PERSPECTIVE ON WELFARE : Is Any Husband Better Than None? : Pushing poor unwed mothers into marriage will perpetuate abusive relationships that harm women and children.

“It’s so nice to have a man around the house,” cooed a 1950s pop song. In the ‘90s, could that same sentiment lead to a fix for our social problems? Suddenly, we are hearing about marriage as the cure-all for poverty, drug abuse, crime and declining levels of education. Many welfare reformers propose that women be coerced to slip on wedding rings before they pick up their Aid to Families with Dependent Children checks. Even Bill Clinton--for whom welfare reform is usually tied to education and day care--touted marriage for welfare moms in his State of the Union speech.

But do we really want a 15-year-old to marry her gang-member boyfriend, so their toddler can be caught in the cross-fire? How about the woman who has just given birth to the child of a crack addict? A good family is wonderful, but a dysfunctional family is not, nor is it a solution to drug abuse and poverty.

When I was growing up in the ‘50s, girls married if they got pregnant. Too often, that was what family values meant. Let me tell you about some of those family values in families I knew. One woman was married to a Navy officer who regularly beat her. She put on heavy make-up and tried to pretend it didn’t happen. Another wed an alcoholic who was abusive to their four children. She remembers driving her car along a highway watching the telephone poles go by, trying to work up the nerve to smash her car into them to end her misery. (She didn’t. She went home and threw her husband out, got a job and made something of her life.)

That old song waxes sentimental about “a guy in pipe and slippers who will help to zip your zippers,” and if every marriage produced a loving home, I’d join those calling for pregnant girls to get married. Unfortunately, this is not the case. There were nearly as many teen-age pregnancies in the 1950s as there are today, the difference then being that the couples got married. One result: a soaring divorce rate as those marriages collapsed.

President Clinton also talked of making young women who have babies stay at home with their parents or guardians, to break the cycle in which the welfare department takes the place of the father. But often, the home is a place of misery for poor girls. I remember being shown the window of an urban housing project, and my guide commented that the apartment to which it belonged housed three generations of women on crack--daughter, mother and granddaughter. Getting a young mother out of this environment makes more sense than forcing her to stay.

Charles Murray, author of “Losing Ground,” advocates getting rid of welfare altogether. Murray says that relatives will pitch in and help out with kids. Who will do the “pitching in” in that housing-project apartment?

Republican Bill Bennett, the former secretary of education, wants to immediately end welfare for unmarried mothers. What does he suggest in its place? “We must invest generously in the kind of orphanages and group homes that provide order and care.” Shades of Charles Dickens! Indeed, small, well-run orphanages may help care for children in an overburdened foster-care system. But the idea that we should penalize poor, unmarried mothers--many of them good mothers--by taking their children away boggles the mind. The cost of such a program would be enormous and history tells us what a rotten job we’ve done with other large-scale institutions such as psychiatric hospitals and reform schools.

Illegitimacy wasn’t created by welfare. Early in the 1960s, sociologist Oscar Lewis found the same social patterns in the slums of Rio, in American cities, among poor rural whites and Native Americans: “Few will marry. For men who have no steady jobs, no property and no prospect of wealth to pass on to their children, who live in the present without expectations of the future, a free union makes good sense. The women, for their part, will turn down offers of marriage from men who are likely to be immature, punishing and generally unreliable.” A poverty culture flourished where community and other social systems were in decay.

In the short run, giving women access to contraception, job training and decent day care will assure that children have at least one responsible parent. Broadening the idea of manhood beyond breadwinning will also help; a father can love and care for a child, and the experience will enhance his life even if he’s not the right partner for a marriage.

Marriage is a wonderful institution, the source of love, joy and nurture. But it’s not a quick fix for social problems.