Welfare in the United States - A History with Documents, 1935-1996 9780415989787, 2008033350, 0415989787, 0415989795, 9780415989794

Table of contents :
Cover
WELFARE IN THE UNITED STATES
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Documents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1 AFDC in the Early Years: The 1930s and 1940s
Chapter 2 New Debates about Welfare, Motherhood, and Work:
The 1950s and Early 1960s
Chapter 3 Welfare Rights and Welfare Reform: The 1960s and
1970s
Chapter 4 The End of Welfare as We Knew It: The 1980s and 1990s
Introduction to the Documents
Documents
Notes
References and Further Reading
Permissions Acknowledgments
Index

Citation preview

WELFARE IN THE UNITED STATES

Welfare has been central to a number of significant political debates in modern America: • What role should the government play in alleviating poverty? • What does a government owe its citizens, and who is entitled to help? • How have race and gender shaped economic opportunities and outcomes? • How should Americans respond to increasing rates of single parenthood? • How have poor women sought to shape their own lives and influence government policies? With a comprehensive introduction and a well-chosen collection of primary documents, Welfare in the United States chronicles the major turning points in the seventy-year history of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Illuminating policy debates, shifting demographics, institutional change, and the impact of social movements, this book serves as an essential guide to the history of the nation’s most controversial welfare program. Premilla Nadasen is Associate Professor of History and African American Studies at Queens College, City University of New York. She is the author of Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States (Routledge), winner of the 2005 John Hope Franklin Publication Prize. Jennifer Mittelstadt is Assistant Professor of History and Women’s Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of From Welfare to Workfare: The Unintended Consequences of Liberal Reform, 1945–1965. Marisa Chappell is Assistant Professor of History at Oregon State University. She is the author of The War on Welfare: Gender, Family, and the Politics of AFDC in Modern America.

9780415989787 Welfare in the United States Size: 229 x 152mm Spine size: 17 mm

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Binding: Hardback

WELFARE IN THE UNITED STATES A HISTORY WITH DOCUMENTS, 1935–1996

PREMILLA NADASEN JENNIFER MITTELSTADT MARISA CHAPPELL

First published 2009 by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2009 Premilla Nadasen, Jennifer Mittelstadt, and Marissa Chappell Typeset in Minion and Scala Sans in by Keystroke, 28 High Street, Tettenhall, Wolverhampton

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Nadasen, Premilla. Welfare in the United States: a history with documents, 1935–1996 /Premilla Nadasen, Jennifer Mittelstadt, Marisa Chappell. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Aid to families with dependent children programs—United States— History—twentieth century. 2. Poor women—Government policy— United States. 3. Welfare recipients—Employment—United States. 4. Public welfare—United States—History—twentieth century. I. Mittelstadt, Jennifer, 1970– II. Chappell, Marisa. III. Title. HV699.N233 2008 362.71′30973—dc22 2008033350 ISBN10: 0–415–98978–7 (hbk) ISBN10: 0–415–98979–5 (pbk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–98978–7 (hbk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–98979–4 (pbk)

CONTENTS

List of Documents

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

Chapter 1

AFDC in the Early Years: The 1930s and 1940s

Chapter 2

New Debates about Welfare, Motherhood, and Work: The 1950s and Early 1960s

23

Welfare Rights and Welfare Reform: The 1960s and 1970s

39

The End of Welfare as We Knew It: The 1980s and 1990s

63

Chapter 3 Chapter 4

9

Introduction to the Documents

85

Documents

87

Notes

222

References and Further Reading

225

Permissions Acknowledgments

229

Index

233

DOCUMENTS

1 The United States Children’s Bureau Studies the Mothers’ Pensions Program (1933) 2 The Social Security Act of 1935 Establishes the Aid to Dependent Children Program (1935) 3 An Analyst Assesses Whether the Social Security Act of 1935 Will Benefit African Americans (1936) 4 A WPA Photo Shows a “Typical” Family Helped by the ADC Program (ca. 1936–43) 5 The Social Security Board Promotes the ADC Program (1940) 6 The Chamber of Commerce Claims Welfare Fraud (1950) 7 A Social Worker Encourages ADC Mothers to Work Outside the Home (1952) 8 Public Welfare Reports on a Training Program for ADC Clients (1953) 9 Researcher Outlines Difficulties Facing African American Women on ADC (1957) 10 The Urban League of Greater New Orleans Reports on the ADC Crisis in Louisiana (1960) 11 City Official Makes a Plan to Cut Clients from the Welfare Rolls (1961) 12 Young Americans for Freedom Support Hard Line on Welfare (1961) 13 A Political Cartoon Supports Mitchell’s Thirteen-Point Plan (1961) 14 Newspaper Aims to Dispel Rumors about Welfare (1961)

87 100 104 107 108 109 113 116 120 122 126 128 129 130

viii • Documents

15 Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, Abraham Ribicoff, Declares a New Direction in Welfare (1961) 16 An Advocate for Welfare Describes the Emerging Field of “Poverty and the Law” (1963) 17 A Labor Department Official Sees AFDC as Part of a Dangerous Trend (1965) 18 Two Activist Academics Offer “A Strategy to End Poverty” (1966) 19 Two Democratic Senators Offer Alternate Solutions to Rising Welfare Rolls (1967) 20 A Chicago Welfare Recipient Group Publishes a “Welfare Rights” Handbook (1960s) 21 A Feminist Congresswoman Spars with Welfare Rights Activists (1968) 22 Welfare Rights Activists Propose a Guaranteed Annual Income (1969) 23 President Richard M. Nixon Proposes Welfare Reform (1969) 24 A Country Singer Decries “Welfare Cadillac” (1970) 25 A Popular Periodical Reports on the “Welfare Crisis” (1971) 26 A Business Leader Urges a Shift in Welfare Policies (1971) 27 Johnnie Tillmon Argues that “Welfare is a Women’s Issue” (1972) 28 A Feminist Criticizes Federal Antipoverty Policies (ca. 1972) 29 A Cartoonist Depicts AFDC as Unfair to Wage-earning Mothers (1973) 30 A Feminist Organization Urges Work-based Solutions to Women’s Poverty (1977) 31 Ronald Reagan Criticizes “Welfare Queens” (1976) 32 Welfare Recipients Organize to Demand a Better Deal (1982) 33 Welfare Rights Activists Challenge the Definition of “Welfare” (1981) 34 A Conservative Scholar Condemns Federal Welfare Policies (1984) 35 An Activist Academic Examines the Real Lives of African American Single Mothers (1986) 36 Women Academics Oppose Ending AFDC as an Entitlement (1995) 37 Wisconsin Becomes a Leader in Welfare-to-Work (1996) 38 Congress Abolishes AFDC (1996) 39 A Welfare Rights Organization Fights for the Rights of the Poor (1998) 40 President George W. Bush Lays Out a Plan for Welfare Reform (2002)

132 135 138 143 147 150 154 158 163 166 169 174 177 180 184 185 189 192 195 197 201 208 210 214 217 219

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The idea of a collaborative project provoked some anxiety among us: As historians we are trained to work in isolated settings, alone in archives or at our computers. None of us had collaborated with other academics in quite this way. But it worked out beautifully. Rather than a tangle of drudgery and conflicting personalities, we created a small community of support. Even though in some ways this work was still solo, since we didn’t see each other once during the course of the project, it was immensely helpful to have co-authors to bounce ideas off of, to critique and improve our work, and to pick us up and move us along when we hit a wall. Our network of collaboration and mutual aid extended well beyond the three of us. Many individuals went out of their way to help us locate documents and secure permissions. Our thanks to Joellen El Bashir at the Moorland-Spingarn Library at Howard University; David Klaasen at the Social Welfare History Archives at the University of Minnesota; Lynn Catanese at the Hagley Museum and Library; Ellen M. Shea at the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe; Mary Bricker-Jenkins and Cheri Honkala of the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign; Jessica Steights at Ms. magazine; Harry Miller at the Wisconsin Historical Society; Habiba Alcindor of the Nation magazine; Ellen Bennett at the National Organization for Women; Chuck Thomas of the Newburgh Free Library; Mark Renovitch at the FDR Presidential Library; Larry DeWitt of the US Social Security Administration; Jennifer Brathorde of the Library of Congress; the National Urban League; Cynthia Harrison; Mimi Abramovitz; Ellen Herman; Roy Doty; and Guy Drake. Our selection of primary documents is much richer for all of their help.

x • Acknowledgments

Kate DeVan at Penn State helped us organize and prepare our documents, and the three anonymous readers of our proposal for Routledge made excellent suggestions about themes and documents. Rhonda Williams and Lisa Levenstein took time out of their very busy schedules to review the manuscript for us, immensely improving the narrative. Matthew Kopel and Kim Guinta of Routledge were incredibly patient, supportive, and helpful editors. We are deeply grateful for the time, energy, and insight that each of these individuals contributed. One thing that made this project a challenge was an issue featured within the covers of this book: childcare. We are all mothers of small children. We each had to juggle the responsibilities of taking care of our kids with the demands of the book. Sometimes this meant paying for additional day care or writing even when we got very little sleep the night before because of a sick child. We missed deadlines because of family obligations or flooded basements. But like so many mothers in the contemporary United States, we managed to somehow make it through. We are grateful to the many individuals and institutions who cared for our children while we worked and thereby made this book possible. We also recognize that, unlike many of the mothers in this book, we do work that we find fulfilling and we have some economic resources to ease us through the hard times of mothering. Many women in the United States don’t have such privileges. That, of course, was part of our motivation for writing this book: to expose the hard work and the very real needs of poor mothers. We hope that this book helps to provide a broader appreciation of both the possibilities and the limitations of AFDC, of the struggles that poor single mothers face, and of the political barriers to securing economic justice for them and for their children. Perhaps a better understanding of this history will help to engender a richer, more productive discussion about what our nation can and should do to ease the challenges of caring for and financially supporting children in the contemporary United States.

INTRODUCTION

In the contemporary United States, “welfare” is virtually synonymous with federal cash aid to poor single mothers and their children: Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) before 1996 and Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF) since then. Yet any number of government assistance programs might also be labeled welfare, including Old Age Assistance, Aid to the Disabled, Supplemental Security Income, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, unemployment insurance, public housing, legal services, student grant programs, corporate bailouts, corporate subsidies, and food stamps. Some of these are programs targeted to the poor, but the nation’s most generous social welfare measures—such as Social Security, Medicare, and veterans’ benefits—are available to people regardless of income status. By the 1980s, the federal government was spending twenty times as much for Social Security payments as for AFDC grants. The federal government has also spent tremendous sums on veterans, particularly since the creation of the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (more commonly known as the GI Bill), which provided veterans with benefits such as pensions and disability assistance, employment preferences, medical care, higher education aid, and a mortgage assistance program, at a cost of $14.5 billion in the decade after World War II. Scholars refer to this broad constellation of federal programs and benefits as the “welfare state,” though Americans make sharp distinctions between aid to the poor and other kinds of federal programs. Part of what makes the history of welfare so intriguing is precisely the way its definition narrowed dramatically during the twentieth century to focus exclusively on AFDC and how this program was stigmatized. Recipients

2 • Welfare in the United States

of AFDC are characterized as promiscuous and irresponsible African American women who are undeserving of assistance. And that image played a significant role in why AFDC was dismantled. Yet, nearly everyone in the United States—rich and poor, taxpayers and non-taxpayers, women and men, immigrants and native born, young and old, whites and people of color—receives government assistance. When we visit a city park, drive on an interstate highway, or visit our local library, we make use of public dollars. Middle- and upper-class Americans, in particular, benefit from a plethora of direct assistance programs such as student loan programs, farm subsidies, mortgage deductions, and business expense tax write-offs, but they do not see themselves as welfare recipients, and their entitlements do not generally spark political controversy. US families with children get tax deductions by claiming their children as dependents, but we don’t routinely suggest that this financial incentive will encourage people to have children. Widows of men who had full-time, long-term careers get survivors’ insurance to enable them to support their children, but we don’t demand that they perform community service in exchange. When federal money is pumped into regions of the United States as “disaster relief ” because of tornadoes, coastal flooding, and hurricanes, we generally see the recipients as worthy and deserving of assistance. The same generosity, empathy, and unblemished support, however, are not extended to people who have experienced chronic high unemployment, deindustrialization, and inadequate public schools; who are relegated to an unstable, low-wage, race- and sex-segregated labor market; and who struggle to raise children with few social supports. How do we account for this disparate treatment of US citizens? Understanding how welfare—in its most constricted sense—has been central to Americans’ understanding about poverty and social policy helps to reveal the historical processes and cultural logic that have given life to such stark and contrasting realities. In other words, the equation of welfare with AFDC, a program that has unduly suffered severe stigmatization has led many Americans to consider most kinds of welfare assistance to the poor suspect. Because of controversy about “welfare” or AFDC, Americans have come to believe that government is inefficient and wasteful, and that social problems like poverty and unemployment are best addressed by the private sector, aided by government policies such as corporate tax breaks and economic growth policies. Americans have also blamed welfare programs targeted to poor people for urban decline, the rise in single parenthood, failing schools, and increased crime. For all of these reasons we have decided to focus our discussion on AFDC. While doing so, and referring to AFDC as “welfare,” we risk reinforcing popular misconceptions about who benefits from state support. We don’t intend to do that. Nevertheless, we feel that AFDC has been critical to discourses about poverty and has been politically

Introduction • 3

influential. Part of the mission of this book is to explore how and why AFDC—only one of many welfare programs—became so controversial and why it generates such passionate debate. As industrialized nations go, the United States is far behind its counterparts in providing welfare benefits. The United States does not offer the same guarantees of family allowances, parental leave, universal health insurance, or publicly funded childcare that are available to citizens of western European nations, for instance. France and Germany offer paid family leave for nearly three years after the birth of a child, for example, while Canada provides a family allowance—or guaranteed income—for poor families without stigma or moral criteria. Scandinavian nations provide generous, comprehensive “cradle to grave” supports for all their citizens and still maintain high levels of adult employment. In contrast, in the United States, meagerly funded and stigmatized programs, particularly for low-income citizens, have resulted in a significantly higher poverty rate, especially for women and children. In 2006, the United States had one of the highest child poverty rates among developed countries, nearly 22 percent. A number of scholars have attempted to understand the roots of this “American exceptionalism.” Many explanations emphasize the relative weakness of the US labor movement. They argue that racial divisions within the working class and the early suffrage granted to white working-class men impeded the development of a “working-class” or “labor” political party that may successfully have demanded broad government protections like public jobs, family allowances, and health care. Others highlight Americans’ deep commitment to a Puritan work ethic, the sanctity of the free market, and individual responsibility. We will argue that numerous factors—from the particular structure of the New Deal welfare state, to the nation’s shifting attitudes about race and gender, to the increased political power of corporate America—have worked to constrain welfare state development and to determine the fate of AFDC. While the history of the welfare state and AFDC makes sense only in the context of these broader social, economic, and political developments, two critical features of US aid to the poor have remained consistent. First, welfare broadly defined has always been shaped by distinctions between the “worthy” and “unworthy” poor. During the colonial era, Elizabethan poor laws, which governed aid, assured public assistance for the “deserving” poor, but not for the “idle poor.” Those individuals who society believed were impoverished through no fault of their own were considered “deserving,” while poor people who were deemed idle or lacking a work ethic were considered “undeserving.” These early assumptions, which undergirded poor relief programs, solidified distinctions between the worthy and unworthy poor that continued to shape welfare state policy throughout its history.

4 • Welfare in the United States

Second, because of deep suspicion about the worthiness of impoverished Americans, AFDC also has been used to shape and even control their behavior. Often, the denial of such government aid has been used to push needed workers into low-wage labor. Other times, its provision was contingent on monitoring and “correcting” the behaviors of recipients, particularly sexual activity and parenting. While opposition to programs for the poor has ebbed and flowed and the definitions of deserving and undeserving have shifted over time, the regulatory features of AFDC have remained fundamental to Americans’ responses to poverty. Previous scholars also have brought to light the many constituencies that have informed the evolution of the American welfare state: elderly people, veterans, social workers, single mothers, politicians, policymakers, and taxpayers. Building on this scholarship, our history of AFDC likewise attempts to incorporate multiple voices and competing interests that have shaped who benefits and who doesn’t, who is considered worthy or unworthy, and how benefits are given and why they are taken away. In this book, we illustrate the complex negotiations and contestations that have shaped American welfare policies and politics—and the men and women who have engaged in them, including academics and activists, policymakers and politicians, musicians and cartoonists, the poor and the non-poor. We particularly sought to center the voices of low-income welfare recipients, who play a less prominent role in most scholarship on the history of the welfare state and AFDC. Because recipients of AFDC are poor single mothers, it is sometimes difficult to recover their voices. They left fewer paper trails. Their words and actions in many of the archival sources were filtered through the eyes of social workers. In fact, administrators considered ideal those recipients who were silent and conformed to welfare regulations. When recipients mobilized on their own behalf they articulated their needs, desires, and visions, exposing the shortcomings of policy and the travails of daily living often unacknowledged, dismissed, or ignored. This happened with greater frequency beginning in the 1960s. In earlier periods, however, when there was no organized social movement, it is much harder to gauge recipients’ goals and expectations. We begin our history in 1935, when the AFDC program—and much of the twentieth-century welfare state—was created. We also provide some background about the mothers’ pension programs created in the early twentieth century, which are often viewed as the precursors to AFDC. We end the narrative in 1996 with the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), which terminated the AFDC program and replaced it with a new, temporary aid program to families. Remaining within these chronological parameters has its advantages and disadvantages. It allows us to explore in great detail the people and

Introduction • 5

events that affected Aid to Families with Dependent Children, but it also has meant bracketing much of the early history of welfare and charities, workhouses and almshouses, the Elizabethan poor laws, and the institutionalization of poor children—all of which informed the modern welfare state and AFDC. Moreover, we don’t discuss in great detail repercussions of the end of the welfare entitlement, particularly, the expanding role of private charities, the increasing number of poor children in foster care, poor women’s adoption of alternative survival strategies, or the impact of workfare on union and non-union workers. Instead we trace the genealogy of one particular welfare program—arguably the most important politically— from birth to death because it serves as a window into the shifting American political landscape. For years, scholars viewed welfare programs primarily as an instrument for mediating class relations. Business interests and the wealthy, they argued, agreed to a moderate redistribution of income in order to stabilize the workforce and prevent the social disorder that accompanies mass poverty and unemployment. In this interpretation, the New Deal welfare state emerged as a compromise between the noisy and sometimes violent demands of a working class suffering from the Great Depression, and of a capitalist class eager to prevent riots, forestall revolution, and maintain potential laborers during hard times. Class, in this view, is the primary shaper of the welfare state. Our narrative highlights the racial and gendered dimensions of welfare, alongside class. No discussion that seeks to understand how welfare “became” AFDC would be fully comprehensible otherwise. Race and gender infuse the nation’s labor market, welfare state, and public perceptions of the citizens who access both. Since the 1980s, scholars have paid more attention to the welfare state’s role in reflecting, as well as shaping, race and gender relations. Unlike many other industrialized nations that offer universal benefits as a right of citizenship, the United States ties benefits closely to employment. Throughout most of the twentieth century, the nation’s deeply sex- and race-segregated labor market reserved stable, full-time employment for white men, relegated men and women of color to insecure, lowwage jobs, and assumed white women’s economic dependence on fathers and husbands. So while white men gained access to the most generous social insurance programs, Social Security and unemployment insurance, their wives benefited only as dependents. Meanwhile, men and women of color lacked a stable social safety net, an exclusion that carried both economic and political repercussions. New Deal welfare policies, however, not only reflected labor market inequalities, but also created them by inscribing social inequality into its institutional structure. The vast majority of African American workers

6 • Welfare in the United States

didn’t qualify for social insurance benefits because New Deal laws excluded from its protected groups domestic and agricultural workers—two occupations in which African Americans predominated. As a result, African Americans and other non-whites, as well as white women unattached to men with full-time employment, had to rely on the welfare state’s less generous, more restrictive public assistance programs designed for the poor such as General Assistance, food stamps, public housing, Old Age Assistance, and AFDC. In sum, AFDC can be understood only by paying close attention to the intersecting effects of race, class, and gender, as well as to assumptions about heterosexuality and the traditional nuclear family. The politics of race and gender not only shaped the development of AFDC, but also produced a cultural logic that kept it stigmatized and miserly, almost from its origins. In its early history, Aid to Dependent Children, as it was known prior to 1962, was a relatively minor program serving primarily white widows. Racially discriminatory practices denied assistance to most needy African American mothers. When African American women began to claim assistance in the 1950s and 1960s, the goals of the program shifted from supporting women in their work as mothers to requiring them to take paid employment outside the home. Longstanding cultural stereotypes of black women as Jezebels—sexually promiscuous seductresses—compromised their claim to full-time motherhood and deemed them unworthy of public assistance. So, too, did their long history as workers under an oppressive slave system and, later, coercive labor policies and economic necessity. Even before transformations in family structure created large numbers of single-mother families in the 1970s, stereotypes of African American teenage mothers with several children by multiple fathers—what later became the trope of the “welfare queen”— created enormous skepticism and opposition to AFDC in the 1950s. These women, it was believed, did nothing of value and simply took advantage of government programs. Culture of poverty arguments—the idea that the behavior and cultural patterns of poor people can explain their impoverishment—rooted in worthy/unworthy distinctions, gained increasing currency in the postwar period. Primary source documents illuminate the stereotypes that fueled misinformation about AFDC and bring to light facts that are often forgotten. Benefits, for example, were always far from generous and AFDC grants almost never brought families out of poverty or near-poverty. African American women have always been a minority of recipients even though high rates of poverty, lack of social insurance protections, and relegation to the worst jobs made them disproportionately eligible. Strict eligibility criteria always excluded many needy mothers and children from even miserly benefits. AFDC mothers bore no more children than the average

Introduction • 7

American family, and incidences of welfare fraud were no more common than fraud in other government programs. Most single mothers worked outside the home in addition to caring for children. And most women were not long-term recipients, but cycled on and off the welfare rolls in between bouts of employment and in response to changes in family and labor market status. Nevertheless, the myths and stereotypes about welfare persist. This is in part because AFDC and its recipients have served as a powerful political tool, a scapegoat for a crumbling urban infrastructure, anxiety about family and community transitions, and economic uncertainty. People on welfare were frequently pitted against “taxpayers” and “hard-working Americans,” as if these were two distinct groups. In reality, welfare recipients are hardworking Americans who pay taxes but occasionally find themselves in need of a safety net. Conservative politicians, in particular, routinely labeled their liberal counterparts as big government spenders who supported a welfare population that cheats the government and undermines two core values on which the United States was founded: the traditional family and the work ethic. In the decades after World War II, politicians of all political orientations vied to see who could most vehemently denounce welfare recipients. Liberals as well as conservatives contributed to the political discourse and shaped the policies that led to the ultimate demise of AFDC. This debate about welfare has obscured some of the real economic obstacles that working-class Americans encounter. Because discussions of poverty have centered on dysfunctional families, teenage pregnancy, and welfare fraud, the more fundamental issues of low wages, the lack of affordable childcare, inadequate public transportation systems, shuttered factories, and failing public schools have been brushed aside. So, too, have the larger issues that lie behind these problems: the growing power of multinational corporations, the decline of organized labor, deindustrialization and outsourcing, and the erosion of social responsibility for citizens’ well-being that has occurred since the 1960s. By stigmatizing government support for the poor, attacks on AFDC and its clients have made it all that much harder for people in need—working or not—to seek assistance and for policymakers to address urban decline, the erosion of well-paid jobs, and the startling rise in income inequality since the 1970s. We hope this book provides insight into how welfare policy unfolded, how it was not a simple linear process, but one fraught with disagreement and differing viewpoints. The narrative portion of the book provides students with a concise overview of some of the important developments in welfare history since the creation of AFDC in the 1930s, introducing them to the major trends and turning points. We chronicle the origins of AFDC and subsequent changes in welfare policy, the shifting demographic

8 • Welfare in the United States

composition of the welfare rolls, changing ideology about welfare and maternal employment, the popular and political backlash against welfare, the emergence of a welfare rights movement, and the ultimate abolition of AFDC. This narrative is followed by a selection of primary source documents that will bring to life this complicated history. Students will have an opportunity to read proposals of policymakers as they grappled with increasing welfare rolls, hear the rhetoric of welfare opponents who linked welfare to worrisome social and economic changes, view political literature produced by welfare rights activists, and look at cultural productions like cartoons and songs that capture popular attitudes about welfare. The primary sources will give students an opportunity to investigate the many sides of the debate, analyzing the meaning, message, significance, and form of the documents. In this way, they will be able to engage one another as they determine for themselves how the politics of welfare unfolded.

