English · Chapter 13
Study notes aligned to the official NEB syllabus.
"What Is Poverty?" is a first-person essay first published in 1971 in America's Other Children: Public Schools Outside Suburbia, a collection edited by George Henderson. The name Jo Goodwin Parker is almost all that is known about the writer. The essay reached the editor from West Virginia, and nothing more about the author has ever been confirmed. The speaker is a poor rural American mother of three who has been asked what poverty is. Instead of a dictionary definition, she gives the reader her own life, plainly and without self-pity, and then turns the question back on the reader: having heard all this, what will you do?
The essay opens with a challenge. "You ask me what is poverty?" the speaker says, and then tells the reader to listen, but to listen without pity, because she cannot use pity. She asks the reader to put themselves in her dirty, worn out, ill-fitting shoes and hear her. She stands before us smelly, with rotting teeth, and hides nothing.
She then answers the question paragraph after paragraph, each beginning with the words "Poverty is". Poverty is getting up every morning from a mattress stained with dirt and illness, into a smell of urine, sour milk and spoiled food that never leaves the house. Poverty is being tired. At the hospital, when her last baby was born, she was told she had chronic anemia from poor diet, a bad case of worms, and that she needed an operation. She listened politely, because the poor are always polite and the poor always listen, and did not say that there was no money for iron pills, better food or worm medicine. She worked as long as she could, but wages barely covered a babysitter and her children were not properly looked after, so she had to give the job up.