CALIFORNIA CONGRESSWOMAN Lynn Woolsey made headlines when she revealed that at age thirty, the mother of three children, her husband left the family and paid no further child support. Woolsey had no choice but to apply for welfare. Even though she was working, her income left Woolsey and her children below the poverty level. "I will never forget what it was like to lie awake at night worried that one of my children would get sick or trying to decide what was more important: new shoes for my children or next week's groceries," she told the New York Times. "I needed welfare in order to provide my family with health care, child care and the food we needed in order to survive."

Currently, seventeen million American households are headed by single parents, most of them women. And approximately 35 percent of them live in poverty...