CHAPTER

1

AFDC IN THE EARLY YEARS The 1930s and 1940s

When Jane Addams, the internationally renowned white middle-class social reformer, reflected upon her efforts to alleviate poverty, the poor people whom she had encountered stood out the most. In Twenty Years at Hull House, Addams (1910) recounted her experiences at the Chicago settlement house helping ethnic immigrants who resided in dense and impoverished neighborhoods. Her memoir featured heart-rending stories including horrifying accidents on the job, terrible family tragedies, and the often unsuccessful daily struggles that immigrant poor people waged to make ends meet. At the beginning of the twentieth century, when Addams established Hull House, Chicago was rapidly urbanizing and industrializing. People flocked to this Midwestern city, expecting vast economic, social, and cultural opportunities. More immigrants from southern and eastern Europe landed in Chicago than in any city, except New York. And Addams placed Hull House amidst their neighborhoods. Hundreds of thousands of African Americans, fleeing the poverty and repression of the segregated South, also arrived in Chicago in the first decades of the twentieth century. But Addams, like other middle-class white reformers, generally overlooked their plight. Far from experiencing the opulence and modernity linked to city life, many ethnic immigrants and black migrants found themselves crowded into tenements and back alley shacks of one of America’s fasting growing cities. They generally worked long hours for little pay in unsafe conditions and faced frequent bouts of unemployment. Their dwellings were substandard, lacking indoor plumbing, toilets, or running water. Many could not afford the basic necessities of life such as food and clothing, let alone benefit from new technologies heralded in the internationally celebrated Chicago’s World Fair.

10 • Welfare in the United States

Harrowing and difficult as the lives were of Chicago’s newly arrived and working-class urban residents, theirs proved the rule, not the exception. Between 1900 and 1930, 60 percent of Americans lived without sufficient access to food, shelter, clothing, and clean water. About 40 percent of Americans lived in abject poverty. Many of America’s poor were rural, farm workers or small farmers. For them, a repressive sharecropping system, predatory banks, bad weather, agricultural pests and rapid mechanization rendered life desperate. But numerous others crowded into rapidly growing cities such as Chicago, laboring for industrial behemoths like International Harvester, U.S. Steel, and Swift and Company meat packing. Life for wage laborers was insecure and dangerous. Business tactics supported by legislators and the courts made unionizing industrial workers extremely difficult. Low wages and frequent economic downturns and recessions that resulted in lay-offs made financial hardship an ever-present reality, even for the families of skilled male workers. Working-class families typically relied on the wages of multiple earners—older children and wives as well as husbands—in order to survive. Neither laid-off male workers nor unemployed, disabled, or elderly people had public or private safety nets to tide them or their families over. Faring particularly poorly were single mothers whom the urban industrial economy produced in significant numbers. In the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century, industrial accidents killed and maimed tens of thousands of men each year, rates three to five times higher than in comparable European nations, leaving many widows to fend for themselves and their children. In addition, urban life reduced the moral censure that operated among kin and neighbors in some small communities, resulting in increased family dissolution through both mutual agreement and abandonment. Thus, in the early twentieth century, households headed by single mothers were becoming more common. Joanne Goodwin’s (1997) meticulous research reveals that single women between the ages of 15 and 44 headed 6–7 percent of Chicago households. The rate for foreign-born households was 3–7 percent. The rate for African Americans, whose families were burdened by extreme racial and economic discrimination and persistent hostility and violence from white people, reached between 18 and 23 percent. Based on the evidence available, historians estimate that in the United States as a whole, there were probably between one and two million female-headed families with children. Nearly all of them struggled. Addams’ memoir was filled with the “piteous revelations” of hard-working immigrant mothers who were trying to “both support and nurture” their children alone. In one story, a poor German widow with “a large family of young children” was shamed when her daughter stole from a department store in order to have just one new

AFDC in the Early Years • 11

article of clothing. In another, “Mrs. Moran’s” bags of beans and flour “which alone lay between her children and starvation” split open and spilled upon the wet, muddy floor of a trolley, leaving her embarrassed and fearful that her children would go hungry. One overworked single mother’s son, Goosie, fell off the roof of her tenement as she hung her laundry; she could not even afford to take a day off from work to mourn his death. Some single mothers, particularly native white and ethnic immigrant women, performed factory work while others took piecework into their homes. Employers generally paid women only half the already low wages that men received. African American women generally couldn’t get factory jobs; they were relegated to the lowest paid jobs as domestic workers in white people’s homes. Given their poverty and insecurity, all single mothers often faced spells of extreme need and those that could—mostly white native born and ethnic women—turned to charity or the very paltry public welfare programs of the time; African American women were more often rejected by white-run private and public welfare agencies. Single women of all backgrounds either left children with family or neighbors, or, like some women Addams recounted, took children to work. Often, single mothers found it impossible to both care for their children and support them financially. Many sent them to live with other family members or in orphanages when they could not put food on the table. In other cases, courts ruled single mothers neglectful and forcibly took children away.

AID FOR POOR SINGLE MOTHERS While single motherhood was not a new phenomenon in the early twentieth century, these women and the problems they confronted became increasingly visible. Packed into densely populated, racially and ethnically bound neighborhoods, low-income city residents were bound to know single mothers as neighbors or co-workers. In cities, black and white single mothers lived relatively close to their richer neighbors. The more privileged viewed single mothers as symbols of harsh and anonymous industrial urban life, which they feared dissolved bonds of family and community. Racism and nativism accentuated these anxieties, as middle- and upper-class white urban dwellers considered foreigners and non-whites destabilizing, and even dangerous, elements in society People of all backgrounds, working-class, immigrant, African American, middle-class and white, considered the solo mother and her travails a dire problem. Women took the greatest interest: working-class women in labor unions affirmed solidarity with single mothers; middle-class African American women claimed a responsibility for uplifting them as well as “the race” as a whole; and middle-class white reformers claimed a special

12 • Welfare in the United States

“maternalist” responsibility for single mothers, who they felt needed the guidance of their “betters.” These differently situated women sought to ease the burdens of single mothers with a variety of proposals. But it was the vision of white middle-class reformers like Jane Addams that won out. Their concerns as well as their prejudices shaped the laws that would eventually evolve into the Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) program. Single mothers themselves had little power to contribute to the policy discussion about them. In this period and for decades to come, there was no movement of poor, single mothers through which they could express their own desires. Their impact lay in their largely undocumented individual efforts to survive, claim assistance, and resist reformers’ characterizations of them. Not surprisingly, working-class women, who experienced higher rates of single motherhood, were keenly aware of the dilemmas facing such mothers and proposed solutions. For instance, because their employment rates were higher—since few working-class women, even those married, could afford not to earn money—working-class women focused on improving their working conditions. In the early twentieth century, women’s union movements blossomed in textile and garment factories, where young immigrant women demanded better pay, safer conditions, and reduced hours, among other improvements. While this movement succeeded in creating the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, pay and conditions in textiles remained poor. Moreover, women in other industries and in domestic service had less success in organizing to demand better wages and working conditions. Male union organizers often overlooked or scorned the young women workers, deeming them temporary members of the labor market and therefore unworthy of serious attention or equal treatment. Instead, male unionists focused on winning a “family wage” for male workers, who could then securely, and with dignity, provide for non-working wives and children. Clearly, this union strategy, which focused on men’s roles as breadwinners, excluded bargaining for higher wages for women workers. But even if woman workers had secured greater support from their male peers, before the 1930s, unions unfortunately had little success, for they had to confront repressive employers and unsupportive governments. African American women, like the largely immigrant white workingclass union women, also understood the dilemmas of combining paid employment with caring for a family. African American women, both middle-class and poor, worked outside the home at a much higher rate than white women. Before the Civil War, enslaved African American women performed arduous work both in the houses of slaveholders and in the fields. After slavery, racial discrimination and economic exploitation severely limited African American men’s economic prospects, so their wives and

AFDC in the Early Years • 13

partners—who were generally excluded from job opportunities in the industrial sector—routinely worked as agricultural laborers and in white homes as domestic workers. In the North, where African Americans migrated in search of better economic prospects during and after World War I, African American families continued to rely on the wages of wives and mothers. Middle-class African American women, wives of professionals and small business owners, also worked outside of the home, often as school teachers or as owners of small businesses, to help ensure their families’ security. African American woman reformers approached the plight of poor single mothers more directly than young union women did. Since most unions denied membership to African Americans, they found other avenues to organizing, forming thousands of clubs that worked locally and nationally. Black clubwomen worked to improve conditions in their communities, conducting public health campaigns and raising money to build schools and hospitals. They viewed the plight of poor children as a community problem, as well, and they sought to improve single mothers’ well-being. Given their long history of employment, African American women activists generally accepted the inevitability of combining paid work and care work, and they sought ways to ease this burden. The National Association of Colored Women and African American chapters of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs proposed safe, affordable childcare as a solution. The few day nurseries available for low-income women were generally reserved for whites only; so, African American women struggled to establish kindergartens and day nurseries in their communities. Some middle-class and elite white women echoed African American women’s plea for childcare. In 1898, philanthropist Josephine Dodge formed the National Federation of Day Nurseries, and like-minded women formed chapters in other cities soon thereafter. However, as Sonya Michel (1999) has shown, these reformers were more ambivalent than African American activists about women working outside of the home. They agreed with Addams, who believed that “the long hours of factory labor necessary for earning the support of a child leave no time for the tender care and caressing which may enrich the life of the most piteous baby” (Addams 1910: 116). Women’s true and best role was in the home with children, not in the workplace. Historians have labeled this a “maternalist” vision that emphasized the primary importance of women’s mothering. Maternalists feared that providing easily accessible childcare would encourage women to work outside of the home. They incorrectly imagined that poorer women could afford to choose not to work, and might opt out of full-time caregiving if childcare were available. Thus they advocated only limited, privately operated childcare programs.

14 • Welfare in the United States

This maternalist perspective pervaded what became the most popular and ultimately successful proposal to aid single mothers—mothers’ pensions. New ideas about the importance of childhood motivated a powerful network of middle-class white women’s organizations and female reformers to bolster single mothers’ ability to care for their children. No longer viewed as miniature adults responsible for contributing economically to the household, children in the early twentieth century were seen as inhabiting a distinguishable phase of childhood necessitating motherly affection and cultivation. Earlier practices of remanding poor children to orphanages or workhouses gave way to efforts to keep them in the home. In 1909, a White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children advised that children of reasonably efficient and deserving mothers who are without the support of the normal breadwinner should, as a rule, be kept with their parents, such aid being given as may be necessary to maintain suitable homes for the rearing of their children.1

Rather than raising women workers’ status or easing the burdens of combining work and parenthood, mothers’ pensions or mothers’ aid sought to pull mothers out of the labor market and reinstall them in what was viewed as their proper place—the home. By providing mothers a pension— essentially small cash payments from the government—the program would enable single mothers to forgo paid work and attend to children in their own home. Advocates suggested that mothers would no longer suffer the fear of leaving children with strangers, the strain of working all day in a factory, or the pain of having their families separated. A mothers’ pension would restore the proper—even sacred—domestic role to those women who struggled alone without a male breadwinner to make ends meet. Many influential women and women’s organizations championed the concept of mothers’ pensions. Key among them were the mostly white and middle-class General Federation of Women’s Clubs and the National Congress of Mothers, whose members together numbered well over 1 million women. At a time when women could not vote, these organizations provided a venue for women’s political activity, acting as remarkably effective political pressure groups. Maternalist ideology was critical to the success of these groups. It allowed women to claim special knowledge of women’s needs and an affinity for policies related to them. Leaders of women’s clubs encouraged local affiliates to join social reform efforts around women’s and children’s issues. Extensive lobbying produced impressive results. The Illinois legislature passed the first mothers’ pension law in 1911. Just six years later, thirtyfive states had passed such laws. And by 1935, in the midst of the New Deal, only two states, Georgia and South Carolina, had failed to enact mothers’ pensions.

AFDC in the Early Years • 15

As the name “mothers’ pension” suggests, many reformers saw these payments as recognition of mothers’ service to the state, “salaries earned by mothers who serve the state in giving all their time to rearing good citizens” (quoted in Ladd-Taylor 1994: 144). More radical reformers like the feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman hoped for a universal payment to all mothers that would ensure women’s economic independence from men. Once passed, however, mothers’ pensions proved somewhat less than a generous endowment for motherhood. Pensions were undercut in several ways. First, the laws merely gave counties the option of offering pensions. The federal Children’s Bureau reported in a 1931 audit that fully half of all counties in the United States chose not to provide them—and those that did sought to keep relief costs low. Though the number of eligible households was growing, the United States spent only 0.04 percent of gross national product (GNP) on mothers’ pensions. County administrators and judges worried that if they provided worthy single mothers with too generous a pension, they might encourage wives to strike out on their own and leave husbands. Husbands also might be more likely to abandon their wives, knowing that the pensions would substitute for their support. Mothers’ pensions thus raised anxiety about whether income for solo mothers might threaten the two-parent, male breadwinner family, which most Americans across race and class lines considered ideal. As a result of these limitations, only 5–8 percent of single mothers received such grants. In addition, while the rhetoric of mothers’ pensions seemed to revere mothers, their implementation revealed limits to the maternalist ethos. Mothers’ pensions advocates valued motherhood, but only a particular version. Mothering had to meet the ideals of white middle-class reformers and social workers, who investigated every aspect of applicants’ lives to determine their worthiness. To meet these standards, mothers had to abstain from sexual activity outside of marriage, avoid even the suggestion of impropriety, obey social workers, and exhibit thrift, cleanliness, and full-time domesticity. As Gwendolyn Mink (1995) has shown, such ideals were culturally bound, assuming the superiority of white, native-born middleclass patterns of behavior. African American and immigrant mothers, whose norms reflected their own backgrounds and needs, generally did not meet this supposed standard of worthiness. Nor did women whose husbands had divorced or deserted them or those who had never married. As a result of these strictures, only 3 percent of mothers’ pensions reached African Americans, for example, a proportion far below their percentage of the population and their level of need. According to the Children’s Bureau in 1933, 80 percent of recipients were white widows.2 Even eligible widows, Mink (1995: 33) has shown, had “to prove moral character—by showing intelligence, willingness to learn English [if foreign], piety, celibacy, and

16 • Welfare in the United States

full-time child centered domesticity.” For those women who did receive pensions, the reality of maternalism did not always match the rhetoric. While mothers’ pensions paid homage to supporting full-time mothering, they seldom made that possible. Local governments, which funded the program with tax dollars, sought to keep costs low. Mothers’ pensions payments were usually so small that women could not support their families on them. In order to make ends meet, they often had to earn money. Social workers sometimes prohibited the most lucrative jobs, such as full-time factory work, which would take mothers out of the home. Many relied on even lower-paid “home work”—light production jobs that women (often with the help of children) could perform at home. Linda Gordon (1994) reports that 84 percent of mothers’ pensions’ recipients in Philadelphia worked for wages, 57 percent in Los Angeles, and 66 percent in Jane Addams’ Chicago.

THE TRANSFORMATION TO ADC When the Depression struck in late 1929, tens of millions of already vulnerable Americans fell into dire straits. National unemployment rates peaked in the early 1930s at above 30 percent, and among the poorest the rate was far higher. African Americans experienced 80 percent unemployment in northern cities. Single mothers suffered alongside other idled and displaced Americans. But women also faced additional discrimination, as many were fired to make way for men who presumably supported families. Overwhelmed by need, local governments ran out of funds; as a result, many stopped providing mothers’ pensions. Widespread, sudden privation threatened to totally obscure the problems of single mothers. As the depth of need became clear, formal and informal protest movements swept the nation. Unions struck. Veterans of World War I marched in Washington to demand a bonus to their measly pensions. Many older Americans joined the Townshend movement to demand assistance after they were no longer able to work. Unemployed people in cities across the United States stormed local welfare offices demanding help. Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved to create new programs through which the federal government could exert authority while jumpstarting the economy and controlling the disbursement of funds. The initial step was the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), which provided monies to states to create work programs to aid the unemployed and their families. Superceding all existing state and local relief programs—including mothers’ pensions—FERA provided over 3 billion dollars for public assistance to needy people regardless of their family status. It aided far more people than any previous program. However, the Roosevelt administration, along with many members of Congress and other policymakers, worried that the

AFDC in the Early Years • 17

widespread extension of relief measures would produce “welfarism,” pauperizing the poor and discouraging independence and initiative. The Committee on Economic Security thus decided to craft new legislation that would enshrine work as the sine qua non of citizenship. This new law was the Social Security Act of 1935. The Social Security Act featured social insurance programs for retired workers and the “worthy” unemployed. Employer and employee contributions funded the Old Age Insurance program, more commonly called Social Security, but never totally supported it. Workers in occupations covered by the law contributed a portion of their wages via a payroll tax to the Social Security Administration. Once retired, workers then received a monthly “pension” from the federal government, which not only insured the vast majority of retirees but also heavily subsidized them with general tax revenue. After 1939, the government’s subsidy extended to the wives and dependent children of retirees, further ensuring that workers’ families received much more than they paid into the system. Both employers and employees contributed tax dollars to fund the Unemployment Insurance (UI) program, which provided temporary payments to long-term workers laid off from large firms. The Social Security Act included federal public assistance programs as well. Geared toward assisting the poor who had a more tenuous relationship to the labor market, public assistance included categorical programs such as Old Age Assistance (for elderly poor people), Aid to the Blind, Aid to the Disabled, and Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), the program modeled on the mothers’ pensions programs. The Children’s Bureau spearheaded the successful passage of ADC, thereby enshrining permanent support for poor mothers in federal law. The bureau’s current and former leaders, Katherine Lenroot and Grace Abbot, presented ADC as a necessary, even commendable program; like aid to blind and elderly people, aid to single mothers of dependent children served a population that reformers theoretically exempted from the duty of wage earning. Premised on the male breadwinner model, ADC reinforced women’s roles as caretakers in the domestic realm and dovetailed with white middle-class conceptions of women’s gender roles. While ADC was included in the Social Security Act with relatively little controversy, it did not garner the same status as the social insurance programs or even the other public assistance programs. Gender assumptions proscribed ADC’s value and placement in the hierarchy of state programs because women were its primary beneficiaries. Roosevelt and the architects of the Social Security Act viewed male workers—not women—as the cornerstone of the capitalist, democratic system and as the key to the smooth functioning of society. Through their labor and earnings, men supported themselves as well as women and children. Therefore, the programs that

18 • Welfare in the United States

received exalted status were those that provided male breadwinners with economic security. The federal agency that administered the Social Security Act’s programs, the Social Security Board, sold Old Age Insurance as a right that workers earned through years of wage labor; they marketed it as superior to the non-contributory public assistance programs like Old Age Assistance and ADC. As historian Barbara Nelson (1990) has described it, the Social Security Act enshrined a “two-channel” welfare state. One channel provided generous, respectable entitlements for primarily white male workers, while the other provided public assistance to specific categories of needy Americans. The vast majority of women and non-white men found themselves shut out of the more generous social insurance programs. Unemployment Insurance and Old Age Insurance excluded agricultural and domestic workers as well as occupations held predominantly by women, including employees in government, nonprofits, and hospitals. Temporary, part-time, and seasonal workers also found themselves without adequate social insurance coverage. As a result, Unemployment Insurance excluded 55 percent of African American workers (87 percent of black woman workers) and 80 percent of all woman workers. Excluded workers as well as single mothers, blind or disabled people, and elderly people too old to pay into Social Security, were forced to rely, instead, on “mop up” public assistance programs—Old Age Assistance and Aid to Dependent Children—which provided sparse, means-tested, discretionary financial assistance for those not covered by insurance. ADC eventually became the largest and most controversial of these programs. It also became synonymous with public assistance. ADC’s lowly status—and unequal funding—translated into real hardships for poor single mothers. While a federal program, the federal government did not fully fund ADC, but reimbursed to the states a proportion of their spending—and this at a lower rate than for Old Age Assistance or Aid to the Blind. Moreover, as the name of the program implied, Aid to Dependent Children did not financially support the “caretaker” or mother, but only included funds to support children at a miserly average amount of $13 a month per child in the late 1930s. The paltry allotments perpetuated one of the central weaknesses of the original mothers’ pensions programs; low ADC payments made supporting a family virtually impossible, and many single women taking care of dependent children still had to work outside the home to make ends meet. Neither were ADC payments uniform across states—revealing the significant discretion local officials wielded when administering the program. In the South, where payments were generally lowest, congressional representatives had insisted on local administration as a way to maintain

AFDC in the Early Years • 19

control over the southern labor market and black labor in particular. In fact, at the behest of southern politicians whose support Roosevelt needed to pass his New Deal programs, Congress even removed language requiring that ADC grants be high enough to provide “reasonable subsistence” and ensure “decency and health.” States not only determined the size of ADC grants, but also had maximum leeway to design eligibility criteria, as long as they did not contradict federal rules. In the 1930s, states rarely exercised this privilege, but in the 1940s and 1950s, eligibility rules would become tools to limit the size of the program and the type of clients served and would help to stigmatize the ADC program and its clients. Despite these very real limitations, federalizing mothers’ pensions did make a difference. More women received financial assistance than during the mothers’ pensions era. When the FERA took over the mothers’ pensions programs, the number of women receiving funds more than doubled nearly overnight, from 280,500 to 719,000 in 1934. Federal authority under the new Social Security Act continued to expand the numbers covered by ADC. One reason for the expansion was that federal law now required that states receiving federal ADC funds make benefits available statewide; counties could not opt out, as they had under mothers’ pensions law. States also had to designate a single agency to administer the program, creating greater uniformity and continuity across the state. The federal law also defined dependency more broadly than mothers’ pensions, including children “deprived of parental support or care by reason of the death, continued absence from the home, or physical or mental incapacity of a parent.” In 1939, Congress passed amendments to the Social Security Act that accentuated the inequalities that characterized the now growing ADC program. The new law was called Survivors Insurance and it made the Old Age Insurance (Social Security) benefits of male workers who died available to their dependent widows. The newly expanded Old Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) program enabled more women to benefit from social insurance. But it reified the two-track welfare state that the original Social Security Act institutionalized. Rather than expanding social insurance to cover excluded occupations like domestic and agricultural labor—a proposal that policymakers considered but rejected—it sought to further protect and entitle already covered male workers’ families by providing security to their surviving members. It also reinforced the dependent status of women within the two-channel welfare state. Women found financial support and protection either through the benefits of a male breadwinner or, if deprived of that, through less generous public assistance from the state. Because of OASI, and because of the general liberalization of the ADC program in the late 1930s, the clientele of the ADC program began to change. OASI siphoned off widows. While they comprised a majority of

20 • Welfare in the United States

ADC recipients in 1939, two years later, in 1941, only 20 percent of children receiving ADC had a widowed mother. With most widows now receiving Social Security, increasing numbers of divorced, deserted, or never married women populated the ADC program. By 1941, 39 percent of children receiving ADC came from homes in which the mother was never married or where the father was absent due to desertion, separation or divorce. The numbers of non-whites covered by ADC also grew rapidly. Non-white men, concentrated in excluded occupations like agriculture, and less likely to have steady employment, rarely qualified for OASI. Consequently, their widows and surviving children relied disproportionately on ADC. On the eve of ADC’s creation, African Americans constituted only 3 percent of recipients. By 1937–1938, 14 percent of children on ADC were African Americans, and, despite racist administration, the percentage was even higher in the South where the majority of African Americans lived. By 1948, non-white families constituted 30 percent of ADC clients nationally. Gaining access to ADC was important for divorced, deserted and never married mothers in their struggle to survive. But their inclusion in the ADC program generated controversy and engendered social disapproval because their particular kind of single status remained outside the boundaries of acceptable middle-class white behavior, and some believed that they threatened the patriarchal family structure. African Americans remained subject to oppressive racism and overt hostility. As socially marginalized people, these women were vulnerable. Policymakers, politicians, and the public began to identify ADC with its least privileged clients—unwed African American mothers. And their receipt of public assistance was increasingly scorned. The 1940s offered a brief window of opportunity—a moment when ADC’s fate might have changed for the better. Liberal reformers, emboldened by the success of the New Deal and the economic recovery during the war, tried to broaden the welfare state. In 1942, the National Resources Planning Board, a small group of academic and government experts, drew up plans to significantly expand the social entitlements of citizens through such programs as national health insurance, full employment, and “comprehensive social welfare.” They envisioned a larger, better-funded welfare state, as well as one that ameliorated many of the inequalities written into the Social Security Act. Legislation proposed in 1943 and 1945 aimed to expand social insurance programs by allowing far more Americans access to old age and unemployment insurance. It also advocated a radical change to public assistance programs. The new proposals for comprehensive social welfare abolished the federal–state partnership as well as the categorical programs and replaced them with a unified, nationally administered public assistance program. If passed, this kind of public assistance program would have

AFDC in the Early Years • 21

dramatically altered the fate of the ADC program and its clients. ADC would have disappeared, and poor single mothers would have been part of a much broader pool of needy Americans entitled to federal government assistance. They would not have been as easily singled out or cast as socially marginal. And public assistance programs, generally, may have been less politically vulnerable. In the end, political winds and economic growth shifted in the United States, and Congress scuttled these sweeping proposals. In particular, conservative opponents of government social supports, who swept into Congress as the United States entered into a Cold War with the Soviet Union, used the era’s anticommunist rhetoric to brand all expanded social welfare proposals as anti-capitalist and undemocratic. Anticommunist rhetoric helped the powerful lobbies of business people and physicians fight off new programs like the Truman administration’s universal health insurance proposal. Meanwhile, the unprecedented prosperity of the postwar years obscured the economic problems of working-class and poor people, dimming popular support for expanding government economic protection and reducing liberal advocacy for broad social democratic reform. Finally, Congress preoccupied itself with a new group of “needy” Americans—the millions of soldiers, sailors, and air crew returning to the United States after the war ended. The resulting GI Bill of 1944, perhaps unwittingly, continued to accentuate the unequal two-channel welfare state—with its attendant race, gender, and class proscriptions. The GI Bill provided social welfare supports such as education, job training, mortgages, and more to millions of returning veterans. Government support thus provided economic and social mobility to millions of white working-class men. African American veterans benefited as well, but unequally, given racial discrimination in educational institutions, housing policies, and the labor market. Married women benefited primarily as dependents of men. Singled out as particularly in need of government support in the Progressive Era, single mothers now found themselves excluded from the nation’s most generous federal social welfare programs. The newly created Aid to Dependent Children program contained serious limitations. But the early-twentieth-century reformers who first championed mothers’ pensions viewed it as an important gain for poor single mothers. Doubtlessly many single mothers also welcomed ADC. It broadened support far beyond mothers’ pensions’ reach. And it invoked—even if it did not deliver—recognition of the social value of mothering. As American society moved into the more prosperous, stable, and secure second half of the twentieth century, however, it remained unclear whether “piteous” lone mothers of the type Jane Addams (1910) recalled had less harrowing lives

22 • Welfare in the United States

than their predecessors. Though greater numbers had gained access to needed support for their children, many nevertheless continued to struggle under the burdens of supporting and caring for their families alone. When single mothers first came to national public attention in the early twentieth century, they symbolized the widespread problems of poverty in an urbanizing and industrializing nation. By the 1950s, that nation was gone: Cities emptied into suburbs, factories gave way to office parks, Hull House reformers were replaced by professional social workers. In this postwar society, the poor solo mother was thought to reflect not the structural problems of industrial America, but the supposed dysfunctions of those on the margins.

