-Income Mothers' Empowerment Through Participation, based on her dissertation, is being published by Garland Publishing, Inc. as part of a series of books on children of poverty.

She found that at its most effective, Head Start is as much about bolstering the self-esteem of poor mothers as it is about giving children a head start on school. Present welfare reform policies are gutting this key aspect of the program, she says.

The oldest of seven children, Dr. Peters grew up in a family that never had enough money and moved constantly, "trying to find something better." As an adult she had medical problems which her physicians could not diagnose, and she was sent to a state-paid psychiatrist who told her that as a poor woman with children she should expect to stay on welfare the rest of her life. Through her work on the local Head Start's Parent Advisory Council, Dr. Peters wrote that she began to "believe that I could do what I had always wanted to do: get an education, provide a better life for my children, and become somebody." She became involved in community affairs, stopped using corporal punishment on her children, and fought for and won government relocation assistance for herself and other tenants who were to be evicted from their apartments in a building scheduled for demolition. "It didn't take me long to begin questioning the psychiatric reflection of myself. If I could do all of the things I had been doing in Head Start, why couldn't I go to school? I was not that mentally ill Welfare Mother who could not ever do anything of importance. I could do things, think things, and be listened to," she writes in her book. She got an undergraduate catalogue from the University of Wisconsin, found a major called Urban Affairs, and decided to enroll, over the objections of her psychiatrist. For her research, she went back to the town where she was a Head Start parent and interviewed 33 mothers who were with her then and mothers who enrolled later. "Head Start takes clients and turns them into volunteers; it recognizes the clients as the experts in their own lives," she explains. "Instead of being viewed as poor women or 'damned welfare mothers,' they begin to feel self respect and a sense of accomplishment. They are given decision-making power through their work in their child's classroom, and within Head Start." In the current climate of welfare reform, Dr. Peters said she would not be able to do what she did in the 1970s. "Welfare reform will not work without supporting a woman's role as a mother as well as giving her a job," she explains. "For many women, their most important identity is as a mother."

Still deeply involved in the issues around the Head Start Program, she has traveled to Washington, DC to attend meetings of the Head Start Bureau every year since she began her research. Richard Orton, a long-time Head Start official and National Director from 1968-72 who wrote the Foreword to her book, remembers meeting her at such a conference assembled in 1994 to comment on proposed Head Start policy changes:

"She was the only person who was not a former Head Start director or other official...I introduced myself and was astonished, and pleased, to discover that she was the parent of a child who had been in Head Start AND she was working on her Ph.D. As an official in Head Start from its earliest days, I felt she was a prime example of what... the parent involvement component of Head Start was all about."

At Southampton College, Professor Peters teaches sociology and women's studies courses and helped found the Women's Faculty/Staff Collective. She is also involved in efforts to link women's activities at the college with those of women in the community.