Recycling Poverty:

Abstract

This article explores the reasons why poverty in the women's workplace is recycled into poverty during retirement. This recycling of poverty impacts women's psychological, physical, economic, and social well-being. Income received during retirement, especially for working-class women, reflects years spent in a hostile marketplace that limited access to occupations paying equal salaries to both sexes. This paper makes use of an interactive model encompassing class, race, gender and age, along with role socialization theory and human capital theory to partially explain why so many women, specifically black and white, find themselves in poverty after retirement.