CHAPTER

2

NEW DEBATES ABOUT WELFARE, MOTHERHOOD, AND WORK The 1950s and Early 1960s

After nearly two decades of economic struggle and deprivation, Americans living in the 1950s faced a new and welcome problem—abundance. The war wrenched the nation from the grips of the Depression, and steady, high economic growth continued through the 1960s. An expanding and predominantly white middle class vacated the cities for suburbs, purchased houses with the latest appliances, acquired automobiles, and settled down to have children. Suburbanization brought with it greater emphasis on the nuclear family, and an exaltation of motherhood for white married, middleclass women. Yet the story of the affluent society applied only to some Americans, those lucky enough to have moved to the pricier suburbs. Left behind and left out of the story were the many people living in rural areas, workers affected by the early stages of deindustrialization, and residents of inner cities. Federal highway construction, federally backed home mortgage loans, and redlining policies, which ensured that homes in minority neighborhoods were less likely to qualify for loans, made suburbs the center of growth, further weakening rural and inner city American communities. As suburban America blossomed, these communities experienced dwindling tax revenues and an intensification of poverty—widening the gulf between the haves and the have-nots. For poor Americans, the affluent 1950s brought continued and even new hardships. In the late 1950s, more than 20 percent of Americans remained poor according to the federally established poverty rate. African Americans

24 • Welfare in the United States

were much more likely to live in poor households than white Americans. As the nation mobilized for World War II, millions of African Americans, as they had during World War I, migrated from the South to the North and West to fill munitions factories and other positions. Their arrival was greeted with hostility and violence by many northern whites. When the war ended, those African Americans who had been able to secure industrial jobs were the first fired. Most spent the postwar decades relegated to the least-skilled, lowest-paid jobs, primarily in the service sector. Economic demobilization in combination with the early stages of deindustrialization in northern urban centers—as companies moved manufacturing facilities out of large cities—left many African Americans either unemployed or underemployed. Continued residential segregation compounded these problems. Discriminatory home loan lending practices and white neighborhoods’ use of restrictive covenants to prevent home sales to African Americans forced them into densely populated, low-income segregated neighborhoods in cities like Detroit, Baltimore, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. African Americans who remained in the South continued to face legal segregation and relegation to irregular, low-paying jobs in agriculture and domestic service. As they had in earlier decades, single mothers of all races also struggled for an economic foothold. Widowed, divorced, deserted, or never married, these women faced special difficulties in the postwar years. Single motherhood was rising among women of all races in the 1950s and 1960s primarily due to rising divorce rates and increased births to unmarried women. In 1940 2.5 million households were headed by women. In 1960 there were 4.4 million. These women struggled to raise their children and earn enough money to survive. If they were able to find someone to care for their children while they took outside employment, gender segregation in the labor market often relegated them to low-paid traditional women’s jobs in housekeeping, childcare, unskilled industrial work, and the service sector. The plight of Americans left out of the postwar American Dream fueled growth in all of the federal welfare programs created by the New Deal. Old Age Assistance continued to grow, and a new category, Aid to the Totally and Permanently Disabled, also expanded. But the Aid to Dependent Children program grew most. Between 1945, the year the war ended, and 1950, the number of families receiving ADC more than doubled. By 1960, with over 3 million clients, ADC was the largest and most costly federal public assistance program. At the same time, the faces of the ADC program, which had already begun to change in the 1930s and 1940s, continued to alter. The vast majority of ADC clients were still white. But African Americans relied disproportionately on ADC because they were more likely to be poor

New Debates about Welfare, Motherhood, and Work • 25

and less likely to have access to steady employment and social insurance programs. In addition, because the Survivors Insurance program removed many widows from the ADC program in 1939, and because single motherhood was on the rise in the general population, a greater percentage of ADC mothers in the 1950s and early 1960s were divorced, deserted, or never married. These women experienced welfare differently than women in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. Because the federal welfare state was nearly two decades old, single mothers were more aware of the existence of ADC than their counterparts in earlier eras. Individually and, to a small degree, collectively they began to assert their need for assistance, applying for ADC in far larger numbers than ever before. Some women were buoyed by the growth of the national civil rights movement among African Americans. Though the movement in this period focused largely on access to public spaces, school integration, and political rights, segments of the movement also emphasized equal access to public services, including welfare. The changing faces of ADC’s clientele combined with African American migration and the civil rights movement led threatened whites to identify ADC as a program serving African Americans. The increasing numbers of unmarried mothers also fueled accusations that the program fostered immorality. As poverty-stricken single mothers struggled to make ends meet, politicians drew on old stereotypes and created new myths to demonize them: that ADC clients were over-sexed, uncontrolled breeders; that they were cheats, habitually lying about their actual circumstances; and that they were lazy, seeking to avoid work and live instead at public expense. These hyperbolic images resonated with and helped foster resentment toward women on welfare among many Americans, and the formerly small and relatively uncontroversial program fell under increasing attack from the press and new restrictive rules set by states. At the same time, and paradoxically, a new group of policymakers emerged at the national level who attempted to improve and alter the ADC program. Building on the legacy of the New Deal, they sought to expand ADC’s coverage and eligibility, raise payments, and create services for ADC clients. Their efforts were also shaped by the growth of the program and the changing face of its clientele. Drawing on ADC’s history of formal and informal regulation of clients’ sexuality, family relations, and employment, they sought to “rehabilitate” single mothers through the passage of several new laws. The parallel tracks of increased hostility toward ADC and a national reform effort combined to make the 1950s and early 1960s an era of transition and contestation for welfare.

26 • Welfare in the United States

ATTACKS ON WELFARE Press coverage of ADC in this period reflected the growing hostility toward the program and its clients. National newspapers and periodicals ran stories propagating negative perceptions of ADC mothers. The Christmas edition of the Saturday Evening Post in 1949 reported with satisfaction that the city of Detroit, Michigan, was “cracking down” on “welfare chiselers.” An editorial the following year intoned that “relief is ruining families” by supplying money to children born out of wedlock.1 From the late 1940s through the early 1960s, officials in large cities like Baltimore, Detroit, New York, and Boston launched anti-welfare campaigns to ferret out suspected fraud and to deny aid to children born out of wedlock. State officials in Arkansas, Georgia, New Jersey, and Oregon followed suit, convening grand juries to examine welfare cheating. In 1961, one local investigation garnered significant political attention. Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, a self-proclaimed “expert” on public assistance, conducted a study of the ADC program in Washington, DC and claimed that nearly twothirds of that city’s ADC cases were ineligible and that welfare recipients had been swindling the city. Journalists reporting on this and other investigations reprised the theme of fraud, suggesting, “it pays to play pauper.” In reality, over-hyped, unscientific “studies” like Byrd’s greatly exaggerated rates of fraud in the ADC program. Though the Saturday Evening Post had touted the anti-corruption campaign in Detroit, the magazine did not report the results: In a city of over 1 million people, only two cases of deception were found. In the ADC program nationally, fraud rates rarely exceeded 1–3 percent, a miniscule rate compared to other larger and much more costly public programs like Social Security, disability insurance, or the subsequent Medicare program. The many investigations also ignored the harsh reality that very few ADC clients had to “play” at pauper. They were, in fact, desperately poor. In Las Vegas, Nevada, Ruby Duncan, who relied on ADC for a brief period in her life, lived in substandard housing with no indoor plumbing and no paved roads. She told historian Annelise Orleck (2005) that ADC payments were not nearly enough to support her children. In the Midwest, as James Patterson (2000) has reported, life for poor single mothers on welfare was harsh, too. In Detroit in 1962, for example, a family of four on ADC was expected to get by with a grant of $160/month or $1,920/year. These funds placed them well below the $3,000 federal poverty line for a family of four (itself a very low figure, according to many critics). Families ordinarily did without fruit and vegetables and ate only canned or very poor cuts of meat, such as neck. Half of the 13,000 families surveyed in Detroit said they did without “adequate food.” Families receiving ADC also scrimped on clothes: Three-quarters of children had no raincoats and half had no boots. About

New Debates about Welfare, Motherhood, and Work • 27

90 percent of ADC families had no phone and only 10 percent had any money at all for recreation, such as a movie. The federal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), which oversaw federal welfare and social insurance programs, surveyed welfare clients nationally and discovered that between a quarter and a third of ADC families had no running water, too few beds, and not enough furniture to sit down for meals. The dire poverty of single mothers and their children, however, did not deter continued attacks on them and the ADC program. In particular, local and state politicians invoked the racialized and sexual stereotypes of welfare clients as lazy, immoral cheaters. In much of the inflammatory press coverage, reporters linked the “welfare crisis” to black migrants, who supposedly were responsible for draining the public coffers. Visual images of welfare recipients more often than not portrayed an African American woman, even though white women were the majority of welfare recipients. Press coverage in this period interwove a narrative of welfare, sexual deviance, family, and race that vilified poor African American women as culturally pathological and sexually immoral. “Illegitimacy” in particular became the catchword for the supposed degeneracy of the black family. Moreover, journalists, politicians, and various experts denounced African American “cultural patterns,” claiming black mothers were licentious, neglectful mothers, and unwilling to work. In a parallel development, politicians increasingly imposed rules and passed laws designed to limit access to the program. These exclusionary tactics occurred throughout the United States, in the North as well as the South, in rural states as well as urban industrialized ones, and in the East and West. Some were motivated by agribusiness and large landowners seeking to force poor African American and Latina women into the labor market during planting and harvesting seasons. Others were motivated by openly racist segregationist agendas, seeking to stem the tide of the civil rights movement and keep African Americans from receiving any public funds whatsoever. Still others sought to discourage the migration of low-income people, especially African Americans and Latinos, into their states by denying them aid. Finally some sought simply to keep public welfare costs low and surmised that ADC clients were easy targets compared to blind, disabled, and elderly people. Such exclusionary rules could flourish from the 1940s through the mid1960s in large part because of the structure of the ADC program. ADC was a federal grant-in-aid program, meaning it was jointly funded by the federal and the state governments. Although the federal government was the ultimate administrator of ADC, states reserved remarkable discretion in implementing the program. They could set their own levels of aid as well as determine some eligibility rules for the program. Either unwilling or unable

28 • Welfare in the United States

to change this relationship, federal welfare authorities generally acceded to restrictive rules by states or played catch-up in trying to overrule them. One of the most common ways that states and localities restricted ADC was by cutting funding. In 1949, the state of Michigan summarily reduced the ADC budget by $1 million, affecting thousands of families overnight. Mississippi reduced funds dramatically between 1950 and 1952 just as the number of cases increased. As a result, more families had to make do with far fewer funds. In 1951, Florida cut its appropriations for ADC and instituted a maximum allowable grant to ADC families, a sum that remained the same, despite inflation and recessions, until 1963. Iowa, too, created a maximum family grant. So common had major cuts to ADC budgets become that in the year from 1960 to 1961 the average ADC grant per recipient declined in thirty states. Overall, throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, average ADC payments remained low, leaving ADC families desperately poor. Some welfare clients organized to fight these cuts. In 1957, a group called Mothers’ Campaign for Welfare lobbied officials in Ohio to raise ADC grants. Four years later, Cleveland Mothers, another group of welfare clients, formed to challenge additional proposed cuts to ADC. In Boston, Mothers for Adequate Welfare confronted the welfare department in the 1950s, demanding higher payments to help them make ends meet. Though welfare clients began to resist here and there, restrictive rules continued to flourish. One of the most common restrictions was work rules. In 1943, Louisiana passed the first “employable mother” rule. Although the stated purpose of ADC was to allow mothers to be full-time caretakers of their dependent children, work rules codified expectations that for poor women—and especially for poor non-white women—work was more important than caring for children. Louisiana’s law said that all capable women with children over the age of 7 who received public aid could be denied assistance when agricultural work was available. Georgia instituted a similar rule in 1952. The Georgia welfare board insisted that public assistance administrators could force women to work according to “the habits and customs prevalent in the community.” Local elites, primarily large farmers and employers of domestic workers, were allowed to define those habits and customs. The question of who was employable often depended upon the racial background of the recipient or the need for labor. Administrators routinely refused aid to the African American women who provided low-wage domestic and agricultural labor, particularly during planting and harvesting season. As a result, in places like Tallulah, Mississippi, girls as young as 6 were forced into the fields, picking 100–200 pounds of cotton a day to help their mothers make ends meet. As Annelise Orleck (2005) reported, work rules ensured a brutal labor regime. Girls like Ruby Phillips and Alversa Burrell lost their youth to beatings from landlords

New Debates about Welfare, Motherhood, and Work • 29

and lost their mothers, as Phillips put it, “to overwork” in the cotton fields. Agricultural communities in the Southwest and Midwest similarly used work rules to ensure a ready supply of women farm laborers. Perhaps the most notorious exclusionary tactics of anti-welfare legislators were “suitable home” laws. ADC’s creators, whose interests lay in child welfare, embedded the idea of a “suitable home” into the program from its inception. The 1935 law stated that ADC’s administrators were obligated to ensure that dependent children lived only in “suitable homes,” their health and well-being protected from physical, emotional, or moral danger. As historian Winifred Bell (1965) reported, during the 1950s, nearly half of all states redefined the meaning of a “suitable home” in order to exclude unwed mothers from the program. Georgia passed the first suitable home provision in 1951, but other states across the country, from Florida to Michigan, from Oregon to Illinois, quickly followed suit. Arkansas cut off aid to mothers engaged in a “nonstable, nonlegal union.” Michigan stripped women of aid if they had a “male boarder” living with them. Texas refused to give aid to women in “pseudo-common law marriages.” Legislators designed these laws to ensure that women with access to a male breadwinner could not collect aid as well as to police the morals of women receiving ADC. Historian James Patterson (2000) has described how mothers seeking aid had to sign affidavits like this one: I . . . do hereby promise and agree that until such time as the following agreement is rescinded, I will not have any male callers coming to my home nor meeting me elsewhere under improper conditions. I also agree to raise my children to the best of my ability and will not knowingly contribute or be a contributing factor to their being shamed by my conduct. I understand that should I violate this agreement, the children will be taken from me. (Patterson 2000: 85–86)

Legislators and administrators considered non-marital childbearing de facto evidence of having an unsuitable home and cause for termination from the ADC rolls. One of the most dramatic applications of the suitable home law occurred in Louisiana. The incident revealed how racist efforts to stymie civil rights activism intermingled with sexual stereotypes to drastically limit the provision of needed aid to single mothers. In 1960, Governor Jimmie Davis denigrated ADC clients as “a bunch of prostitutes.”2 Legislators passed a sweeping suitable home law that struck 6,000 mothers caring for 23,000 children—95 percent of them African American—from the rolls. Although the law ostensibly targeted all unwed mothers, its deeper purpose was to keep African Americans from receiving any public funds. As the National

30 • Welfare in the United States

Urban League, a leading civil rights organization, pointed out, public officials passed the law as part of a wide-ranging segregationist package of bills in the legislature that fall. As a result of the law, thousands of destitute mothers and children turned to private charities such as the Red Cross and churches. The National Urban League’s New Orleans chapter started a “Feed the Babies” campaign that swept across the United States and even across the Atlantic Ocean, with British mothers sending “bundles from Britain” to aid mothers and children in Louisiana. In a rare instance of federal intervention, HEW Secretary Arthur Flemming issued a ruling making it unlawful for welfare departments “to declare a home unsuitable for a child to receive assistance and at the same time to permit him to remain in the home exposed to the same environment.”3 The Flemming ruling essentially required states to find alternative arrangements for the children if a home was considered unsuitable enough to cut off assistance. Nonetheless, many states violated the ruling and continued to deny aid to families with “unsuitable homes.” Closely related to suitable home laws were “man in the house” rules. These rules functioned in two ways to restrict needy women from receiving welfare. First, the presence of a man—no matter his relationship to the recipient—automatically rendered the home “unsuitable” in most states with suitable home laws. To enforce these rules, welfare case workers investigated clients, digging into the most intimate aspects of their lives, and invading their privacy: With whom did they socialize, who came to visit, who spent the night? Welfare clients reported intrusive tactics used to answer these questions. As one woman from Boston explained, case workers “visited late at night . . . If . . . you were going to have a male visitor, you knew you were subject to visits during any time of the 24 hour period.”4 Often, welfare workers literally resorted to “midnight raids” to try to find men or evidence of them in welfare recipients’ homes. In Alameda County, California, caseworkers invaded 500 homes in one night in 1962. Welfare workers rousted mothers and children from bed, turned on lights, opened closets and looked under beds. Man in the house rules, sometimes called “substitute father” rules, also limited welfare use by reinforcing the norm of male financial support, a major concern of politicians in the postwar period. Substitute father rules assumed that the presence of a man constituted evidence that financial need did not exist. State officials considered any man in the home of a welfare client the presumptive breadwinner and as a result denied aid to the welfare client. At the same time, in 1950, Congress passed the Notice to Law Enforcement Officials, which forced public assistance employees to gather information on deserting fathers from mothers who applied for ADC so that law enforcement officials could pursue the father and demand financial

New Debates about Welfare, Motherhood, and Work • 31

support of the children. Regardless of whether mothers wanted to have contact with fathers—and many women did not, especially those in abusive or neglectful relationships—they could not receive aid without divulging this information. By 1961, then, a decade of negative press coverage, fraud investigations, and restrictive rules and laws had stoked anti-welfare sentiment throughout the United States. That year, what should have been a small brushfire over welfare rules erupted into a political conflagration. Joseph Mitchell, the city manager of the small Hudson River town of Newburgh, New York, launched a “war on the welfare state,” establishing the most repressive set of rules regarding relief yet assembled. His thirteen-point plan sought to bar all ablebodied, employable, or “immoral” people from receiving any form of welfare, and limited all citizens to only three months of welfare support each year.5 Mitchell’s plan played on the stereotypes and myths of welfare clients that had taken shape in the previous decade. He targeted the “immoral” unwed mother: his plan cut from the rolls any mother who had an “illegitimate” child. He targeted the “lazy” welfare client: his plan cut from the rolls anyone who refused to take any job, regardless of the location, the hours, the pay, or safety concerns. He targeted the “cheating” welfare client: his plan ordered all ADC cases brought before the city manager’s office for review and mustered all welfare recipients to the police station to be registered. He particularly targeted recent African American migrants from the South, whom he hoped to deter: his plan forced any new resident to the city to show evidence that they moved with an offer of employment in hand “similar to that required for foreign immigrants” entering the United States. New York state authorities immediately challenged the legality of Mitchell’s draconian welfare code, and as a result, the city did not put a number of the provisions into action. But while officials prevented the full implementation of Mitchell’s plan, the incident nevertheless sparked a political firestorm in the press and national politics that not only crystallized the sentiments of many Americans, but also had lasting repercussions. Newspapers such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal covered daily developments in Newburgh. Major magazines wrote stories about Mitchell. The National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) news even produced an hour-long news documentary about “The Battle of Newburgh.” A New York Times reporter remarked with surprise that Newburgh had generated a “vehemence normally reserved for debate on such cosmic matters as nuclear bomb tests or the fate of Berlin.” Mitchell’s welfare reform received so much attention because it crystallized the sentiments of many Americans. A Gallup poll that year showed “wide-spread public approval” of the Newburgh plan. Mitchell quickly

32 • Welfare in the United States

became a folk hero to the growing conservative movement. Conservative intellectuals like Friedrich Hayek (1944) considered the welfare state a “road to serfdom,” rejecting state support for social security in favor of commitment to the free market. Mitchell’s anti-welfare code stoked conservatives’ imaginations, and they began to try to roll back welfare programs. Young Americans for Freedom, a conservative youth organization founded by William F. Buckley, organized a pro-Mitchell march in Newburgh. Their hero, Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, who was preparing for the 1964 presidential race, publicly embraced Joseph Mitchell. Meeting with Mitchell in Washington, DC, he congratulated him on his stand against “welfarism.” Newburgh marked a turning point in the history of ADC. It propelled ADC onto the national political agenda and fostered widespread public concern about welfare spending. It also solidified the association between that spending and racist and sexist stereotypes of welfare clients. Supporters of ADC in Congress and federal agencies, as well as social workers and concerned citizens, understood this. “We cannot dismiss the Newburgh controversy as a minor rebellion,” a social work professor wrote. “The favorable response to the plan was too widespread” (Bruel 1962). Look magazine called it “a visible wave of resentment” rolling “across the land” (Knebel 1961). The wave crested in 1961 just as new leaders in Washington began to make far-reaching changes in the ADC program at the national level.

“REHABILITATION”: CHANGING THE ORIGINAL PURPOSE OF WELFARE At the same time that opposition to ADC grew, a different current in ADC’s history, this one led by national policymakers, was also underway. Welfare’s champions were no longer the maternalist reformers of the early twentieth century. Their control was superseded by male-dominated bureaucracies like the Social Security Administration. In the 1950s and early 1960s, national leaders of social work organizations, administrators of state and federal programs, researchers, and philanthropists took the reins of federal welfare policy. In their hands, Aid to Dependent Children legislation changed in subtle but important ways. To some degree, amendments to the program reflected what remained of the broad liberal social welfare impetus of the late 1930s and 1940s, when policymakers had sought to expand welfare provision and create one universal, federally funded program for all needy Americans. Yet at the same time, the legislative changes of the 1950s and early 1960s reflected increased hostility toward welfare, as well as policymakers’ changing perceptions of welfare clients. By the early 1960s, new laws decisively shifted the basic principles of ADC and undermined the homemaker status of women receiving welfare.

New Debates about Welfare, Motherhood, and Work • 33

Despite attacks on welfare by legislators in states around the country, federal policymakers were able to expand the size and scope of ADC and increase federal spending. They were aided in this by the Republican presidential administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower and a contingent of liberal and moderate Republicans who wielded power in Congress. Eisenhower was a centrist who, though he opposed major new social welfare programs, nevertheless shored up the existing social safety net, especially Social Security. During the 1950s, Congress and the Eisenhower administration expanded federal housing assistance, unemployment insurance, and Old Age and Survivors Insurance and added disability insurance to the nation’s safety net. Eisenhower also created a new cabinet level Department of Health, Education and Welfare. His first secretaries, Oveta Culp Hobby and Marion Folsom, supported modest extensions of social insurance and public assistance. One of the most important expansions of the ADC program came in 1950, when Congress passed the “caretaker” provision. Until then, the ADC grant had provided funds only for dependent children, but not for the adult caring for the children. In 1950, however, Congress agreed with what social workers, welfare administrators, and liberal lawmakers had long argued— that the adult staying in the home and caring for the children also needed some modicum of financial support. This made mothers direct beneficiaries of the program for the first time. Two years later, additional amendments followed that increased the benefits limits to individuals to which federal matching funds applied. Thus states could raise their grants and the federal government would cover a portion of the increase. Congress also increased the overall federal matching funds for the program. The federal government would now pay a larger percentage of state ADC costs, a motivation for states to increase coverage and grant levels. In these small expansions, ADC supporters claimed victories. While welfare advocates sought to enlarge and improve the program, they also sought to change it in ways not unlike the proposals of some of welfare’s critics. Welfare’s critics were not the only people who had noticed the program’s steady growth and the increasing numbers of African Americans and never married mothers on the ADC rolls. Social workers, too, watched with apprehension as new clients filled the program. While they did not scorn them as critics did, they nevertheless viewed these clients as problematic compared to the overwhelmingly white and widowed women of earlier years. Using the vocabulary of postwar psychology, social workers insisted that the new clients were afflicted with “social disabilities” of various types: they lacked education and employment skills. They also displayed individual pathologies: in the words of social work researchers they were “immature,” “dependent” personalities whose single motherhood and

34 • Welfare in the United States

“dependence” on welfare were evidence of pathology. Beginning in the early 1950s, social workers, liberal reformers and politicians turned to fixing the perceived problems of ADC clients. Their solution was something they dubbed “rehabilitation.” They proposed that the ADC program utilize social services and counseling to solve the disabilities and pathologies they perceived among ADC clients. In a postwar context of economic growth and the propagation of a nuclear family ideal, rehabilitation translated into two basic goals: “improving family life” and “encouraging self-support.” In 1956, a coalition of social workers, welfare administrators, and supporters in Congress succeeded in amending the Social Security Act to redefine the stated purpose of ADC. It was no longer simply to support dependent children. In fact, the children no longer constituted the focus of the program; the mothers did. In addition, rather than support mothers in their caretaking roles through financial grants, ADC now officially sought to monitor their mothering and encourage them to take paid employment outside the home. The 1956 Social Security Amendments provided for “services to improve family life.” Federal matching funds reimbursed family counseling, individual counseling for parents, efforts to reunite “broken” families, and homemaker services for mothers who were not adequately performing maternal duties. They also provided for services to “encourage self support.” The 1956 law authorized states—if they so chose—to use federal funds for job training, job placement programs, and, to a lesser extent, day care. Though the dominant discourse of motherhood in the 1950s lauded the stay-at-home, white middle-class, “Leave it to Beaver” mother, many social workers believed ADC clients would be better off leaving their children to others, entering the labor market, and becoming economically “independent.” Single mothers also wanted independence, but on different terms: 60 percent of ADC clients responded to a national survey in 1960 that they “did something, or tried to do something, to help the economic situation while receiving ADC.” This included full or part-time employment, seasonal work, home production of goods, or raising livestock or produce. They did this because, as one client in Detroit reported, she was “weary of secondclass citizenship” that came from privation. Like many women, she wanted to earn wages so that she “could provide more material goods” for her children.6 Yet true economic independence was elusive for most poor single mothers, and rehabilitative efforts largely overlooked or reinforced this dilemma. Pilot rehabilitation projects often directed welfare clients to positions as domestics, food service workers, hotel cleaners, and waitresses. One highly touted program in East St. Louis, Illinois, dubbed the “Maid

New Debates about Welfare, Motherhood, and Work • 35

to Order” class, educated welfare recipients in housecleaning so that they could work as maids in wealthy St. Louis homes.7 Such jobs were typical “women’s” work with low pay and no benefits. In some regions, they were also the only jobs open to non-whites. In addition, day care was difficult to obtain, since the government did not subsidize it to any significant degree. African American neighborhoods frequently had no day care providers, other than informal arrangements with family members or neighbors, and white childcare programs were generally expensive and often refused African American children. Not surprisingly, single mothers working in these conditions found it difficult to achieve the “independence” social workers demanded from them. As a result, welfare clients sometimes thwarted the efforts of their ADC caseworkers and asserted their own needs and opinions instead. In the late 1950s, the University of Michigan School of Social Work undertook a pilot project in which they convened groups of ADC clients in Washtenaw County, Michigan, to encourage them to enter the workforce. The social worker reported with some frustration that her efforts to direct conversation toward job training and opportunities were challenged by welfare clients’ own discussions of problems with landlords, where to shop for the best deals on food, and which stylists did hair the best and cheapest. ADC recipients, it seems, often recognized that job training programs rarely offered real opportunities to climb out of poverty. They also revealed that other recipients offered more useful advice than middle-class social workers. Despite the problems with the rehabilitative approach, and the resistance of welfare clients to it, social workers continued to pursue it. This was in large part because rehabilitation provided an answer to critics of ADC. Social workers could point to social services as a solution for unwed motherhood and to welfare “dependency.” Indeed, rehabilitation was warmly received in Congress. The 1956 Amendments passed easily because federal welfare administrators promised to reduce ADC rolls by making poor single mothers “independent.” In 1961, a new law furthered rehabilitative policies. The new Democratic administration of President John F. Kennedy pushed Congress to pass the ADC-Unemployed Parent provision (ADC-UP). For the first time, it allowed states to admit married men into the program. These were unemployed men who did not qualify for unemployment insurance and whose families were in need. Allowing married male heads of households into the ADC program promised to put a new face on the increasingly controversial program. Advocates of the program touted it as a solution to the problem of “broken families” among welfare recipients. They assumed that unemployed fathers, unable to support their wives and children, left the home so their families would qualify for welfare assistance. Expanding aid

36 • Welfare in the United States

to two-parent families would remove this incentive for poor fathers to leave the home. While about half of the states adopted the program, the numbers of fathers on the ADC rolls remained small. At the same time, ADC-UP changed the program in a subtle, but important way. Despite the many efforts to push ADC mothers into the labor market, most Americans in the early 1960s still believed that women best served society by remaining in the home and caring for their children. But if men were to be allowed to receive ADC, they could not be exempted from work expectations. In the eyes of politicians and the public, male breadwinners were just that—breadwinners. They had to earn money. Thus their inclusion in ADC was coupled with the creation of new work programs to which fathers had to report in order to receive welfare. While rehabilitation had been gingerly encouraging welfare clients to work, ADC-UP required welfare-to-work programs for the first time—for men. This would prove to be a key change when Congress once again amended the ADC program the following year because it opened the door for mandatory work programs for women recipients. In 1962, liberal welfare reformers helped pass the Public Welfare Amendments, which mandated that all states provide services aimed at rehabilitating ADC clients (the 1956 law had provided federal funds for services but did not require states to implement them). Though rehabilitation still officially aimed at improving family life and encouraging self-support, starting in 1962, the emphasis was primarily on work. The Senate described the new law as “designed to encourage and assist the State to provide more rehabilitation services in order to get individuals off the welfare rolls.”8 The 1962 amendments also changed the name of the program to Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), underscoring legislators’ increasing focus on the adults in the family, rather than the children. The 1962 amendments promoted work for AFDC recipients in several ways. First, they increased funding for the welfare-to-work programs created by the AFDC-UP program. Second, they opened these work programs to women receiving AFDC, not just the “employable men” on the program. Finally, the amendments authorized new federal funds and administrative waivers for research and demonstration projects that implemented rehabilitation. The overwhelming majority of these projects experimented with ways to encourage mothers to leave their caregiving roles in the home and take paid employment. The 1962 Public Welfare Amendments worked their way through Congress just as the controversial events in Newburgh, New York, were playing out in the national press. Hostility to welfare was at a historic high. None of this was lost on the social workers and federal policymakers who

New Debates about Welfare, Motherhood, and Work • 37

were writing the law. HEW Secretary Abraham Ribicoff and his deputy, Wilbur Cohen, saw rehabilitation not only as the right thing to do, but also as the right strategy to confront welfare’s critics. The affluent society relegated some Americans to poverty but evinced little public responsibility for them. People and events in the 1950s and early 1960s conspired to eclipse the original, official purpose of ADC—to support single mothers as caretakers—and to remake clients into independent workers. Both critics who attacked the program at the state level and reformers who pressed rehabilitation at the national level denied the realities of poor single mothers’ lives in postwar America. AFDC recipients’ responsibilities as mothers, their status as the poorest Americans, their barriers to earning money, the discrimination against them—all were forgotten, overlooked, or just ignored. Americans no longer viewed them as citizens with special needs and unique problems. Instead, they had redefined them as problems themselves. Welfare recipients came to embody concerns about family breakdown, sexual deviance, the divide between the middle class and the poor, the expanding welfare state, racial anxiety, an eroding work ethic, and the decline of inner cities. The racialized and sexualized discourse of welfare transformed it from a program designed to aid women in their work as mothers, to one that insisted that mothers take paid employment in order to achieve “independence.” One of the original authors of the Social Security Act who had overseen the ADC program from the 1930s through the early 1950s, Arthur Altmeyer, decried the new politics of welfare: I am afraid that in the name of rehabilitation, increased self-help, and the provision of constructive social services we will depreciate the need for effective income maintenance programs and weaken . . . the right of needy persons to assistance. (quoted in Berkowitz 1995: 106)

Indeed, few ever spoke of the rights of the poor in the 1950s. At the time, Altmeyer seemed to be a lone voice in the wilderness. But in the mid-1960s, others would join, not policymakers or politicians but welfare clients themselves. As a new Democratic administration pledged to wage a “War on Poverty,” a large, formal movement of poor women—single mothers receiving welfare—would attempt to place their problems, their needs, and most importantly, their rights, at the forefront of the public agenda.

CHAPTER

3

WELFARE RIGHTS AND WELFARE REFORM The 1960s and 1970s

“Bread, Justice, Dignity, and Adequate Income” was the rallying cry of a powerful welfare rights advocacy group that emerged in the 1960s. Women— of all races but mostly African American—on AFDC came together in their local communities to discuss their problems with the welfare department: inadequate assistance, delayed checks, intrusive caseworkers who monitored and scrutinized their daily activities. These politically and emotionally charged kitchen-table conversations spurred women to harness their collective power by forming local welfare rights groups to assist individual recipients and change welfare practices. With the help of middle-class allies, in 1966 these local groups established the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), a federation of local organizations to represent the interests of AFDC recipients on a national level. The NWRO passionately and unapologetically proclaimed poor mothers’ demands for a right to raise their children in economic security and in the process hoped to transform the miserly and punitive nature of AFDC. The welfare rights movement was only one strand of far-reaching efforts in the 1960s and 1970s to reform AFDC. The rapidly expanding welfare rolls, the decline of urban centers, the breakdown in traditional family formations, and the rising number of children born out of wedlock alarmed policymakers and politicians who connected these statistical trends to the AFDC program. The heightened concern about welfare fostered debate, discussion and numerous reform proposals about what to do about the newly defined “welfare problem.” Liberals, conservatives, social workers, politicians, policymakers, and welfare recipients were all dissatisfied with the

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current system and insisted that reform was in order. The central question was: In what direction would that reform go? Competing voices provided vastly different solutions to these problems. Proposals ranged from creating a system of guaranteed income or a floor of economic support for all poor families, working or not, to dramatically cutting welfare rolls so poor women would enter the workforce rather than rely on government assistance. Welfare reform debates in the 1960s and 1970s reflected these contradictory impulses and resulted in equally contradictory outcomes. Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson recognized the problem of poverty and determined to solve it. But his administration’s War on Poverty programs blamed economic disadvantage on the culture of poor people and offered job training and education as a way out of poverty rather than cash assistance. Conservative politicians, such as Joseph Mitchell in Newburgh, New York (see Chapter 2), stepped up campaigns to undercut and restrict access to welfare, and their attacks on AFDC and its clients gained increasing attention as the rolls grew. Meanwhile, a broad coalition of liberals, radicals, welfare rights activists, and some moderate conservatives pushed Congress to replace AFDC with a guaranteed income for all American families. All of these proposals, with the exception of the welfare rights movement’s guaranteed income plan, had mandatory work as a central feature. The 1960s and 1970s proved to be a moment of intense debate, agonizing disagreement, dramatic reform and unmet expectations. By the end of the 1970s, important changes had taken place. Policymakers and advocacy groups discussed guaranteed income proposals, but Congress failed to implement this kind of program. For their part, welfare recipients achieved a much more active role in shaping welfare policy and argued for a “right to live” and recognition and respect for their work as mothers. Antipoverty lawyers won some important court victories protecting recipients’ constitutional rights to privacy and due process. However, welfare recipients’ unprecedented activism ultimately did little to improve meager monthly benefits or to stem the overarching push for recipients to take paid employment outside the home. In fact, by the end of the 1970s, work was even more firmly tied to welfare reform. And despite the momentum for reform, the racial stigma attached to welfare only increased and AFDC benefits declined, foreshadowing a new more punitive era of welfare to come.

THE WAR ON POVERTY The decade of the 1960s opened with mixed impulses. A burgeoning civil rights movement, the United States’ rising global influence, a booming

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economy, and the election of the young articulate President John F. Kennedy seemed to offer a positive break with a past marked by depression, war, and Cold War consensus. At the same time, a racist backlash among some white Americans, growing awareness about intractable poverty, and concerns about urban decline both tempered the bubbling optimism and fueled reform efforts. Michael Harrington’s influential book, The Other America (1962), reminded readers that in the United States, a nation very selfconscious about its affluence, a full one-fifth of the population remained poor. So, in fact, “the rising tide” of economic growth did not lift all boats, as many had predicted. The combination of economic optimism and concerns about poverty prompted President Kennedy to make fighting poverty a central part of a broader liberal agenda. Kennedy achieved little in this regard before his assassination in 1963, but his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, took it upon himself to tackle economic disadvantage along with racial inequality and the nation’s withering public sector. An ambitious leader who idolized Franklin D. Roosevelt, Johnson was also a skilled politician and legislator. Congress passed most of Johnson’s Great Society package, which included a host of legal reforms and new social welfare programs. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 represented significant steps toward civil and political equality for African Americans; federal aid to education targeted resources to schools that served middleclass as well as poor children; the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities encouraged creative endeavors; the food stamp program reduced hunger and malnutrition; Medicare covered medical fees for all elderly patients, regardless of income; and Medicaid similarly ensured health care for the poor. The War on Poverty was the administration’s most direct attempt to end poverty. Its centerpiece was the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which created the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) to coordinate a vast and eclectic array of antipoverty programs: Job Corps, a residential work experience program for disadvantaged youth; Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), a domestic peace corps encouraging service in local communities; Head Start, a preschool program to prepare poor children educationally, socially, and nutritionally for elementary education; Legal Services, which provided free legal assistance to the poor; and Community Action Agencies, which coordinated government services and invited the poor to participate in making decisions about programming and administration through its mandate for the “maximum feasible participation” of poor community members. Income support was the most obvious solution to poverty, but the Johnson administration instead adopted “rehabilitation” as its preferred

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method. Some officials in the Department of Labor urged the president to invest in large-scale federal job creation, but he rejected this option as too politically and financially costly. Other advisors pushed for a family allowance or other forms of universal income support program, but Johnson rejected these as well, turning instead to community development, education, and job training programs. The slogan of the OEO was “a hand up, not a hand out.” Rather than providing money, then, Johnson and his antipoverty policymakers believed that government programs ought to provide people with the tools to enable them to compete in the labor market. The rehabilitative approach to poverty, however, failed to confront broader problems of deindustrialization, racially segregated housing and crumbling urban schools, low wages, or the difficulties of combining work and parenting. Services could help individuals, but they could not alter the larger economic or social environment that kept many Americans poor. The War on Poverty’s planners, then, rejected income support—or “welfare”—as a solution to poverty, and they explicitly sold their programs as an alternative to and solution for growing welfare rolls.

THE WELFARE CRISIS AND THE 1967 SOCIAL SECURITY AMENDMENTS As the nation geared up to fight a War on Poverty, AFDC experienced what the popular media called a “welfare crisis.” In many ways, the crisis of the late 1960s and 1970s was a continuation and exacerbation of trends discussed in Chapter 2. As in the earlier period commentators were disturbed by the kinds of women receiving welfare, as well as the number of women receiving welfare. The percentage of never-married, divorced, and women of color on welfare continued to increase. Compounding this was a dramatic expansion of the number of women receiving assistance. AFDC rolls increased from 3.1 million in 1960 to 4.3 million in 1964 to 6.1 million in 1969 to 10.8 million by 1974. The causes of this increase were complex, but the decisive factor was fairer federal rules that allowed thousands of eligible families, particularly African Americans, to finally rightfully claim benefits previously denied to them. Civil rights activism and War on Poverty programs emboldened poor single mothers in many communities to battle restrictive policies that prevented them from obtaining desperately needed aid. Many of the punitive welfare policies implemented by local and state welfare departments in the 1950s and early 1960s and discussed in Chapter 2 were still in place. Local officials’ efforts to use substitute father rules, employable mother rules, and other restrictions to keep women off the rolls proved increasingly difficult as the number of needy women grew and as more poor women learned of the availability of welfare. In addition, a new generation of social

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workers, trained in the belief that welfare was an entitlement, increasingly saw their role as one of aiding women rather than protecting state coffers. Moreover, civil rights organizations and antipoverty lawyers began to monitor welfare departments to ensure fair and equitable treatment of poor women. The increase in AFDC rolls during the 1960s was the result of successful advocacy and activism rather than a sign of a crisis of family breakup or erosion of work ethic among the nation’s poor. But the media, politicians, and the public believed that increasing welfare rolls were an indication of a broader and deeper set of social problems: the decline of urban centers, the deterioration of living standards among African American city dwellers, rising divorce rates, larger numbers of children born out of wedlock, and inner-city riots. Policymakers and politicians, both liberal and conservative, connected these disturbing trends to the AFDC program and ultimately blamed African American culture and personal behavioral choices for rising AFDC rolls. Congress attempted to address the growing “welfare crisis” in 1967 when it passed a series of amendments to the Social Security Act. The 1967 reforms reflected the contradictory reform impulses of the period. It not only required states to establish a minimum level of “health and decency” but also instituted mandatory maternal work requirements and provisions to curb out-of-wedlock births. The 1967 Amendments created both a carrot and a stick to encourage AFDC mothers to perform wage labor, through the Work Incentive Program (WIN), which made work a mandatory component of women’s welfare receipt for the first time. WIN required states to refer a portion of their AFDC population with school-age children to work programs and, as an incentive to enter the labor market, allowed recipients to keep the first $30 of their wages and one-third of anything beyond that without losing benefits (a policy referred to as the “earned income disregard”). In practice, WIN did little to move recipients into the labor market. Congress provided very limited funding for job training and childcare, and federal job administrators generally focused on placing into jobs poor fathers in the AFDC-UP program (described in Chapter 2), rather than poor mothers on AFDC. Without significant investment in education, training, and support services, recipients’ low educational levels and women’s relegation to the low-wage labor market limited the ability of most recipients to climb out of poverty through wage labor. At the same time, responding to the unsubstantiated criticism that AFDC encouraged out-of-wedlock births, Congress passed a “freeze” on federal AFDC funds to states for children of unwed mothers or deserting fathers. The “freeze” drew vehement protest from federal officials, governors, and welfare rights activists, who argued that not giving poor mothers additional money when they have another child—even if that child was born out of

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wedlock—would create undue hardship, not only for the mother but for the entire family which was already living on a meager monthly allowance. It would, in essence, punish the blameless. In 1967, then, a liberal coalition of women’s organizations like the League of Women Voters, social welfare organizations like the National Conference of Social Workers, and religious organizations like the National Council of Churches of Christ came to the defense of poor single mothers and their children. The criticism was strong enough to ensure that welfare administrators never implemented the “freeze,” which Congress repealed two years later. Despite its ultimate failure, though, the “freeze” nevertheless reflected lawmakers’ frustration with rising rates of single motherhood and their continued concern with recipients’ personal sexual behavior. Like the War on Poverty, the 1967 reforms were premised on the “culture of poverty” theories that had emerged in the postwar period and flourished in the 1960s. As discussed in Chapter 2, proponents of the culture of poverty believed that the problem of poverty lay within individual poor people themselves rather than with broader structural barriers to economic mobility. The culture of poverty argument attributed the persistence of poverty to familial and cultural traits within particular communities. Anthropologist Oscar Lewis first popularized the term in the early 1960s in his writings about impoverished communities in Mexico and Puerto Rico (Lewis 1959, 1966). Lewis argued that among his subjects, poverty had become a way of life, passed from generation to generation through the cultural transmission of a series of traits: the lack of a work ethic, resignation, dependence, lack of impulse control, and the inability to delay gratification, among others. In some distant past, Lewis argued, such traits developed in response to prolonged economic deprivation, but these traits now prevented his subjects from escaping poverty. In other words, culture perpetuated—even caused—poverty. Of course, culture of poverty arguments failed to take into account the complex reasons for the persistence of poverty, including residential segregation, racially discriminatory hiring policies, and inadequate schools. By narrowly focusing on one issue— personal behavior—culture of poverty theorists missed the larger picture of why poverty exists and, moreover, assumed that culture is an attribute “passed on” generationally rather than something created and crafted in a particular historical moment. This emphasis on personal behavior reinforced parallel critiques of welfare and, by attributing these behavioral patterns to “culture,” the theory ultimately reinforced welfare’s racial stigma. In the mid-1960s, Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan applied the culture of poverty directly to discussions of African American poverty and welfare. One of the architects of the “War on Poverty,” Moynihan sought to convince President Johnson to move beyond the Civil

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Rights and Voting Rights Acts and rehabilitative antipoverty programs to ensure substantial racial equality—to move from “equality of opportunity” to “equality of results.” To do this, he insisted, policymakers had to face the particular form that the “culture of poverty” had taken among African Americans. At the heart of black poverty, Moynihan insisted, was male economic disadvantage and its effect on family structure. Centuries of slavery, segregation, and discrimination prevented black men from providing for their wives and children, he argued. As a result, these failed breadwinners deserted their families, leaving single mothers to raise children without male role models. The resulting “matriarchal” black family structure created a “tangle of pathology” characterized by juvenile delinquency, drug use, and other forms of social disorder in the nation’s central cities.1 Like Lewis, Moynihan saw the roots of the problem in structural barriers to economic mobility—he cited slavery, segregation and discrimination, rapid urbanization, and high rates of unemployment and underemployment among black men—but argued that now, the cultural problems rooted in family breakup themselves perpetuated black poverty and racial disadvantage. He also erroneously equated female-headed households with “matriarchy” (which implies female power) and assumed that these families were inherently dysfunctional, regardless of financial status. The “fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community,” Moynihan wrote, was “the deterioriation of the Negro family” and the answer was to establish a stable Negro family structure featuring a male head of household.2 Moynihan said little that was new. Sociologists, both black and white, had been worried about single motherhood and family breakup among poor urban blacks since W.E.B. Du Bois’s influential book, The Philadelphia Negro (1899). Nonetheless, the report, which became public just after the black neighborhood of Watts in Los Angeles erupted in violence during the summer of 1965, sparked significant controversy. Civil rights leaders and some of their white allies feared that the report signaled the administration’s retreat from civil rights. Some accused Moynihan of “blaming the victim” (Ryan 1971) and providing “fuel for a new racism” (Farmer 1967) by highlighting black family structure and social disorder. Few critics, however, took issue with Moynihan’s condemnation of female-headed households or his celebration of male breadwinning. Civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., Whitney Young, Jr., and Bayard Rustin also cited single mother households and family breakdown as serious social problems. And they all saw jobs and income to bolster male breadwinning—rather than women’s economic independence—as critical to overcoming poverty and achieving racial equality. Young and Rustin marketed plans for massive investments in poor urban neighborhoods as a solution to family breakup, and King cited the Moynihan Report favorably.

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Ebony magazine’s photo editorial “A Man Around the House” quoted liberally from Moynihan, labeling the “heritage of matriarchy” in African American culture “one of the most destructive forces in the life of the Negro family.”3 Ebony’s editors, like civil rights organizations, called on government and private industry to provide “job retraining and other special consideration . . . to the Negro man,” for “if the Negro is ever to win his rightful place in American society, something must be done, and done soon, to build a strong and stable family structure among Negro ghetto dwellers.” In contrast to these national civil rights leaders, welfare rights activists argued for higher welfare benefits and job training for those women who wanted it, rather than programs to reestablish the two-parent black family and increase poor women’s dependence on a male head of household. The “culture of poverty” argument, and its emphasis on family structure, had two important consequences for AFDC recipients. First, policymakers such as Moynihan and other architects of the War on Poverty focused job training programs almost exclusively on men and failed either to push for an expansion of welfare for AFDC mothers or to provide well-paying jobs for them. Only at the insistence of the Labor Department’s Women’s Bureau and Democratic Congresswoman from Oregon Edith Green did the federal government establish a small Women’s Job Corps. But that program trained women for low-wage “female jobs” like “Secretary, Hospital Services, Food Services, Cosmetology, and Nurses Aide,” and its boosters ensured the public that participants would “learn . . . how to be homemakers . . . good wives and good mothers.” The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 made few provisions for childcare, which further restricted women’s access to job training. Policymakers decided to solve the poverty of poor single mothers and their children by enabling poor men to become family providers. Second, the “culture of poverty” and concerns about family structure bolstered criticism of AFDC even among liberals. Because so few two-parent families were eligible for public assistance, liberals feared that poor fathers deserted their families in order to enable their wives and children to collect welfare. Like men’s low wages and unemployment, AFDC “perpetuated the matriarchal family” by placing a “premium on desertion,” as Whitney Young of the National Urban League put it (Young 1964: 175). Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Council identified AFDC as one of the twelve aspects of the ghetto’s “total pattern of economic exploitation” because it “contribute[d] to the breakdown of family life” (quoted in Carson et al. 1991: 296). Liberals in Congress agreed; they hoped to extend income support to two-parent (which they considered father-headed) families by mandating state adoption of the AFDC-UP program so that poor fathers would remain with their families.

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Despite the preoccupation with male breadwinning, the Moynihan Report and culture of poverty theories actually bolstered arguments that AFDC mothers should be required to work for wages. Concerns about the breakdown of the black family fueled arguments that welfare should not be a comfortable, viable option for African American women. Requiring welfare recipients to work, the argument went, might put pressure on mothers and fathers to stay together or not have children in the first place. The misguided assumption was that poor women had children and failed to marry the fathers because of the availability of welfare. Women’s increasing employment in the postwar period, as well as racist stereotypes that African American women were undeserving of support and ought to be employed, further encouraged legislators to push AFDC recipients into the labor market. The “welfare crisis” thus lent support to conservatives’ renewed efforts to restrict AFDC by instituting stringent work requirements. To conservatives like Louisiana’s Russell Long, powerful head of the Senate Finance Committee, African American single mothers had no claim to the middleclass ideal of full-time homemaking. Long wondered aloud why poor single mothers in the welfare rights movement had time to protest but not “to pick a beer can off the street . . . in front of their own house or catch a rat.” He evoked longstanding stereotypes of black women as lazy and promiscuous when he drew a picture of an AFDC recipient as “that woman who just sits around the house and drinks Hi-Fi or Gypsy Gold wine all day while the children are out or in school.” The archetypal AFDC recipient, Long insisted, “won’t do anything except produce more children for the public to pay for at taxpayers’ expense.” 4 Inherent in Long’s critique was a devaluation of black women’s mothering. The 1967 amendments did little to solve what journalists called the “welfare crisis.” Although the reforms emphasized work, they did not provide decent paying jobs for AFDC recipients, nor did it resolve the pressing issue of how poor mothers would continue to care for their children without adequate childcare while working full time. Another voice in the debate—that of welfare mothers—provided an alternative solution to this dilemma.

THE WELFARE RIGHTS MOVEMENT The 1960s and early 1970s witnessed social movements for equality among women, African Americans, Latinos, Chicanos, Native Americans, Asian Americans, sexual minorities, and a number of other constituencies. Demands for justice in one area overflowed into others, with social movements sharing methods, ideologies, and members. Welfare rights activists —and their causes—were among them. These movements, like the War on

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Poverty, were fostered by an abiding belief that a country as wealthy and powerful as the United States could, without difficulty, ensure equality and opportunity for all Americans. A cadre of organizations, individual activists, and intellectuals helped chart strategies for political change and form networks of support. Churches, foundations, local and federal government agencies, and a massive number of ordinary Americans funded movement organizations enabling them to open offices, rent telephones, print leaflets, and hire staff. For many Americans, the emergence of social movement activism was the fulfillment of political democracy, where ordinary Americans participate in policymaking, reform political institutions, and better their lives. The struggle for welfare rights was one of these movements. In the 1960s, AFDC recipients in rural and urban areas, north and south, organized for a right to welfare and countered efforts to restrict AFDC and transform it into workfare. Many of the women who became involved in the welfare rights movement first engaged in civil rights activity and community organizing. They garnered support from social workers, student activists, and local War on Poverty agencies. Community organizations interested in organizing welfare recipients used federal grants to set up storefront offices, VISTA workers volunteered with welfare rights groups, and Legal Services lawyers waged court battles on their behalf. With such support women on AFDC organized a widespread movement. They insisted on the federal government’s responsibility to ensure all Americans an adequate income and pushed for protection of their civil rights, fair and transparent welfare policies, and a revaluation of their work as mothers. At its peak in 1969, this historic movement had close to 30,000 members nationwide. Welfare rights activists planned sit-ins, marched in militant public demonstrations, wrote pamphlets and position papers, lobbied Congress, and participated in welfare policy discussions. By the late 1960s, welfare rights activists played an important role in local, state, and national welfare politics and their campaign for a federally guaranteed income had garnered widespread support. The emergence of the welfare rights movement was part of a broader turn towards antipoverty initiatives among social movement participants. Civil rights activists renewed efforts to address urban poverty and joblessness in the mid-1960s. The 1963 March on Washington, best known for Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech,” was billed as a “march for jobs and freedom.” In 1966 the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) implemented “Operation Breadbasket” in Chicago to address economic hardship among African Americans. In 1968, SCLC organized a “Poor People’s Campaign,” which brought thousands of people from around the United States to set up camp in the nation’s capital to demand “basic economic and social freedom to all Americans.”

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While poverty was clearly an important component of the civil rights agenda, many key participants saw welfare as too stigmatized an issue and believed it contributed to the breakup of the black family. Some civil rights activists and organizations denounced racially restrictive welfare policies and mandatory work requirements and sought to protect the civil rights of welfare recipients. But in terms of antipoverty initiatives, they favored universal programs, such as a Negative Income Tax, or job creation and full employment policies. Consequently, few established civil rights organizations extended concrete support for the welfare rights movement. In fact, when two welfare rights activists approached Whitney Young of the National Urban League about organizing welfare recipients, Young, revealing his biases against welfare receipt, responded, “I would rather get one black woman a job as an airline stewardess than I would to get fifty black mothers on welfare.”5 In this way, the welfare rights movement parted ways with the mainstream civil rights movement. White, Latina, Native American, Asian American—but predominantly African American—women, and even some men, embarked on a variety of efforts to better the condition of AFDC recipients. In 1963 Johnnie Tillmon, an African American single mother of six, who went on welfare after an illness made it difficult for her to continue working, formed a welfare rights group in her Los Angeles public housing complex that she called ANC (Aid to Needy Children) Mothers Anonymous. In New York City, Jennette Washington had worked for many years on urban renewal, housing rights, and parent-teacher associations before forming the Westside Welfare Recipients League. Lillian Craig was a white welfare recipient in Cleveland who became involved in welfare rights in 1964 through her church on Cleveland’s west side, where Students for a Democratic Society, a leftist youth organization, had launched an antipoverty initiative. In 1966, George Wiley, a middle-class African American civil rights activist, helped bring many of these recipients together in the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), giving them a voice in national antipoverty and welfare reform debates. Welfare rights activists challenged the fundamentals of the culture of poverty argument. They argued that single-parent families were not dysfunctional and that the real ailment of these families was not the lack of a male breadwinner but the lack of adequate economic resources. In Morgantown, West Virginia, for example, welfare rights activists informed recipients that they had a right to date and have intimate relationships without losing their welfare benefits. In addition, women in the welfare rights movement insisted that society had an obligation to provide income to compensate their work as mothers and caregivers—their “motherwork.” Recalling Progressive Era maternalism but extending its reach beyond

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worthy white widows, a welfare rights group in Boston called Mothers for Adequate Welfare believed that “motherhood—whether the mother is married or not—is a role which should be fully supported, as fully rewarded, as fully honored, as any other.” At the same time, welfare rights activists repeatedly demanded opportunities for education, jobs, and childcare that would enable them to escape poverty via wage labor—something most of them had tried to do for years—if they so chose. They believed, fundamentally, that all women, including poor women, ought to have the choice to work inside or outside the home. And they insisted that the federal government had both the means and the obligation to ensure that no child would grow up in poverty. Securing the right to an adequate income was the first goal of the welfare rights movement. Mildred Calvert, of the Milwaukee County Welfare Rights Organization, explained the problem as one of distribution of resources: Poor people have a right to welfare . . . We have a right to live decently as dignified human beings today. When I see money being wasted—sending men to the moon to play golf, dumping nerve gas in the ocean, burning potatoes, killing off hogs . . . and then I see hungry and raggedy children running around . . . this is what just burns me up. I feel the only way changes will be made, especially in the welfare system, is through poor people, welfare people, organizing and raising a lot of hell. (Calvert 1972: 29–30)

To secure an adequate income, welfare activists advocated on behalf of individual recipients threatened with losing their grants, urged eligible families to apply for AFDC, and demanded “special grants.” Welfare departments often enumerated a number of basic items that they considered necessary for a basic standard of living—items such as a bed for every child, telephones, school clothing, and winter coats. Thanks to welfare rights activists, recipients learned, in many cases for the first time, that they were entitled to these items. When busloads of women and children deluged welfare offices with applications, they usually succeeded in getting what they needed. With the help of antipoverty lawyers, recipients also created “welfare rights handbooks” which translated into lay language complex rules and regulations. The Hinds County Welfare Rights Movement in Mississippi wrote a handbook called “Your Welfare Rights” letting recipients know their rights if they could not locate their children’s father. Such knowledge helped recipients advocate for themselves and each other and shifted the balance of power by questioning arbitrary caseworker decisions and demanding fair hearings. In New York, for example, the Citywide Coordinating Committee of Welfare Rights Groups filed requests for 3,000 fair hearings in the summer and early fall of 1967 alone—a huge increase over the usual fifty cases a year. Welfare

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rights activists also waged a campaign to pressure department stores to issue credit cards to welfare recipients. They argued that poor people desperately needed credit, since they did not have the resources to purchase big-ticket items. Recipients held sit-ins and “shop-ins” at Sears and Montgomery Ward until store executives agreed to grant credit to members of welfare rights organizations. NWRO launched a nationwide boycott of Sears which they called “Sock it to Sears” to pressure the company to grant $150 of credit to welfare recipients. Such activism empowered poor single mothers even as it improved their standard of living. In addition to these local campaigns, welfare rights activists waged a series of legal battles to establish a right to assistance. They worked closely with lawyers and legal aid societies, many of whom were part of an emerging field of poverty law that saw economic justice as central to its agenda and hoped to use the law to end poverty. The cases challenged the most egregious violations of recipients’ rights—the kinds of restrictive policies described in Chapter 2. One case challenged Alabama’s substitute-father rule. The Roger Baldwin Foundation and the Center on Social Welfare Policy and Law argued that the substitute-father law violated due process and recipients’ right to privacy. Because 95 percent of affected recipients were black, they also charged that the rule denied African American recipients equal protection. In King v. Smith (1968), the US Supreme Court agreed that substitute-father rules did not conform to the Social Security Act and thereby ensured AFDC recipients some measure of personal and sexual privacy that such laws had consistently denied. In Shapiro v. Thompson (1969), the Court agreed with welfare rights lawyers who claimed that residency rules violated recipients’ right to mobility. Authorities applied these rules, ostensibly to prevent welfare recipients from moving to a state for the purpose of collecting welfare, in a racially discriminatory manner often as a direct response to African American migrants in search of work. Studies showed, however, that few people crossed state lines seeking higher welfare benefits. The decision broadened access to AFDC and challenged the notion that public assistance was a local concern. The Supreme Court’s Goldberg v. Kelley (1970) decision represented the welfare rights movement’s most important legal victory. The case’s first plaintiff, John Kelley, a 29-year-old disabled, homeless African American New Yorker, had been unilaterally cut off from General Assistance—a state program for poor adults without children—by a caseworker. When poverty lawyers filed suit against New York welfare officials on behalf of Kelley and five other recipients, a federal district court ruled that welfare benefits, protected by due process, could not be terminated without a fair hearing. This ruling was affirmed in 1970 by the US Supreme Court. The case undercut the longstanding assumption that welfare was charity and could

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be disbursed and taken away whenever the state decided. It effectively made welfare an entitlement, not only in theory but also in practice, and gave recipients a new, even if incomplete, measure of protection. At the same time, the Goldberg decision revealed the limits to this new entitlement. The decision guaranteed procedural, not substantive rights. As a result, important questions remained unaddressed: Were welfare grants large enough to support a family? Did AFDC’s lower benefit levels compared to other public assistance programs constitute discrimination? Could a state implement stringent eligibility criteria for AFDC? In other cases, lawyers and recipients argued for a substantive right to welfare. For example, in 1970 the Center on Social Welfare Policy and Law and the NWRO challenged cuts in New York State’s welfare benefits without regard to the needs of recipients. In the US Supreme Court case, Rosado v. Wyman (1970), poverty lawyers sought to establish a right to live, arguing that a basic minimum income was guaranteed by the 1967 Social Security Amendments. The court rejected that argument and ruled that states had the right to reduce grants to accommodate its budget as long as it was done equitably. This case demonstrates that federal justices were unwilling to move from a discussion of equality in procedure and process to one of endorsing the right to a basic minimum standard of living. As long as states treated everyone the same, they could reduce grants and reject as many applicants as they saw fit. Many welfare rights advocates, antipoverty lawyers and liberal reformers had come to believe in a more long term solution to the problems of poverty: replacing AFDC with a broader, more comprehensive income support program for all American families.

THE GUARANTEED INCOME CAMPAIGN Perhaps the most far-reaching antipoverty proposals in the 1960s were those for a federally guaranteed annual income for all Americans. As congressional resistance stalled War on Poverty programs, urban riots and calls for Black Power highlighted African American economic distress, and the AFDC rolls grew, support for guaranteed income proposals gained currency. Guaranteed income proposals took many forms, including a Negative Income Tax (NIT), administered through the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), which subsidized individuals and families whose income was too low to pay taxes, and children’s allowances, which provided a monthly stipend to people with children, regardless of income or family status. Other proponents linked a base income to employment through government job creation and wage subsidies. The idea of a guaranteed income was most thoroughly laid out by economist Robert Theobald in The Guaranteed Income (1966). Theobald argued that technological advances could effectively sever the link between

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jobs and income, making basic economic security, guaranteed by the federal government, an “absolute constitutional right.” Support for a guaranteed income crossed partisan lines. A broad coalition—ranging from welfare rights activists to White House task forces to a handful of corporate leaders—sought to replace the nation’s categorical public assistance programs with a federally guaranteed income for all American families. Some conservatives, such as economist Milton Friedman (1962), saw a guaranteed income—in the form of a Negative Income Tax— as preferable to the current array of social welfare programs because it would enable the poor to participate directly in the free market. Friedman, interested primarily in minimizing government bureaucracy, pushed for replacing the current welfare system and its meddling social workers and hodgepodge of assistance programs such as housing subsidies, with direct cash assistance to families. On the other end of the political spectrum, a broad coalition of labor unions, civil rights and liberal organizations endorsed the proposal, as did many religious and social welfare groups. The League of Women Voters called for “fundamental income redistribution” in the form of guaranteed income support. Civil rights activists had also begun to demand a guaranteed income, along with guaranteed jobs, in proposals like the National Urban League’s Domestic Marshall Plan and the A. Philip Randolph Institute’s Freedom Budget. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the National Council of Churches all endorsed the guaranteed annual income. The NWRO offered the most generous guaranteed income program. Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward (see Document 18), scholar-activists and supporters of the welfare rights movement, envisioned a federally guaranteed income as the likely outcome of welfare rights organizing, which would overwhelm local and state welfare budgets and force Congress to take over welfare funding and administration of AFDC. While NWRO did not embrace the crisis theory that Piven and Cloward posited, the push for a guaranteed income quickly became the organization’s central goal. For many women in the organization, the guaranteed income would compensate them for their work as mothers. Cassie Downer, AFDC recipient and chair of the Milwaukee County Welfare Rights Organization, explained: A guaranteed adequate income [GAI] will recognize work that is not now paid for by society. I think that the greatest thing that a woman can do is to raise her own children, and our society should recognize it as a job. A person should be paid an adequate income to do that. (Downer 1972: 135–136)

Introduced as a bill in 1969 by the Congressional Black Caucus, the NWRO’s Adequate Income Act called for a base income of $5,500 for a family of four (increased to $6,500 in 1971). In establishing their base income, NWRO

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rejected the federal government’s official poverty line, which it deemed an unrealistic assessment of the cost of living and instead adopted the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics’ “moderate food plan.” The GAI plan, administered by a single federal agency, would have replaced all existing categorical public assistance programs. An individual’s declaration of need, rather than caseworker investigation, would have decided eligibility. The GAI plan included a built-in work incentive, so families earning money could continue to receive assistance until their total household income exceeded $10,000. Groups like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Black Panther Party, and the National Association of Social Workers followed the lead of welfare rights activists and supported this guaranteed income plan. The plan garnered some support from liberal Democrats, but not surprisingly a majority of lawmakers rejected it. The other significant guaranteed income proposal in this period was put forward by Republican President Richard M. Nixon. A conservative elected on a platform promising to quell rowdy civil rights and student demonstrations and to represent the interests of white, suburban voters, Nixon unexpectedly proposed his own version of a guaranteed income plan, the Family Assistance Plan (FAP), in 1969. The plan’s designers convinced Nixon that FAP would stem the rising tide of single-parent families by offering aid to two-parent families; reinforce the work ethic by rewarding male breadwinners in “working poor” families; and ameliorate poverty. Nixon also hoped to reap political benefits: FAP would have left most AFDC recipients, disproportionately non-white, with less income while providing a new subsidy to poor two-parent families, more likely to be white. The plan offered an income floor of $1,600 (in addition to $864 in food stamps) for a family of four with no income. Able-bodied adults and parents of school-age children would be required to register for work or training. With a built-in work incentive, a family of four with a working adult could receive some level of subsidy until their family income reached $3,920. Some liberals endorsed FAP, despite its low benefit levels, which they hoped could be raised in subsequent Congressional sessions. But fearing lower benefits for single mothers and their children, Nixon’s rhetoric about forcing recipients to work, and the plan’s rejection of recipients’ recently earned rights, the NWRO opposed the plan and urged liberals to join its “Zap FAP” campaign. Conservative groups like the Chamber of Commerce, as well as Southern Democrats and Northern Republicans in Congress, also opposed FAP. Southerners feared the impact of even low benefit levels on their region’s low-wage economy and racial order, while many conservatives simply rejected the idea of a federally guaranteed income. In the end, after two years of lobbying, debating, testifying, and protesting, neither the NWRO’s nor Nixon’s proposal became law. But the

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guaranteed income debate revealed the contours of discourse about welfare and poverty in the 1960s. First, people from across the political spectrum— those self-identified as radical, liberal, and conservative—advocated some form of guaranteed income. This rather rare coalition of forces favoring an income floor reflected not only the widespread discontent with AFDC, but also a certain level of optimism about the ability of the federal government to take an active role in alleviating poverty. Second, the NWRO had a perceptible impact on the debate. Welfare rights activists found themselves sparring with the Nixon administration not about whether people needed income support but about what that level of income support ought to be. They garnered allies among civil rights, social welfare, and religious organizations. Moderates in Congress sought to find the middle ground between what they believed were the two extremes of Nixon and the NWRO. While unable to achieve a guaranteed income, welfare rights activists clearly influenced the debate about what constituted a minimum standard of living. They also succeeded in establishing their legitimacy as participants in policymaking, testifying before Congress, meeting with high-level officials, and speaking at national events about the virtues of their proposals. Among liberals who debated whether or not to support FAP, Nixon administration officials, and lawmakers, women on welfare were seen as an indispensable voice in deliberations about welfare policy. Finally, the debate about a guaranteed income exposed the centrality of race and gender in the battle for, and the ultimate defeat of, plans for broad income support. As with other proposals such as the Negative Income Tax, the rationale underpinning the income plans upheld a male breadwinner model. Both Republican and Democratic supporters envisioned the primary beneficiaries of a guaranteed income as two-parent, working-class families with an unemployed or underemployed male head. But neither liberal Democrats nor Nixon succeeded in their efforts to shift the debate —viewed in racial terms—from single mothers to deserving two-parent “working poor” families. Many conservatives attacked Nixon’s guaranteed income plan as nothing more than a “welfare expansion bill” which would encourage family breakdown and laziness. It proved impossible to disentangle the debate about a guaranteed income from contemporary welfare politics. Business lobbyists and Congressional conservatives objected most vehemently to the guaranteed income because they believed it would provide an alternative to wage labor. In Senate Finance Committee hearings on FAP in 1972, Senator Russell Long of Louisiana summed up his opposition to the plan, complaining, “I can’t get anybody to iron my shirts” (Welsh, 1973) suggesting that any guaranteed income plan would exacerbate the shortage of domestic laborers—an occupation dominated by African American

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women. After failing to pass FAP, Congress approved the Talmadge Amendments to AFDC in 1971, which strengthened the 1967 work requirements for AFDC recipients with school-age children. Even as guaranteed income supporters hoped to reward marriage and custodial fatherhood, Long’s reference to black women as domestic servants revealed how central African American single mothers remained to discussions of welfare and income support. At the same time that Congress thwarted the guaranteed income proposals and instituted new work requirements for women on AFDC, it expanded assistance for elderly, blind, and disabled people, signaling that some groups were considered more worthy of aid than others. Different treatment for different categories of poor people suggested the continued belief of many Americans that the problem with AFDC was not miserly benefits or the program’s narrow reach. Instead, the problem was a system that encouraged black women to bear children out of wedlock and avoid their longstanding role as low-wage workers. Such efforts to link welfare to work requirements occurred as the economy slowed and shifted in ways that rendered low-income women and people of color even more vulnerable. By the early to middle 1970s, longterm shifts in the US economy underscored and spread economic deprivation. In 1973, three decades of economic growth which had benefited many middle-class Americans came to a halt, as the worldwide oil crisis highlighted terrifying trends already underway in the United States: deindustrialization and shift to a new service economy. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, industrial plants closed their doors, laid off their workers, and moved abroad. Many working-class Americans were hard hit by these changes. African Americans, although largely shut out of well-paying industrial jobs, found themselves trapped in a cycle of poverty with greater job competition and the decline of urban centers. Government aid like AFDC provided an important source of survival. High inflation made wages and welfare checks worth less and increasing unemployment narrowed job opportunities. The newly emerging service economy—with jobs in hospitals, restaurants, and departments stores, for example—offered mostly low pay, no benefits, long, inflexible hours, and little or no time off. These non-unionized jobs in the service industry and public sector could not make up for losses in household income, although many married working- and middle-class women entered the labor force in these occupations to maintain their standard of living. For women with family responsibilities, particularly single mothers, the new economy intensified poverty. As real wages declined and unemployment increased, Americans at the bottom rung of the income ladder suffered most, but women and their children became the most populous subgroup of America’s poor. Women of the welfare rights movement were acutely aware of their particular vulnerability as women. In the 1970s, they

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rearticulated welfare as “women’s issues.” With the aid of some middle-class feminist allies, they offered yet another vision of welfare reform in the 1970s, one tied to women’s needs for economic security and independence.

FEMINISM AND WELFARE In the early 1970s, in the midst of debates about a guaranteed income, women in the welfare rights movement began to espouse a feminist politics that asserted their political and economic autonomy and tied women’s liberation to economic security, a position that grew out of their decadelong organizing effort. They believed that having their basic economic needs met—food, shelter, and health care—would enable them to have the same choices about work and motherhood as middle-class women. At the same time that other women organized in labor unions, feminist organizations like the National Organization for Women (NOW), and women’s liberation collectives, then AFDC recipients, articulated their own critiques of patriarchy, proscribed sexuality, and sexual discrimination. Johnnie Tillmon, NWRO’s chairperson and later executive director, published an essay in the premier issue of Ms. magazine in 1972 entitled “Welfare is a Women’s Issue.”6 In the essay, Tillmon (1972) outlined the gendered and racial nature of oppression within the welfare system, exposing how welfare rights activists’ political positions—rooted in their experiences as poor, black women—did not always fit comfortably with that of working- and middle-class feminists. While they all advocated women’s autonomy, they defined this differently. For many middle-class women, autonomy meant freedom from housework and motherhood and an opportunity to earn a paycheck. For poor women autonomy meant economic security, freedom to bear and raise children, and not being forced into low-paying menial jobs. Nonetheless, during the 1970s, AFDC recipients worked in various ways with feminist organizations to challenge restrictive welfare policies, mandatory work requirements, and the continued focus on male breadwinners and two-parent families among liberals and progressives. In the end, they would offer a vision of welfare reform that, in addition to defending AFDC as an essential tool for women’s economic independence, offered employment as a viable route out of poverty. Welfare rights activists had espoused the elements of a feminist position since they began organizing. While some Black Power activists denounced family planning as genocide, for example, welfare rights activists fought for resources to control their fertility. But unlike middle-class feminists, who prioritized legalized abortion, they also asserted their right to bear children on their own terms. Into the 1970s, welfare administrators sometimes pressured recipients to undergo surgical sterilization, and doctors sometimes

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sterilized women without their consent, a particular problem on Indian Reservations. Welfare rights activists demanded an end to such practices. Moreover, in fighting for a guaranteed income and higher benefit levels, they also demanded economic autonomy, that is, access to enough money to raise their children independent of men. A history of relationships with unstable and often abusive men convinced many AFDC recipients of the need for an independent source of income, whether through federal income support or jobs that paid wages adequate to support a family. Revaluing their work as mothers—something that they had been historically denied—was also central to their agenda. They insisted that all mothers, regardless of economic status, should have the choice to join the workforce or stay home and raise their children. Though long informed by its own race- and class-based notions of women’s empowerment, the welfare rights movement took on an increasingly visible and self-conscious feminism beginning in the early 1970s. The shift provoked tension with some of their welfare rights allies. In response to a pattern of sexist and patronizing behavior by male staff members, as well as divergent analyses of work and motherhood, recipient leaders in the NWRO demanded greater control within the organization. Ultimately, many of the male staffers resigned and female AFDC recipients replaced them. In 1972 NWRO’s first chairwoman, Johnnie Tillmon, became executive director. The NWRO folded in 1975 due to internal tensions, financial difficulties, and a more hostile political climate, but welfare rights organizing continued, and it retained this growing feminist perspective. Welfare rights activists in Las Vegas, Nevada, for example, spent the 1970s and 1980s improving the poor, predominantly African American Westside, earning grants to build community resources like a library and to implement essential services like a health clinic and early childhood screening program. In New York City in 1975, socialist feminist and AFDC recipient Theresa Funiciello founded the Downtown Welfare Advocacy Center (DWAC), while feminists and welfare rights activists established the National Council on Women, Work, and Welfare in 1976. At the same time, feminist organizations like NOW, Women’s Lobby, and the National Women’s Political Caucus devoted new energy and resources to studying poverty and lobbying for progressive welfare reform. Margaret Mason of NOW summed up the growing sentiment that “feminists’ attention to poverty is not a divergence from women’s problems” but was instead “an essential focus on one of the basest manifestations of sexism and racism” in the United States.7 The bulk of members in mainstream feminist organizations never adopted a welfare rights perspective, but a number of leaders gave the issues of poverty and welfare attention. The growing number of poor,

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female-headed households, along with pressure from welfare rights activists prompted a growing number of middle-class feminists to see welfare as a women’s issue. Certainly, female-headed families had long been vulnerable to poverty, given women’s disproportionate responsibility for children, disadvantaged position in the labor market, and inability to access the welfare state’s most generous programs like Unemployment Insurance. But rising rates of divorce and nonmarital childbearing increased the number and visibility of poor, single-mother households significantly in the 1970s, part of what sociologist Diana Pearce (1990) labeled the “feminization of poverty.” During the 1970s and 1980s, female-headed households grew from 36 percent to 53 percent of all poor families. Class and racial tensions among women did not disappear. For instance, child support enforcement became a divisive issue. In the mid-1970s, NOW supported legislation to strengthen federal child support enforcement. Middle-class feminists recognized the negative impact that divorce had on women’s standard of living and saw it as only fair that fathers contribute economically to their children’s support. However, the law they supported required AFDC recipients to cooperate in establishing their children’s paternity and in tracking down non-custodial fathers. Welfare rights activists and their allies insisted that the bill was “punitive to welfare mothers” because mothers who no longer lived with the father of their children often did not want to maintain contact, since such relationships might be abusive. In addition, the bill denied welfare benefits to mothers who did not cooperate. Moreover, critics argued that establishing paternity was unlikely to provide much economic security to AFDC children, whose fathers were also typically poor. Legislation that might help women in middle-class and professional families, then, would prove unhelpful and even punitive for many AFDC recipients. Middle-class feminists’ emphasis on opening up job opportunities and facilitating women’s entry into the workforce also created some tension with welfare rights activists, who feared coercive work requirements. Many welfare rights activists demanded “wages for housework,” and insisted on a mother’s right to choose wage labor or full-time childrearing. For poor women relegated to the lowest-paying, most demeaning and least rewarding occupations, employment did not signal either liberation or personal empowerment. In some ways, middle-class feminists’ championing of work made welfare rights activists’ claims for expanded welfare assistance even more untenable for many Americans. Yet with the NWRO’s demise, a new generation of welfare rights activists concluded that employment offered the only route to economic security, and they joined feminist campaigns to improve poor women’s access to wellpaying jobs. By 1979, Wider Opportunities for Women listed over eighty

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women’s training and employment groups dedicated to getting poor single mothers into “nontraditional” employment—the kinds of blue-collar, unionized jobs like plumbing and construction that enabled men with little education to support families. At the same time, women’s organizations lobbied Congress to make AFDC recipients a priority target for federal full employment legislation. Welfare mothers who participated in the Women’s Bureau Low-Income Women Project, which drew together poor and working-class women in a series of regional conferences in the late 1970s, enumerated the multiple barriers they faced in finding and keeping jobs. They complained of not only personal barriers like poor health, responsibility for small children, and low levels of education but also systemic problems like lack of affordable childcare facilities and transportation. Above all, they complained about federal training and jobs programs like WIN and the US Employment Service, which channeled women into “low paying dead end jobs in traditional women’s occupations” that failed to enable a single mother to support a family. A 1977 Labor Department study of the WIN program demonstrated conclusively that “the chances of a low-income—and especially black—family headed by a woman permanently moving out of poverty are much less than they are for a family with a male head . . . not because welfare mothers refuse to work” but because “they are not able to command a high enough salary.”8 While welfare rights activists continued to demand a “right to live” through more generous income support, then, their emphasis in the 1970s shifted. The Democratic Party and liberal advocates had begun to emphasize full employment legislation rather than a guaranteed income. At the same time, many women’s rights groups pushed for expanded job opportunities. And while Congress seemed unwilling to keep AFDC benefit levels even with inflation, it did pass an Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), a small NIT for families with full-time workers. The message, of course, was that work pays. Furthermore, the 1970s witnessed a sea change in family economics that sent more and more wives and mothers into the labor market. A decade earlier, Moynihan had committed to creating male-breadwinner, female-homemaker families among poor African Americans, but now noted that AFDC, “a program that was designed to pay mothers to stay home with their children,” could not “succeed when we now observe most mothers going out to work.”9 As an alternative to a miserly and demeaning welfare program, many welfare rights activists demanded federal programs that would provide the education, training, services, and jobs to escape poverty. Welfare rights activists and their allies in middle-class feminist, women’s, and social welfare organizations brought this perspective to the debate over Democratic President Jimmy Carter’s comprehensive welfare reform plan,

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the Program for Better Jobs and Income (PBJI). Like nearly all welfare reformers before him, Carter denounced the current welfare system as “antiwork” and “anti-family.” The PBJI looked very much like Nixon’s FAP: it would have replaced AFDC and other public assistance programs with a very low guaranteed income for all poor families with children. Single mothers along with elderly and disabled people would receive $4,200 a year for a family of four on the “Income Support Tier,” which would leave their income at 65 percent of the federal poverty line. Two-parent families would be eligible for a lower benefit level, and their “primary wage earners” would qualify for temporary public service employment on the plan’s “Employable Tier.” Like the FAP, the PBJI would benefit two-parent, “working poor” families while hurting a majority of AFDC recipients, whose level of assistance would be reduced or terminated due to new eligibility restrictions. Welfare rights activists and middle-class feminists denounced the plan’s low benefit levels and its potential to reduce the income of already poor AFDC families. But they also opposed the relegation of poor single mothers to an “Income Support Tier” that defined them as unemployable and left them ineligible for public service jobs and other federal employment programs. Discussions within the Carter administration show that policymakers simply did not want to spend the funds necessary to provide enough jobs and childcare to enable AFDC mothers to replace welfare with wages. Grassroots antipoverty and welfare rights groups, lobbyists from groups like the League of Women Voters, NOW, and Women’s Lobby, and women’s religious organizations protested the plan’s two-track system which “keeps women poor” and “denies them access to employment and education for at least seven, possibly fourteen years.” In the end, Carter’s proposal, like Nixon’s and NWRO’s, failed to muster sufficient support to ensure passage, setting the stage for Republican President Ronald Reagan’s welfare cuts. Even before Reagan’s welfare reform efforts, the economic realities of the 1970s and 1980s boded ill for the poor, particularly poor single mothers and their children. AFDC rolls rose gradually during the 1970s and remained fairly steady during the 1980s despite growing numbers of single-mother households. For those able to get on the AFDC rolls, the real value of benefits declined steadily during the 1970s. In 1973, Congress made aid to elderly and disabled people inflation-proof; grants would increase to keep pace with rising prices. However, AFDC grants remained vulnerable to inflation, another example of AFDC’s particular political vulnerability. State legislatures, which set AFDC grant levels, were disinclined to spend more money on the increasingly unpopular program. Welfare rights activism and the support of poverty lawyers and many liberal advocacy organizations resulted in some increases in AFDC grants in the late 1960s. During the 1970s,

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though, AFDC values plummeted by more than 40 percent to an average of $275 per month for a family of three. In no state did the combined value of AFDC and food stamps bring a family of three out of poverty. The tighter economic circumstances that characterized the 1970s dampened enthusiasm for reform—especially reform under the rubric of welfare. Many Americans were working harder and earning less in real dollars. Conservative criticisms that blamed social movements, liberal reform, and special interests for the economic crisis resonated with a wide swath of American society. Few people wanted to spend more to reform a program that they believed would aid the least deserving at the expense of “hard-working Americans.” As the 1970s drew to a close the welfare crisis that burst onto the national political stage in the early 1960s was left unresolved. Although the decade witnessed an unprecedented mobilization of welfare recipients, who gained some material benefits, ensured protection of their constitutional rights, and made a place for themselves at the policymaking table, their plans for fundamental reform and ideological change were unsuccessful. The increasing number of recipients and the perceived problems associated with this increase were left to be addressed in another, more conservative, period of reform.

CHAPTER

4

THE END OF WELFARE AS WE KNEW IT The 1980s and 1990s

The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 heralded a new era in welfare politics. As the nation’s political climate grew more conservative in the 1980s and 1990s, longstanding attacks on AFDC increasingly bore fruit. While the Democratic Party had been criticizing AFDC since the 1960s, liberals had nonetheless pursued a variety of antipoverty policies during the 1970s. Liberal poverty analysts in the federal government tried to convince legislators to adopt a Negative Income Tax (see Chapter 3), and a broad liberal coalition pursued full employment legislation and resisted Republican President Gerald Ford’s efforts to severely restrict welfare. As social and fiscal conservatives gained power in Washington, DC in the 1980s, the Democratic Party largely abandoned this commitment to antipoverty policies, however. By 1996, a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, signed a bill that eliminated AFDC altogether, and with it the nation’s sixty-one-year commitment to aiding poor single mothers and their children. A number of developments during the 1970s laid the groundwork for Reagan’s election and contributed to the increasingly conservative welfare reforms that followed. Seismic national and global shifts shook the American economy in the 1970s and revitalized conservative resistance to progressive taxation, domestic spending, and social welfare programs. Changing expectations about women and work undermined support for a program designed to allow low-income single mothers to care for their children at home. The continued growth of single-parent households and unwed teen motherhood stoked fears about family decline. And deepening poverty among urban minorities fueled attacks on a so-called underclass.

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These trends sparked concern among many Americans. By the 1980s, a new group of conservative scholars in corporate-funded think-tanks employed these concerns to attack AFDC. In their hands, longstanding criticisms of welfare grew increasingly sophisticated. They argued that welfare spending was a primary cause of the nation’s economic problems and insisted that AFDC created cultural pathologies among the poor, encouraging nonmarital childbearing, discouraging employment, robbing poor adults of dignity, and locking poor children in a cycle of deprivation. They offered punitive welfare reform as a way to revive the work ethic, the two-parent family, and the nation’s economic supremacy. Conservatives wielded this anti-welfare discourse most effectively, but many liberal politicians accepted the basic contours of the conservative argument. Liberal politicians and organizations vigorously defended social welfare programs for elderly and disabled people but failed to mobilize effectively against attacks on AFDC. In a 1991 speech, for example, Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton denounced the “idea abroad in the land that if you abandon your children the government will raise them” and declared that poor parents must be “asked to assume their responsibilities and forced to do it if they refuse.” By the late 1980s, most Democratic lawmakers and liberal organizations, many of whom had once demanded a broader and more generous income support system, signed onto a new welfare consensus, largely shaped by conservatives. This bipartisan agreement paved the way for the termination of AFDC in 1996. Only welfare rights activists, joined by a handful of allies among middleand working-class feminists, religious organizations, and community organizers, offered a real alternative to the growing attack on poor single mothers and AFDC. In an era of deepening economic inequality, they echoed the National Welfare Rights Organization’s assertion that all Americans had a basic “right to live” and demanded federal support for poor women’s caregiving work. But they also envisioned AFDC and other forms of government support as an essential tool in helping women manage the difficult task of balancing parenting and low-wage work and as a potential means of escaping poverty once and for all. While welfare rights activists failed to halt the deterioration of the federal government’s commitment to improving the lives of poor single mothers and their children, their activism and their vision are nonetheless an important part of AFDC’s history.

WELFARE AND AMERICA’S “RIGHT TURN” The accelerating campaign for restrictive welfare reform in the 1980s and 1990s reflected a broader conservative shift, or “right turn,” in American politics whose causes are still debated. Some scholars emphasize a shift in

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political power, as businesses mobilized to challenge liberal policies, television advertising increased the cost—and therefore the importance of fundraising—of political campaigns, unions lost political power and membership, the population and political influence of suburbs intensified, and voter turnout declined among the poor and working classes. Other scholars blame the liberal policies of the 1960s and 1970s for fracturing the New Deal coalition. They argue that white Americans rejected race-based policies like busing and affirmative action, working-class voters rebelled against growing tax bills, and Christian evangelicals mobilized to reinstate “traditional” or “family values.” Likely a result of multiple forces, the conservative trend in American politics marked the end of Great Society liberalism and, to a large extent, federal efforts to counter poverty and racial disadvantage. The end of the nation’s long economic boom in the 1970s ushered in conservative economic policies and increased the economic vulnerability of growing numbers of Americans, including poor single mothers. Oil shocks in the 1970s signaled the end of cheap energy, global economic competition accelerated, and the long postwar shift from a manufacturing to a service economy, a process sometimes called deindustrialization, affected increasing numbers of Americans. During the 1970s, drivers lined up for miles to purchase gasoline, while auto, steel, and other key industries shut down plants and laid off hundreds of thousands of workers, both signs that the long post-World War II boom had ended. Americans faced the seemingly inexplicable combination of slow economic growth, soaring inflation, and high unemployment rates, collectively labeled “stagflation.” By the late 1970s, the nation’s success in reducing poverty reversed itself. Even as the economy revived in the late 1980s, it was permanently altered. In response to global competition, corporations relocated production facilities abroad. As a result, the nation lost well-paid, unionized manufacturing jobs—2 million of them during the 1980s. The new, postindustrial economy provided opportunities for highly educated professionals in new high-tech industries, but most job growth occurred at the bottom of the labor market in low-paid service jobs. Poor African Americans and other people of color were shut out of the most lucrative jobs, intensifying racial disparities. Beginning in the 1970s, real wages for the bottom 60 percent of the population stagnated, unions lost members and clout, and poverty rates and economic inequality increased. These trends hit low-income women particularly hard. More likely to be relegated to lower-paid service sector jobs such as waitress, cashier, or home and hospital health aides, with no employment benefits, they struggled to gain and maintain footholds in the changing economy. Conservative economists blamed the nation’s economic troubles—whose roots lay in shifting global and national economic systems—on liberal

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economic and welfare policies. They argued that high tax rates, cumbersome federal regulation, and mounting government spending hampered economic growth. They falsely targeted welfare and antipoverty programs as the government’s biggest expenses, even though AFDC accounted for a mere 1 percent of federal spending. The government’s relatively small investment in income support programs for the poor and working class— AFDC as well as Unemployment Insurance, Supplemental Security Income, Food Stamps, and the Earned Income Tax Credit—succeeded in keeping poverty rates fairly steady, at around 11 or 12 percent, during the troubled 1970s, even as unemployment soared and wages stagnated. Nonetheless, the assumption that welfare spending was a prime culprit in the nation’s economic problems flourished in President Ronald Reagan’s administration. Elected by a slim margin in 1980, Reagan epitomized the federal government’s shift “from the war on poverty to the war on welfare,” as Michael Katz (1989) has called it. “In our current crisis,” Reagan declared in his first inaugural address, “government is not the solution; government is the problem.” In the 1980s, conservative economists and lawmakers and corporate lobbyists targeted social welfare programs, especially AFDC. While polls showed that most Americans continued to support progressive tax policies and federal aid to the poor, conservative economic ideas gained traction in Washington, DC. They offered a simple explanation for complicated economic transformations, and they were aggressively promoted by a growing cohort of conservative think-tanks, like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, that were funded by wealthy individuals and corporate foundations intent on rolling back regulation, taxation, and the welfare state. While conservatives paved the way for the conservative economic policies of the 1980s and 1990s, many Democrats had come to believe that their party’s success depended upon embracing the new economic order, and this led to a bipartisan consensus. President Carter had already adopted fiscal conservatism, but in the 1980s the Democratic Party increasingly sought corporate contributions to keep up with the growing cost of political campaigning. As a result, it adopted conservative economic ideas. The Democratic Leadership Council, founded in 1985, represented an explicit and successful attempt by economically conservative Democrats to move the party to the right on taxes, regulation, and welfare. The Council prioritized corporate tax breaks and balanced budgets over fighting the deepening economic inequalities that accompanied the nation’s shift to a postindustrial order. Democratic mayors and city councils in a number of cities like Baltimore and Cleveland followed suit, adopting economic growth policies designed to attract businesses by offering tax breaks and spending cuts.

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A strong defense of AFDC did not fit into the party’s strategy for political success. Democrats had other reasons to eschew AFDC. Welfare did not fit into the party’s growing economic conservatism, but it also threatened to alienate white voters. As a result of three decades of attacks, welfare had become a political touchstone deeply intertwined with race—ensuring the downfall of those who defended the program and propelling to electoral success those who attacked it. Many Democrats hoped to avoid association with the negative stereotypes that encumbered AFDC and to court white workingclass and suburban voters, constituencies that political strategists saw as resentful of the party’s support for civil rights and antipoverty programs— the so-called “Reagan Democrats.” Attacks on AFDC were not a big stretch even for former liberals who fought in the 1960s for more generous income support programs. After all, as Chapter 3 describes, liberals had been criticizing AFDC themselves since the 1960s, arguing that it broke up families and created social disorder in urban African American neighborhoods. For both political and ideological reasons, then, the Democratic Party did not provide a vigorous political defense of welfare in the 1980s. Democrats, unions, and liberal advocacy organizations criticized Reagan’s spending cuts in programs that affected middle-class families, like student loans, but most said little about AFDC. Only a handful of the dozens of speakers representing over two hundred liberal organizations attending 1981’s Solidarity Day to protest the Reagan administration’s budget cuts even mentioned AFDC or “welfare.” President Reagan put conservative economic theories into action with significant tax cuts for corporations and wealthy Americans and cuts in social spending for the poor. Reagan’s Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (OBRA) of 1981, passed by a Democratic-controlled Congress, slashed federal spending for AFDC and other programs that targeted low-income Americans including Medicaid, food stamps, disability and unemployment insurance, social services, child nutrition, legal services, and low-income energy assistance. Aid to low-income Americans declined from 14 percent of federal spending in 1978 to under 12 percent in 1988. AFDC was particularly hard hit. OBRA’s various administrative restrictions initially cut an estimated 500,000 individuals off the rolls in the first year and reduced benefits for many more. OBRA reflected the growing conviction among liberals as well as conservatives that more punitive measures needed to be instituted to ensure that poor single mothers support their children by earning wages. Of course, poor and non-white women had always been expected to work outside the home, as the rules and restrictions described in previous chapters demonstrate. By the 1980s, though, opponents of AFDC had a new justification for enforcing wage labor among poor single mothers, both white and

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non-white: shifting norms about women’s work. More mothers of all economic backgrounds entered the workforce in the 1970s and 1980s, a result of stagnating male wages, rising prices, and the expanding service sector. In 1980, about 46 percent of women with children under age 6 were in the workforce, as were 65 percent of women with children ages 6 to 17. By 1990, those percentages had risen, with 58 percent of mothers with children under age 6 and 72 percent with children ages 6 to 17 in the workforce. Welfare critics seized on this transformation in gender roles to denounce AFDC as an anachronism; with most mothers in the workforce, they argued, it had become politically impossible to allow poor women receiving welfare to stay at home with their children. While Congress had been interested in putting welfare mothers to work since the 1960s, OBRA withdrew the carrot of work incentives and strengthened the stick of work requirements. As Chapter 3 noted, in 1967, Congress had hoped to encourage AFDC mothers to seek paid employment by allowing them to keep some of their AFDC benefits along with their earnings. An employed recipient could deduct some work expenses like childcare and transportation costs as well as some of her earnings from her income when determining the family’s grant amount. In 1981, OBRA changed these policies by sharply reducing the work expense deduction and by limiting the earnings deduction to four months. OBRA’s social service cuts had what historian Sonya Michel (1999) called a “devastating impact,” reducing childcare funding for low-income families by 14 percent. Before OBRA, AFDC mothers with earned income could raise their income above the poverty line in most states. Afterward, these families fell into poverty once again. At the same time, OBRA gave states increased authority to implement “workfare” programs, which required recipients to “work off ” their grants by performing community service jobs. By 1986, twenty-four states had adopted some form of workfare program.

“WELFARE QUEENS,” THE “UNDERCLASS,” AND A “NEW CONSENSUS” ON WELFARE Conservative economists urged Reagan to cut welfare spending in order to restore economic prosperity. But Reagan also defended his welfare cuts by employing longstanding racial and gendered stereotypes of welfare mothers as promiscuous, cunning, and lazy. In fact, he made an attack on welfare recipients a cornerstone of his political strategy and his domestic policy. He had long charged that the program was riddled with fraud, despite numerous studies to the contrary. During his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 1976, Reagan regaled audiences with tales of “welfare queens,” women who bilked the welfare system of money they

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did not really need and lived off the taxpayers’ largesse. He denounced a “woman in Chicago that’s getting checks under 127 different names” and another in Pasadena “charged with collecting $300,000 in a welfare scheme.”1 Newspapers and news magazines popularized such stories, which usually featured African American or Latina “welfare queens.” The exaggerated and sensationalized stories and the rhetoric employed by conservative politicians—what Ange-Marie Hancock (2004) has called “the politics of disgust”—reinforced the public image of welfare as a program for poor, urban minorities. It also fostered the belief that the welfare system was a mess, a haven for enterprising crooks as well as lazy ne’er-do-wells, and, according to a 1980 Reader’s Digest article, that “a significant proportion of tax funds spent on welfare is consumed by fraud, waste, and abuse” (Tomlinson 1980: 84). By the 1980s, journalists and scholars offered an even more powerful condemnation of AFDC in discussions about an emerging urban “underclass.” The notion of the underclass drew on racist assumptions and assertions that the poor were fundamentally different from other Americans, both ideas that had long characterized American social welfare politics. More directly, it built on theories of a “culture of poverty” (described in Chapter 3). In 1977, Time magazine introduced readers to “The American Underclass” by describing the “impoverished urban blacks” of the nation’s central cities trapped in a “different world, a place of pock-marked streets, gutted tenements, and broken hopes.”2 Both scholarly and popular treatments portrayed poor urban minorities as alien and dangerous characters, whose economic choices nurtured “values that are often at radical odds with those of the majority.” Members of the underclass supposedly rejected wage labor in favor of illicit activities or welfare grants and eschewed monogamy and the nuclear family in favor of promiscuous sexual behavior, non-marital childbearing, and female-headed households. While some scholars saw the poor as rational economic beings, and others saw them as pathological, they all fundamentally agreed that liberal government policy was the source of the problem. The underclass, the authors of Time’s treatment insisted, produced “a highly disproportionate number of the nation’s juvenile delinquents, school dropouts, drug addicts and welfare mothers” as well as “much of the adult crime, family disruption, urban decay and demand for social expenditures.”3 Sponsored by a new breed of explicitly ideological conservative thinktanks like the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, and the American Enterprise Institute, an influential group of conservative scholars and authors shaped these popular stereotypes into a compelling case against AFDC. Like the “culture of poverty” argument of the 1960s, discussions of the “underclass” blamed poverty on the intergenerational transmission of destructive values and behaviors. But many Great Society liberals argued

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that the origins of the “culture of poverty” lay in structural inequalities like racial discrimination, segregation, and economic deprivation. Despite the Johnson administration’s decision to emphasize “rehabilitation,” many liberals in the 1960s favored even more activist federal policies, including antidiscrimination measures, job creation, and a guaranteed income as the solution. The underclass discourse, largely shaped by journalists and conservative scholars, dismissed structural barriers to economic stability and viewed government intervention as the problem rather than the solution. Most of the authors who wrote about the “underclass” blamed government social programs, especially AFDC, for providing “perverse incentives” that encouraged the poor to adopt self-destructive behaviors and dysfunctional family patterns. “We have tried to abolish poverty through a generous welfare program,” intoned conservative editor Irving Kristol, and as a result the poor had “sunk to various depths of social pathology” (Kristol 1976: 10). The concept of an underclass offered conservatives a powerful weapon in their campaign to cut welfare spending. Conservative author and Republican speechwriter George Gilder insisted that welfare had “halted in its tracks an ongoing improvement in the lives of the poor and left a wreckage of broken families and broken communities.”4 Meanwhile, Reagan’s top welfare advisors lamented that an “ethic of work has been replaced by an ethic of dependence,” creating “an intergenerational welfare cycle.”5 Welfare, President Reagan declared, had been a “costly and tragic failure” that was “destroying people, our most precious resources, by creating a permanent and growing poverty class” (Reagan 1971: 56–57). Conservative authors offered two solutions to the problems of the “underclass,” both of which would become key elements of welfare reform legislation in 1988 and 1996. One was to eliminate AFDC altogether, along with any other aid to able-bodied adults and their children. In his much publicized book, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 (1984), Charles Murray, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, insisted that welfare policies had made it “profitable for the poor to behave in the short term in ways that were destructive in the long term” (Murray 1984: 9). Using a hypothetical pregnant couple, Harold and Phyllis, Murray purported to demonstrate that after the liberalization of welfare in the 1960s, the “old-fashioned solution of getting married and living off their earned income had become markedly inferior to staying unmarried and collecting welfare benefits” (Murray 1984: 160). In Murray’s analysis, the poor simply made “rational decisions”; it was federal policy that made non-marital births and welfare more attractive than marriage and work. Many critics pilloried Murray’s statistical data. Murray greatly exaggerated the financial benefits that would accrue to the unwed Harold and Phyllis. Critics pointed out that choosing extremely low monthly benefits was not in fact rational, except

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when no jobs were available. Murray’s timeline did not support his contention that liberalized AFDC benefits caused single motherhood, for substantial increases in female-headed households occurred during the 1970s, when AFDC benefits declined significantly in most states. But policymakers overlooked factual detail and proved receptive to his larger argument. While Congress was not ready in 1984 to adopt Murray’s preferred solution of repealing all aid for able-bodied adults, he scored an important ideological victory for AFDC’s critics. Other conservative critics saw the “underclass” as fundamentally pathological rather than rational, but they, too, targeted AFDC. One of the most influential of these thinkers was the political scientist Lawrence Mead. In 1986, Mead responded to Murray in his influential book, Beyond Entitlement: The Social Obligations of Citizenship. Mead (1986) agreed with Murray that “permissive” welfare policies had created “behavioral problems” like withdrawal from wage labor and out-of-wedlock childbearing among the poor. But instead of abolishing welfare, Mead wanted to use federal policies to enforce “social obligations.” Forcing recipients to conform to dominant social norms like marriage and wage labor, he insisted, would benefit both the poor and society at large. Above all, he argued, “employment must become a duty, enforced by public authority” (Mead 1986: 13). Both solutions—cutting welfare aid and enforcing behavioral standards among recipients—had long been used to discipline AFDC recipients, as previous chapters demonstrate. Both also proved increasingly attractive to legislators in the 1980s and 1990s. These two strategies quickly replaced expanding equity and coverage—a demand articulated in the 1960s and 1970s by welfare rights activists and supported in some measure by liberal advocacy organizations and poverty analysts within HEW—as the key elements in “welfare reform.” By the late 1980s, interested observers began to write about a “new consensus” on welfare. Substantial research disproved the basic contentions of the “new consensus.” Studies showed that the availability and amount of welfare benefits had no discernable effect on women’s childbearing decisions or labor force participation. As the Reagan administration’s own General Accounting Office concluded in March 1987, “research does not support the view that welfare encourages two-parent family break up” (quoted in Roth 1993: 257), that it affects birth rates among unmarried women, or that it significantly affects incentives to participate in the labor market. Welfare recipients themselves had been making such arguments since at least the 1960s, when they organized to demand more generous and universal welfare policies. Nonetheless, many liberal political leaders reinforced the dominant stereotypes and misconceptions disseminated by conservative think-tanks and pundits. In the mid-1980s, a plethora of foundation task forces and

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government commissions denounced long-term welfare receipt and targeted “dependency” rather than poverty as the appropriate target for welfare reform. These groups often included Democrats and “liberals.” Groups such as New York Governor Mario Cuomo’s Task Force on Poverty and Welfare and the Ford Foundation’s Project on Social Welfare, which included liberal academics, Democratic politicians, leaders of civil rights organizations, and labor union representatives, dismissed the idea of “guarantee[ing] everyone a minimum, poverty-line income” (Ford Foundation 1989: 63). A guaranteed income, insisted the Ford Foundation’s Project on Social Welfare, would fail to solve “the problem of persistent poverty and long-term welfare dependency” (Ford Foundation 1989: 63–64). The Ford Foundation Project, whose members included Vernon Jordan, leader of the National Urban League (the most vigorous defender of AFDC among African American civil rights organizations), and Eleanor Holmes Norton, a civil rights advocate and liberal Democrat, insisted that “today’s welfare system injects a message of passive dependency” into “underclass” neighborhoods (Ford Foundation 1989: 6). Liberals also joined conservatives in condemning welfare “long-timers” and “recidivism,” despite the fact that the vast majority of AFDC recipients relied on the program for short periods of time (two years on average). They insisted that recipients begin to “exhibit individual responsibility,”6 and they pronounced wage labor both an “obligation,”7 and a cure for “welfare dependency,”8 even if, as the conservative philosopher and American Enterprise Institute fellow Michael Novak put it, “their financial situation [when working] were little better than with welfare alone” (Novak et al. 1987: 161). Eleanor Holmes Norton (1985) agreed that “gainful employment” was essential to “augment self-esteem by exposing women to the values and discipline associated with work, allowing them to pass on to their children more than their own disadvantages.” The consensus between liberals and conservatives drew on “underclass” discussions that blamed AFDC for poverty and social disorder among urban African Americans. It therefore focused on the small number of recipients who remained on AFDC for long periods of time rather than a majority of recipients for whom the program served as a short-term safety net. Liberal poverty researchers Mary Jo Bane and David T. Ellwood, for example, warned that the program’s small number of long-term recipients utilized a majority of AFDC funding and should therefore be targeted in reform efforts (Bane and Ellwood 1994). Former Lyndon Johnson aide Bill Moyers featured long-term AFDC recipients in his widely viewed CBS Reports documentary, The Vanishing Family: Crisis in Black America (1986). The documentary exemplified the new consensus and demonstrated the failure of liberals to address deeply rooted structural barriers to upward mobility

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for poor single mothers and other non-white urban residents. Moyers provided no context about Newark, New Jersey’s declining job base and eroding tax revenues, nor did he discuss racial and residential segregation. Instead, the documentary honed in on the “values” and behavioral decisions of several welfare mothers and fathers, who bore children out of wedlock and avoided wage labor in favor of AFDC grants. The lesson of the documentary, according to Newsweek magazine, was that “it’s no longer only racism or an unsympathetic government that is destroying black America.”9 Instead, “the problem now lies in the black community itself and its failure to pass on moral values to the next generation.” While a handful of voices on the political left, like the sociologist William Julius Wilson (1987), emphasized the structural roots of the so-called underclass and promoted an expanded social safety net as part of the solution, many Democrats and liberal scholars echoed conservative “underclass” authors and merely condemned welfare for promoting “pathological” behavior. The concentration of urban poverty and changing family structure inclined many Americans to accept conservative arguments about welfare’s supposedly destructive effects, especially in the absence of powerful arguments to the contrary. As historian Alice O’Connor (2001) has shown, analysts in academia and government agencies contributed to the “new consensus” by failing to address the broad, structural shifts in the nation’s economy that ended the postwar economic boom and fueled poverty and inequality. In part, the notion of an underclass drew on economic and social changes that were becoming more evident by the 1980s. Declining urban centers housed an increasingly concentrated number of poor people of color. With few available jobs, crumbling infrastructure, and poor educational opportunities, the residents of these neighborhoods had little chance for economic mobility. At the same time, broad changes in family structure provoked concern among many Americans. Between 1960 and the early 1980s, the nation’s divorce rate tripled, and by 1990 more than 30 percent of all babies were born to unmarried mothers. Despite real changes, the growing attention to unwed mothers, especially unwed teen mothers, was often misleading. Teen birth rates peaked in the 1950s and early 1960s, when most teen mothers married or put their baby up for adoption. And the increase in the percentage of out-of-wedlock births occurred not because of increased fertility among unmarried women but because of a sharp decline in fertility among married women. Nonetheless, these changing patterns increased the visibility and frequency of female-headed households. Between 1960 and 1984, the proportion of American households headed by a woman (i.e., without an adult man) increased from 9 to 12 percent for white families and from 22 to 43 percent for black families.

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Neither concentrated urban poverty nor changing family structure was a result of welfare policies, as substantial research demonstrated. Long-term studies of low-income households found that poverty was much more widespread and temporary than the “underclass” thesis suggested.10 AFDC rolls remained steady during the 1970s and 1980s at around 10–11 million people per year, or 4–5 percent of the population, belying the hysteria about deepening “dependency.” A majority of AFDC recipients remained on the rolls for a short time, and welfare played no discernable role in encouraging non-marital births (in fact, non-marital birth rates increased steadily after 1970 even as the real value of an AFDC check plummeted). The increasing separation of marriage and childbearing was occurring throughout the industrialized world, a result of complex cultural and economic changes. AFDC’s main effect on family structure was to enable women to leave unhealthy or violent relationships, an outcome that many would applaud (Kurz 1999; Davis 2006).11 Worries about “intergenerational transmission” were also groundless. Daughters of AFDC recipients were no more likely than other young women in their communities to become AFDC recipients as adults. In fact, AFDC most often served as a temporary support for women struggling to combine parenting and wage labor. Nonetheless, critics of welfare seized on changes in family structure and urban poverty to construct an unflattering and unsubstantiated portrait of the nation’s poor. Rather than investigate the causes and consequences of corporate labor policies, the nation’s increasingly regressive tax structure, or crumbling urban economies, poverty researchers studied the impact of welfare policies on individual decision-making.

WELFARE RIGHTS ACTIVISM IN A CONSERVATIVE ERA The lone voices putting forth an alternative to the underclass debate and the notion that welfare breeds bad behavior were welfare rights activists and some feminist and advocacy organizations. Groups like Philadelphia Citizens in Action, Mississippi Coalition for Mothers and Babies, and New York’s Downtown Welfare Advocacy Center (DWAC) countered conservative portrayals of welfare recipients as undeserving and pathological through public protests, newsletters, and lobbying. DWAC gathered enough allies to win a rare AFDC grant increase in New York in 1980 and mounted a series of theatrical protests against Reaganomics. Attired in Robin Hood costumes and throwing jelly beans to onlookers (using Reagan’s favorite candy to symbolize “trickle down economics”), DWAC members insisted that “corporate subsidies” and “Aid to Dependent Corporations,” rather than “women and kids with low incomes and heatless apartments,” were “the nation’s real welfare problem.”12

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Welfare rights activists revived the NWRO’s demand for a guaranteed income, but they began to emphasize employment as the key to escaping poverty. Testifying before Congress in 1982, Sally Helling of New York City’s Welfare Grant Coalition condemned Reagan’s cuts in work incentives and childcare training. “Besides increased suffering,” she told lawmakers, “we have witnessed the hopes of numerous welfare recipients to get off public assistance shattered by the AFDC and [public employment program] cuts that eliminated employment possibilities for the poor.”13 In 1984, the National Congress of Neighborhood Women, a grassroots organization of working-class women in New York City, concurred. “We need to look at the way the welfare system interfered with women’s attempts toward selfsufficiency,” the group insisted, by denying benefits to women with earned income and by failing to provide constructive job training, public service employment, and adequate and affordable childcare options.14 Boston welfare rights activist Mary Ann Mortorana encouraged Congress to invest in poor women’s economic independence. “If the so-called welfare problem is to be solved,” she insisted, “it will be by providing educational and training opportunities for us to develop the skills we need to earn the breadwinner’s wages it takes to support our families.”15 Welfare rights activists found a few allies among middle-class feminists, who (as Chapter 3 notes) increasingly recognized poverty and welfare as women’s issues in the 1970s and 1980s. Feminist organizations like the National Organization for Women and the National Women’s Political Caucus lobbied for affirmative action and comparable worth to improve women’s economic security. They argued that society’s failure to reward women’s work both at home and in the labor market contributed to the “feminization of poverty”—the increasing proportion of women among the nation’s poor. Feminists set up dozens of programs designed to train and place AFDC recipients into jobs not traditionally reserved for women, the kind of well-paid blue-collar jobs like plumbing and construction work that had long enabled working-class men to support families. In 1987, the fiftyplus liberal and women’s organizations that belonged to the National Coalition on Women, Work, and Welfare offered an alternative both to the liberal guaranteed income proposals of the 1970s and to the restrictive welfare reforms offered by conservatives. They demanded significant funding for education, employment, and support services that would “transform the welfare system into one which enables welfare recipients to become economically self-sufficient.”16 While welfare rights activists agreed with middle-class feminists that employment would in many cases prove a better alternative than welfare, they also defended AFDC as a critical safety net. Some women, they argued, suffered from physical or mental problems or had children with special

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needs that prevented them from participating in the labor market. Other women could earn wages, but they nonetheless needed AFDC as a back-up, given the instability of the low-wage labor market and their responsibility for children. Testifying before a presidential commission in 1980, Chicago AFDC recipient Eve Dembaugh warned those who saw jobs as a simple alternative to welfare that because of her paucity of education and lack of marketable skills, “my future as a worker holds little more promise for me than my life now as an [AFDC] recipient.”17 She relayed her “panic at the thought of total loss of income” if a job situation turned sour and urged policymakers to “allow me to pass on and off welfare or on and off WIN quickly and frequently, if necessary, because that’s probably how my life is going to be as a low-income worker.”18 Similarly, the leaders of the Minnesota Recipients Alliance saw AFDC as a program that would “allow the poor the basic essentials of life while they reclaim their ability to provide for themselves.”19 Rather than a respite from labor, as many critics saw it, AFDC could provide women with the “security to go to work.” Emphasizing economic self-sufficiency, welfare rights activists and their middle-class feminist allies embraced the sea change in gender relations that brought a majority of mothers into the workforce in the 1970s. In the long run, the mass entry of mothers into the labor market undermined support for AFDC. As inflation and unemployment pushed more mothers into the labor market, AFDC seemed both an “anachronism,” as one task force put it, and an unfair privilege. “A program that was designed to pay mothers to stay home with their children,” Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan declared, “cannot succeed when we observe most mothers going out to work.”20 As Chapters 1 and 2 suggest, American society had always defined non-white women as workers and devalued their caregiving role. Now, all poor single mothers would be regarded the same way. A working mother, insisted New York City welfare administrator Blanche Bernstein, would be “a much better role model for children than the mother who is a long-term dependent on welfare” (Bernstein 1986: 45).

THE END OF “WELFARE AS WE KNOW IT” In the 1980s and 1990s, welfare rights advocacy and the realities of poor women’s lives had little influence on welfare reform debates. Welfare rights advocates had few allies in their defense of AFDC. Instead, researchers and lawmakers focused on the minority of AFDC recipients who remained on the rolls for several years and simply assumed, against all evidence, that welfare policies encouraged teen pregnancy, non-marital births, and “dependency.” A majority of Americans agreed; polls revealed the widespread belief that welfare discouraged work, encouraged family breakup and

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illegitimacy, and created dependency among recipients. Most Americans seemed to agree with Reagan’s welfare reform working group, whose report, Up From Dependency, proposed shifting the goal of welfare from providing income support to “lift [ing welfare recipients] from a life of dependency” by becoming “productive adults.”21 The Family Support Act (FSA) of 1988, which passed with strong bipartisan support, embodied many of the assumptions guiding welfare reform in this period. The FSA increased federal child support enforcement measures, an effort to enforce male breadwinning even for children of single mothers. The bill primarily focused, however, on getting AFDC mothers into the labor market. Business groups hoped that work requirements and incentives would expand the low-wage labor pool, and both conservative and liberal welfare reformers insisted that work would rehabilitate poor mothers and benefit their children. The FSA required states to enroll recipients with children as young as three into Job Opportunities and Basic Skills (JOBS), which replaced WIN with a variety of education, training, and workfare programs. States could also use federal money to provide temporary childcare subsidies and Medicaid to women leaving welfare for a job—transitional benefits that would help families move “from welfare to work.” Conservatives wanted more coercion, while liberals wanted more funding for childcare and job training, but all agreed that welfare should be “transformed into a short-term support program that helps those who can to achieve self-sufficiency through work.”22 Some feminists hailed the Family Support Act as a victory because it offered a step toward helping women become economically self-sufficient. Lupe Anguiano, for example, who spent years living and working with AFDC recipients in San Antonio, Texas, praised the Reagan administration for offering women a chance to earn their way out of poverty.23 Others, like members of Black Women for Wages for Housework, condemned the program for denying the value of women’s caregiving labor in the home and critiqued its coercive aspects (Naples 1997: 914). These contrasting views reflect the ways in which women adopted different notions of feminism as it related to the politics of welfare. For some women, the goal was independence through employment; for others it was a revaluation of caregiving. States implemented the FSA’s new requirements inconsistently, and Congress provided too little funding for education and training to have a significant effect. The bill primarily shifted responsibility for welfare administration to the states and fueled demand for further reform. The law significantly expanded the waiver system, by which states could apply for permission to waive certain federal requirements in welfare administration. By 1996, when President Clinton signed a new welfare reform bill that ended AFDC, forty-three states already had waivers, mostly to institute time limits

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and work requirements or to impose behavioral requirements on recipients. These requirements moved beyond the postwar “man-in-the-house,” suitable home, and employable mother rules. Following Lawrence Mead’s (1986) suggestion that government use welfare to enforce behavioral standards, various states reduced welfare grants if children missed too many days of school (“Learnfare”), bore additional children (“family cap”), or failed to immunize their children (“Healthfare”). In a less punitive but similarly manipulative effort, California adopted “Wedfare,” a year of childcare and medical benefits for parents who married. The most famous state experiment, Wisconsin Works (W-2), not only implemented time limits and a work requirement but also provided extensive support services like childcare, health care, and transportation subsidies. In contrast, under Governor Bill Clinton, Arkansas received a waiver to implement one of the nation’s toughest “workfare” programs. But like previous efforts to move AFDC recipients “from welfare to work,” the FSA’s combination of carrots and sticks had little effect on AFDC rolls, which began to rise in the late 1980s to a peak of 5.04 million in 1994 as recession set in and poverty increased. The stage was set for another round of welfare reform. Bill Clinton entered that stage when he was elected president in 1992, proudly donning the mantle of “New Democrat.” A long-time member of the conservative Democratic Leadership Council, which espoused “fiscal conservatism,” he pledged during his campaign to “end welfare as we know it.” He proposed to replace AFDC with time-limited income support, transitional support services like childcare and transportation, and, if necessary, a minimum wage public service job when time ran out. Welfare, he insisted, should provide “a second chance, not a way of life.” At the same time, Clinton proposed universal health care, a higher minimum wage, and a significant expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit. Such policies, his top welfare advisor David Ellwood insisted, would “make work pay” for those who “play by the rules” (Ellwood 1988: 110). Clinton made health care his first priority, and by the time lawmakers considered his welfare proposal in 1994, Republicans had won control of Congress and offered their own, more coercive, welfare reform plan as part of their “Contract with America.” The ensuing hearings welcomed hundreds of representatives from business and conservative organizations while only a handful of current or former welfare recipients testified. Congressional debate focused on “dependency” and featured offensive attacks on poor women, recalling Senator Long’s denunciation of welfare recipients as “brood mares” in the late 1960s and Ronald Reagan’s invocation of “welfare queens” in the 1970s and 1980s. Florida Representative John Mica compared AFDC recipients to alligators; his state frowned on feeding alligators, he said, because “unnatural feeding and artificial care create dependency.”24 When

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asked what would happen to children deprived of needed assistance, House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Republican from Georgia, proposed orphanages, a policy that reformers had rejected in the Progressive Era when they promoted mothers’ pension programs. Clinton twice vetoed welfare reform plans which contained deep cuts in Medicaid, food stamps, and school lunches as well as AFDC. He insisted the provisions would be too harmful to poor single mothers and their children. But with an eye toward reelection, and with AFDC serving as such a powerful weapon in conservative attacks on the Democratic Party, he signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) in 1996. The PRWORA ended the federal government’s sixty-one-year commitment to children of poor single mothers. AFDC was an entitlement program that in theory required states to provide aid to anyone who met eligibility requirements. The PRWORA replaced AFDC with Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF), a capped block grant to states. Proponents of more comprehensive and generous welfare policies since the 1930s had been urging the federal government to adopt increasing responsibility for both funding and administering welfare programs. They argued, and investigations bore out, that state and local governments sought to keep benefits and costs low and distributed aid discriminately. Civil rights organizations had been particularly vociferous in urging greater federal responsibility. By transforming welfare into a block grant, Congress in 1996 went in the opposite direction. TANF did not require states to provide any assistance and, in fact, it prohibited states from providing too much. Now, states would have only a fixed amount of funding for welfare benefits and Congress would have to reauthorize that funding every few years. While TANF allowed the states to administer welfare programs, it included a number of strict federal guidelines, but not the sort that AFDC recipients and their advocates had long demanded, like an adequate minimum payment and procedural rights for applicants and recipients. Instead, Congress insisted that state programs include a maximum of two years of continuous assistance, mandatory work requirements, and a five-year lifetime cap on benefits. The time limits remained even though Congress did not include public jobs as a backup, and they applied to most recipients (those who could prove certain disabilities or a recent history of domestic abuse were exempt). In response to xenophobic (and false) claims that Mexicans were draining welfare coffers in the Southwest, the bill completely excluded recent immigrants (those who had been in the United States for less than five years) from receiving TANF, food stamps, and other federal welfare benefits. The PRWORA also emphasized the “family values” agenda of social conservatives, who had become influential in the Republican Party in the 1970s and 1980s. Social conservative lobbying groups generally combined

80 • Welfare in the United States

a fiscal conservatism that celebrated the free market and promoted tax reductions and social spending cuts with a commitment to reviving the “traditional” American family. By increasing the vulnerability of single mothers, reducing federal welfare spending, and devolving authority to the states, the PRWORA fulfilled both aspects of this agenda. Christian Right groups like Focus on the Family and the Eagle Forum explicitly sought to stigmatize single motherhood and, as the PRWORA stated, “encourage the formation and maintenance of two-parent families.” The law provided funds for marriage counseling and “abstinence only” educational programs, offered an “illegitimacy bonus” to states that reduced non-marital pregnancies, and allowed states to implement a “family cap”—a rule denying benefits to children born to mothers on welfare (twenty-one states adopted the “family cap”). Democrats, still at least partly responsive to civil rights, feminist and advocacy groups that warned about the extreme hardship many single mothers would face, defeated proposals to completely deny benefits to unwed and teen mothers, but teen mothers were required to live with a parent or a guardian to be eligible for benefits. Democratic congresswomen, many of them self-described feminists, managed to push through a provision allowing states to exempt victims of domestic violence from the time limits, but nonetheless, most of them voted for the PRWORA. If these programs and requirements didn’t convince single mothers to marry or otherwise rely on male financial support, the PRWORA’s work requirements would force them to prioritize wage earning over caregiving. The law required states to ensure that at least half of their caseload spent at least thirty-five hours a week in work-related activities. A majority of states adopted a “work first” approach, providing minimal job training and refusing to count many educational pursuits as work-related activities. Wisconsin officials encouraged teenaged recipients to find low-wage jobs rather than pursue a high school diploma, while Nebraska TANF recipients interviewed by Professor Barbara Sparks “recounted academic tracking into low skilled job training that will not lead to living wage jobs rather than degree programs which are the surest way out of poverty.”25 In large cities, recipients were often given municipal jobs such as picking up trash, cleaning bathrooms, or doing routine paperwork, positions that, like “workfare” jobs, provided no real training or opportunity for mobility. Welfare recipients were a cheap replacement for unionized public employees: New York City used almost 7,000 TANF recipients in its Parks Department. The PRWORA succeeded in drastically reducing welfare rolls, which plummeted from 4.5 million families in 1996 to 2.1 million by 2002. At least half of welfare “leavers” left the rolls for the workforce, a trend that began before the 1996 law as the economy recovered from recession. But many more found themselves “sanctioned” off the rolls or refused aid in the first

The End of Welfare as We Knew It • 81

place. Failure to show up for one appointment, fill out paperwork properly, or otherwise comply with the rules led to termination. Sanction rates doubled after the PRWORA, reaching one-quarter of all TANF recipients. In some states, more women left the rolls because of sanctions than because of finding employment. Rewarded with federal dollars for reducing welfare rolls, states also adopted formal “diversion” programs to discourage eligible recipients from applying for assistance. Caseworkers, pressured by demands to keep people off the rolls, required applicants to ask family and friends for help, fill out a certain number of job applications, or return for multiple visits before applying. Caseworkers also often failed to tell applicants and recipients about available benefits, like transitional Medicaid or childcare subsidies. Public and private employees administering welfare programs practiced these tactics. Many states contracted for-profit corporations, including defense giant Lockheed Martin, to administer welfare-to-work programs. By 2000, only 50 percent of those eligible for TANF received benefits, down from 84 percent in 1995. While pundits lauded the declining caseloads, subsequent research revealed the underside to “ending welfare as we know it” in an era of wage stagnation, growing economic inequality, and a shrinking social safety net. Boosters could crow that between one-half and two-thirds of welfare “leavers” found employment, but what kind of employment? In an economy where, according to the US Women’s Bureau, women’s median wages continue to lag at least $10,000 below men’s, where women’s real wages are stagnating, and where women are less likely to receive employment benefits, it is no wonder that former welfare recipients have fared poorly. These women typically took low-wage jobs—averaging $8.00 an hour—with inflexible schedules and few benefits. Nearly half of those with jobs were employed for only part of the year, given childcare responsibilities and instability in the low-wage labor market. Even those employed full time had difficulty climbing out of poverty. A high percentage of TANF recipients had at least one significant barrier to employment, among them low educational levels, poor physical or mental health, or responsibility for small children. And the low-wage jobs that they obtained rarely provided the kind of upward mobility that welfare reformers promised. Despite a significant increase in the Earned Income Tax Credit, childcare subsidies, and child health insurance provision, then, a majority of welfare leavers remained poor—often poorer—after leaving TANF. Children also remained poor. Child poverty rates held steady at 17–18 percent, the highest rate in the industrialized world. The depth of poverty also increased sharply after 1996. Many communities reported increased demand for emergency shelters and food pantries. The number of welfare children in foster care or living with relatives other than their mother

82 • Welfare in the United States

increased. Some single mothers found it impossible to fulfill TANF’s work requirements and still care for their children. Like women in the late nineteenth century, they had to relinquish custody of their children in order to ensure their survival. These statistics did not seem to dampen the celebratory rhetoric around welfare reform, nor did they convince the president or Congress to change course. In 2002, Republican President George W. Bush offered more of the same: additional funding for abstinence-only education and marriage promotion along with significant increases in the proportion of recipients required to work and the number of hours spent in work-related activities (to forty hours a week). When Congress reauthorized the PWRORA in 2005, its sponsors reiterated these policies. The end of the entitlement program of support for poor mothers and their children fueled welfare rights organizing. Across the United States, welfare recipients and their allies fought for expanded childcare programs as well as meaningful job training and education to enable women to take employment. They sought to protect their rights as workers by demanding a living wage, a grievance procedure, the right to organize, and basic health and safety standards. Some local groups pushed for a child subsidy program that would revalue parenting and allow recipients to care for their own children. In the process of organizing, some welfare recipients formed alliances with unions, thus eroding the artificial distinction between the “welfare poor” and the “working poor” and challenging the conservative discourse around welfare. As in the 1960s, welfare recipients worked closely with lawyers to challenge some of the punitive aspects of welfare reform. Groups such as the Kensington Welfare Rights Union in Philadelphia argued that social and economic rights, such as food, shelter, and education, were basic human rights. As politicians in both parties celebrate welfare’s end, those who continue to insist that poverty demands an active federal response—a few liberals in the Democratic Party but mostly advocacy organizations, welfare and poverty rights activists, liberal and leftist academics, and new voices within organized labor—ponder their next step. To many of today’s progressives, the end of AFDC provides an opportunity to include poor single mothers in a larger campaign to “make work pay” by using government policy to ensure that workers can earn a living wage and have access to the supports they need to remain out of poverty. Indeed, by the mid-1990s, a majority of poor single mothers on welfare reported that they preferred even a low-wage job to AFDC. And poor single mothers may benefit from living wage campaigns, unionization efforts, and expanded income support for the “working poor,” which is much more politically popular than TANF or other subsidies for “non-working” families.

The End of Welfare as We Knew It • 83

Yet poor single mothers also remain committed to parenting their children, a task many find impossible under current welfare rules and labor market conditions.26 One group of women receiving TANF, interviewed by researchers, spoke of mothering “as an important responsibility . . . an area where they enjoyed competence, and a central part of their identity” (Limoncelli 2002: 88). More formally, a year before Congress passed the PRWORA, the Milwaukee, Wisconsin welfare rights organization, Welfare Warriors, demanded that its allies “stand up for our right to public support for our children and our right to mother our own children” (quoted in Tilly and Albelda 1999). State policies that require recipients to work into late pregnancy and, in several states, provide no time off from work activities even to care for newborn infants, have provoked outrage among organized recipients. These women insist that mothering is not a class or race privilege and that it need not take place within a two-parent, male-breadwinner family. Only a handful of antipoverty feminists join these activists and continue to draw on the most empowering elements of the maternalist politics of the past to argue for policies that enable single mothers to devote their time to caregiving if they so choose. The history of the AFDC program from its inception in 1935 until its demise in 1996 holds many lessons for students and scholars of twentiethcentury American politics. As the history recounted here suggests, we cannot dismiss popular antipathy to welfare as a natural expression of Americans’ commitment to the work ethic or rejection of “dependency.” Instead, welfare is embedded in a larger history. American social provision has both reflected and created differential categories of citizenship, categories that belie the nation’s professed commitment to equality of opportunity. Throughout this history, multiple voices and competing interests have vied to shape who benefits, at what level, and for what purpose. Some groups—business and corporate interests, policymakers and reformers within the federal government, and legislators and political leaders—have had significant power to shape the nation’s social safety net. Other groups—advocacy organizations, activists, and especially poor single mothers themselves—have had less access to power but, nonetheless, have often challenged the assumptions and interests that shape federal welfare policies. Throughout, debates about welfare have featured competing visions of motherhood, economic justice, racial equality, and the rights of citizenship. These competing visions have divided not only “conservatives” and “liberals” but also feminists and welfare rights activists, New Democrats and liberal advocacy groups, poverty analysts and welfare administrators. These debates will continue, even though AFDC itself is now history.

84 • Welfare in the United States

The abolition of AFDC, then, has done little to settle the conflicts that made the program so contentious throughout the twentieth century: Who should have a right to be a mother or caregiver, what does that right entail, what role should the government play in ameliorating racial, gender, and economic inequality, and do all Americans have a “right to live” free from poverty?

INTRODUCTION TO THE DOCUMENTS

The following section consists of primary source documents—articles, speeches, cartoons, and reports created by participants in this history rather than by historians. These documents provide insight into the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program from its origins through its replacement with Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF) in 1996. For each document, we have included an introduction that lists the author or speaker and provides some brief context. The history of welfare is often told as a history of policymaking, and many of the documents here shed light on the ideas and plans of the lawmakers, administrators, and government officials who created, administered, and reformed the AFDC program over the years. As you read the laws that shaped AFDC, analyze the images of AFDC recipients that government officials purveyed, investigate the minutes of a local government trying to reduce welfare rolls, and explore the reasons that policymakers and presidents wanted to change the program, consider the following questions: Why did Congress create AFDC in the first place? What beliefs and assumptions underpinned the program and how did the structure of the program reflect them? How did the purpose and structure of AFDC change over time? Who did policymakers imagine as the clientele, and how did policymakers’ views of them shift? How did local, state, and federal governments differ in their views about AFDC? How did policymakers’ views reflect and shape Americans’ ideas about poverty, single motherhood, citizenship, and entitlement throughout the twentieth century? While government officials designed and re-envisioned AFDC over the years, individuals and organizations constantly criticized the program.

86 • Welfare in the United States

We have included the voices of critics from across the political spectrum: On one side, business lobbyists, conservative organizations, and politicians who denounced AFDC recipients as undeserving; from another perspective, we have the voices of social workers, poverty lawyers, and recipients themselves who criticized the program’s low benefits, narrow reach, and demeaning regulations. You can read these criticisms in various forms: congressional hearings, articles, speeches, cartoons, position papers, and even a song. As you evaluate these sources, think about what these criticisms have in common and how they differ. What accounts for the differences? How effective were they? Did critiques have the power to alter welfare law? Journalists also played an important role in shaping popular attitudes about welfare since AFDC’s early days. We have included discussions of the program and its recipients in various media outlets, from publications by advocacy organizations like the US Chamber of Commerce and the National Urban League to more mainstream periodicals like U.S. News and World Report and local newspapers. As you scrutinize the words and images that journalists employed, consider their portrayal of AFDC and its recipients. How accurate were they? What aspects of recipients’ lives did they choose to include, and which did they leave out? Were journalists objective reporters or did they participate in shaping public debate? Finally, we have tried to include the voices of AFDC recipients themselves. Poor single mothers left little record of their experiences and opinions with the welfare system for the first twenty years of the program’s existence; historians are only now uncovering recipients’ perspectives during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. For now, it is only in the 1960s and beyond, when recipients began to organize formally on their own behalf, that we can readily access their voices—and then, we most often find the voices of the particular recipients who became activists. As you evaluate recipient activists’ welfare reform proposals, position statements, and Congressional testimony from the 1960s through the 1990s, consider what recipients liked and disliked about the program. What alternative policies did they propose? What accounted for their ability to influence policy and what limited their impact? Finally, what visions of motherhood, sexuality, citizenship, and entitlement did welfare recipients offer, and how did they differ from popular portrayals of these issues?

DOCUMENT

1

THE UNITED STATES CHILDREN’S BUREAU STUDIES THE MOTHERS’ PENSIONS PROGRAM (1933) The US Children’s Bureau undertook a nationwide survey of the state-level mothers’ pensions program in 1931, and published its findings for the Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, in 1933. These tables encapsulate some of the most important conclusions of the study. As they demonstrate, the many state programs shared some commonalities, particularly in discriminating against non-widowed women and non-white women. But the programs also varied widely in many other aspects, including payments.

Total New England: Maine New Hampshire Vermont Massachusetts Rhode Island Connecticut Middle Atlantic: New York New Jersey Pennsylvania

Division and State

58 21 67

1915 1913 1913

48 21 50

(3)

(2) (2) (2) (1)

( 2) (2) (2) (2) ( 2) ( 2)

1917 1913 1917 1913 1923 1919 49 21 57

(2) (2) (2) (3) (2) (2)

1,490

12,542 2,472 4 2,494

603

638 144 43 3,391 4

45,825

18,423 1 7,000 6,066

608 175 90 2,817 388 959

93,620

On a specified date in 19311

During 1921 or 1922

1921

June 30, 1931

Number of families receiving aid—

Number of administrative units reporting mothers’ aid grants in States having county jurisdiction

1,049

Number of administrative units in States having county jurisdiction

2,723

Date of passage of the first mothers’ aid law

48,686 19,361 18,674 5

1,763 516 239 7,235 1,253 2,679

3

253,298

Number of children receiving aid on a specified date in 19311

Table 1 Date of passage of first mothers’ aid law, number of administrative units in each State and number of units reporting mothers’ aid grants in 1921 and on a specified date1 in 1931, and number of families and number of children receiving aid

MOTHER’S AID, 1931

Florida

Georgia

East North Central: Ohio Indiana Illinois Michigan Wisconsin West North Central: Minnesota Iowa Missouri North Dakota South Dakota Nebraska Kansas South Atlantic: Delaware Maryland District of Columbia Virginia West Virginia North Carolina South Carolina

3 24 1 13 124 55 100 ...

1917 1916 1926 1918 1915 1923 ...

1919

87 99 8 115 53 69 93 105

1913 1913 1917 1915 1913 1913 1915

67

9

88 92 102 83 71

1913 1919 1911 1913 1913

3 (11) ... (12) 19 ... No mothers’ aid law on June 30, 1931. No mothers’ aid law on June 30, 1931. 5

78 64 32 43 44 56 41

86 21 54 70 70

41

3 7 1 3 9 17 81

85 98 9 11 9 44 963 82 9 32

88 70 91 7 75 71

168

167 (12) ... (12) 162 ...

4

2,265 1,299 227 608 423 349 430

5,763 114 2,500 2,072 3,284

3

2,298

314 121 161 110 334 433

3,455 3,242 307 978 1,290 10 1,453 342 3

7,708 1,083 5 6,087 6,555 6 7,052

3

5,241

818 450 595 309 876 1,461

9,990 7,829 1,134 2,644 3,324 10 4,141 954 3

21,262 3,387 6 17,004 18,030 6 18,188

Mississippi West South Central: Arkansas Louisiana Oklahoma Texas Mountain: Montana Idaho

East South Central: Kentucky Tennessee Alabama

Division and State

82

75 64 77 254 56 44

1917 1920 1915 1917

1915 1913

120 95

Number of administrative units in States having county jurisdiction

1928

1928 1915

Date of passage of the first mothers’ aid law

33 33

4 ( ) 32 22 12

(12) No mothers’ laid law on June 30, 1931.

567 229

9

46 38

136 (11) 758 109

(12)

13 7 48 9 23

3

1 4

839 230 3

131 69 10 1,896 475

13

45

117 190

On a specified date in 19311

During 1921 or 1922

1921

June 30, 1931

Number of families receiving aid—

Number of administrative units reporting mothers’ aid grants in States having county jurisdiction

1,969 14 619

355 206 13 5,166 1,383

13

110

405 556

Number of children receiving aid on a specified date in 19311

Table 1 Date of passage of first mothers’ aid law, number of administrative units in each State and number of units reporting mothers’ aid grants in 1921 and on a specified date1 in 1931, and number of families and number of children receiving aid—continued

10 11 12 13 14

23 30 (12)

13 36 Mothers’ aid law not in operation on June 30,1931. (12) 8 10 39 27 57

9

527 375 (12)

2,517 862 4,729

131 628 167

(12) 341 102

14 15 9 13 9

95 650

95 428

10 42

9

5,605 2,127 11,615

414 1,906 374

279 2,166

Most administrative units reported as of June 30, 1931. Unit of administration is city or town. Estimate. Number receiving aid on a given date. Includes 13,031 children in 5,382 families aided under the Home Life Act and 6,330 children boarded with their mothers. Number receiving mothers’ aid during the year ended June 30, 1931. Does not include 6 counties known to be granting mothers’ aid which failed to reply to the questionnaire. Includes 1 independent city. Aid given was apparently poor relief rather than mothers’ aid in additional counties as follows: Kansas 29, Missouri 13, Montana 6, Nevada 1, North Dakota 1, Oregon 2, South Dakota 3, Texas 9, Utah 7, West Virginia 11, Wyoming 6. Includes for a few administrative units the number receiving mothers’ aid during the year ended June 30, 1931. The law was applicable to only 2 counties in 1921. Not reported. Includes 24 independent cities. Number receiving mothers’ aid during the year ended Oct. 31, 1931.

39 36 58

1913 1913 1913

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

14 29 17

1914 1913 1913

Arizona Utah Nevada Pacific: Washington Oregon California

23 63

1915 1913 1931

Wyoming Colorado New Mexico

92 • Welfare in the United States

...

AVERAGE MONTHLY GRANT State Average monthly grant per family Massachusetts $69.31 Rhode Island 55.09 New York 52.62 Connecticut 45.91 Pennsylvania 37.45 Michigan 37.04 California 31.40 Maryland 30.52 Maine 30.16 New Jersey 30.03 Minnesota 29.35 Tennessee 26.78 Indiana 26.73 Colorado 26.50 Missouri 26.22 Illinois 26.11 Montana 24.78 Nevada 24.76 Delaware 23.69 North Dakota 22.93 Wyoming 22.55 South Dakota 21.78 Ohio $21.68 Wisconsin 21.66 Oregon 21.35 Vermont 21.11 Iowa 20.81 New Hampshire 19.77 Washington 19.66 Nebraska 17.81 Arizona 17.25 North Carolina 16.64 Virginia 16.52 West Virginia 15.46 Kansas 14.05 Idaho 13.16 Utah 11.77

The US Children’s Bureau Studies Mothers’ Pensions • 93

Mississippi Texas Louisiana Florida Oklahoma Arkansas

11.11 10.07 10.06 10.01 7.29 4.33

...

FAMILIES AIDED PER 10,000 POPULATION State Families aided per 10,000 population Wisconsin 24 Nevada 23 South Dakota 20 Florida 20 Utah 19 Montana 18 North Dakota 18 Washington 16 New York 15 Minnesota 14 Michigan 14 Delaware 13 Iowa 13 New Jersey 13 Ohio 12 Oklahoma 12 Wyoming 11 Nebraska 11 Oregon 11 California 8 Illinois 8 Maine 8 Kansas 8 Colorado 7 Massachusetts 7 Pennsylvania 6 Connecticut 6 Rhode Island 6 Idaho 6 West Virginia 5

94 • Welfare in the United States

Arkansas Texas Mississippi Virginia New Hampshire Indiana Tennessee Arizona Louisiana Vermont Missouri North Carolina Maryland ...

5 4 4 4 4 4 3 3 3 3 2 2 1

New England: Maine New Hampshire Vermont Massachusetts Rhode Island Connecticut Middle Atlantic: New York Pennsylvania East North Central: Ohio Indiana Illinois Michigan West North Central: Minnesota Iowa

Total

Division and State2

496 163 80 1,197 332 959

15,469 5,866

6,436 828 1,087 1,991

2,500 2,186

17,472 6,066

7,834 1,018 1,389 3,060

3,518 2,333

49,477

Number

608 175 90 1,564 379 959

60,119

Total

Father dead

71 94

82 81 78 65

88 97

82 93 89 77 88 100

82

Percent

329 5

456 69 157 356

375

27 5 3 122 15

3,296

Father deserting

66 1

33 39 22 173

25 7

39 1

1,369

Parents divorced

335 5

397 17 60 150

631

1 156 9

26

2,325

Father disabled physically

Families for which status of father was reported

Table A-I—Status of father in families receiving mother’s aid on June 30,19311

105 44

253 23 46 120

737 200

18 6 6 40 13

1,984

Father disabled mentally

182 92

255 39 14 253

259

24 3

2

1,596

Father imprisoned

1

4 3 3 17

1

55

17

Mother Other unmarried status

Missouri North Dakota South Dakota Nebraska Kansas South Atlantic: Delaware Maryland District of Columbia West Virginia North Carolina Florida East South Central: Kentucky Tennessee Mississippi

Total

Division and State

2

125 633 880 659 226

258 80 127 238 318 1,040

81 181 30

292 93 161 309 430 1,630

117 199 34

49,477

Number

184 872 1,157 1,106 352

60,119

Total

Father dead

69 91 (3)

88 86 79 77 74 64

68 73 76 60 64

82

Percent

1 5 2 219

8 21 39 198 21 5 1

3

4 43 173 75 33

1,369

Parents divorced

17

12 99 23 230 45

3,296

Father deserting

4 5

8 1 12 22 11 75

18 37 25 57 19

2,325

Father disabled physically

Families for which status of father was reported

Table A-I—Status of father in families receiving mother’s aid on June 30,19311—continued

5 7

6 1 10 12 6 65

13 31 22 26 5

1,984

Father disabled mentally

6 1 2

8 3 10 54 33

10 28 33 45 16

1,596

Father imprisoned

1

1

3

14

1

55

8

1

2

17

Mother Other unmarried status

2 3

1

45 32 1,175 174

648 69 477 589 141

1,187 474

56 33 1,346 250

731 95 655 613 160

2,205 574

54 83

89 73 73 96 88

80 (3) 87 70

433 28

10 12 93 15 7

2 1 24 33

326 9

5 2 45 5 4

3 6

120 24

35 4 11 3 5

13 22

7

61 13

9 8 22 1

44 6

71 26

2

7

21

87 8

2

5

1 2

3

1

A few administrative units in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Tennessee reported for families receiving aid during the year ended June 30, 1931. Status of father not reported by Arizona, California, Idaho, New Jersey, Virginia, and Wisconsin. Percent not shown because number was less than 50.

West South Central: Arkansas Louisiana Oklahoma Texas Mountain: Montana Wyoming Colorado Utah Nevada Pacific: Washington Oregon

New England: Maine New Hampshire Vermont Rhode Island Connecticut Middle Atlantic: New York Pennsylvania East North Central: Ohio Indiana Illinois Michigan West North Central: Minnesota Iowa Missouri North Dakota South Dakota Nebraska Kansas South Atlantic: Delaware

Division and State2

3,657 5,700

6,806 1,074 1,445 2,877 3,456 2,222 159 763 1,132 945 301 286

3,734 6,066

7,251 1,083 1,497 2,962

3,485 2,304 173 765 1,135 948 345

314

4

607 175 90 384 916

608 175 90 388 959

Percent

9

(3) (3) 13 2 3 44 27

(3) 2 8

5 1 3 2

16 47 14

361 9 51 71

2 6

1 4

4 43 66 366

(3)

1

Number

1

2 1

13 35

1 14

84

11

117

7,682

2,592 3,704 12,769 84 120 560 3,807

73,954 27,368 4,724 3,247

17,809 98,942

259 (3) 135 2,542 7,174

13

(3) 1 8 (3) (3) (3) 3

5 4 1 1

1 5

(3) 2 2

(3)

Percent

Number

Negro

Total

White

Negro families in areas reporting (1930 census)

Families for which race of mother was reported Other

Table A-II. Race of mother in families receiving mothers’ aid on June 30, 19311, and number and percentage of Negro families in the areas reporting race

2 3 4

1

78 87 276 425 1,976 92 191 34 55 69 1,096 207 802 95 638 626 165 1,883 571 2,414

93 161 285 429 2,006

117

194 34

56 69 1,203 211

319 95 650 628 167

1,904 574 2,620

1 (3)

7 1

1 (3) 2

(3)

4

13 1 52

13

8 (3)

91 1

8 2 154

5 1 2

16 3

2

2

21

16 46 3 1 1

1

3

25

15 74 9 4 30

1,750 139 7,753

447 124 3,353 311 164

5,917 27,767 16,882 29,457

46,778 8,720

14,622

38,614 29,995 5,264 169,976 73,069

1 (3) 1

(3) 1 1 (3) 1

17 44 6 19

35 68

16

15 24 5 29 27

Some administrative units in Florida, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Tennessee reported for families receiving aid during the year ended June 30, 1931. Race of mother not reported by Arizona, Idaho, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Virginia, and Wisconsin. Less than 1 percent. Includes white and other.

Maryland District of Columbia West Virginia North Carolina Florida East South Central: Kentucky (Jefferson County) Tennessee Mississippi West South Central: Arkansas Louisiana Oklahoma Texas Mountain: Montana Wyoming Colorado Utah Nevada Pacific: Washington Oregon California

DOCUMENT

2

THE SOCIAL SECURITY ACT OF 1935 ESTABLISHES THE AID TO DEPENDENT CHILDREN PROGRAM (1935) In the midst of the Great Depression, the Roosevelt administration, with advice from the Committee on Economic Security and Congress, passed landmark legislation to guarantee greater social security for Americans. Its main focus was social insurance programs for retired and unemployed workers. But with the help of the Children’s Bureau, it also created the Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) program. The Act spelled out the purpose of the program, rules regarding administration, and the scheme for payments. Note the very specific definition of “dependent children.”

THE SOCIAL SECURITY ACT (ACT OF AUGUST 14, 1935) [H.R. 7260] PREAMBLE An act to provide for the general welfare by establishing a system of Federal old-age benefits, and by enabling the several States to make more adequate provision for aged persons, blind persons, dependent and crippled children, maternal and child welfare, public health, and the administration of their unemployment compensation laws; to establish a Social Security Board; to raise revenue; and for other purposes. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, . . .

The Social Security Act of 1935 • 101

TITLE IV-GRANTS TO STATES FOR AID TO DEPENDENT CHILDREN Appropriation State Plans for Aid to Dependent Children Payment to States Operation of State Plans Administration Definitions APPROPRIATION SECTION 401. For the purpose of enabling each State to furnish financial assistance, as far as practicable under the conditions in such State, to needy dependent children, there is hereby authorized to be appropriated for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1936, the sum of $24,750,000, and there is hereby authorized to be appropriated for each fiscal year thereafter a sum sufficient to carry out the purposes of this title. The sums made available under this section shall be used for making payments to States which have submitted, and had approved by the Board, State plans for aid to dependent children. STATE PLANS FOR AID TO DEPENDENT CHILDREN SEC. 402. (a) A State plan for aid to dependent children must (1) provide that it shall be in effect in all political subdivisions of the State, and, if administered by them, be mandatory upon them; (2) provide for financial participation by the State; (3) either provide for the establishment or designation of a single State agency to administer the plan, or provide for the establishment or designation of a single State agency to supervise the administration of the plan; (4) provide for granting to any individual, whose claim with respect to aid to a dependent child is denied, an opportunity for a fair hearing before such State agency; (5) provide such methods of administration (other than those relating to selection, tenure of office, and compensation of personnel) as are found by the Board to be necessary for the efficient operation of the plan; and (6) provide that the State agency will make such reports, in such form and containing such information, as the Board may from time to time require, and comply with such provisions as the Board may from time to time find necessary to assure the correctness and verification of such reports.

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(b) The Board shall approve any plan which fulfills the conditions specified in subsection (a) except that it shall not approve any plan which imposes as a condition of eligibility for aid to dependent children, a residence requirement which denies aid with respect to any child residing in the State (1) who has resided in the State for one year immediately preceding the application for such aid or (2) who was born within the State within one year immediately preceding the application, if its mother has resided in the State for one year immediately preceding the birth.

PAYMENT TO STATES SEC. 403. (a) From the sums appropriated therefor, the Secretary of the Treasury shall pay to each State which has an approved plan for aid to dependent children, for each quarter, beginning with the quarter commencing July 1, 1935, an amount, which shall be used exclusively for carrying out the State plan, equal to one-third of the total of the sums expended during such quarter under such plan, not counting so much of such expenditure with respect to any dependent child for any month as exceeds $18, or if there is more than one dependent child in the same home, as exceeds $18 for any month with respect to one such dependent child and $12 for such month with respect to each of the other dependent children. . . . OPERATION OF STATE PLANS SEC. 404. In the case of any State plan for aid to dependent children which has been approved by the Board, if the Board, after reasonable notice and opportunity for hearing to the State agency administering or supervising the administration of such plan, finds— (1) that the plan has been so changed as to impose any residence requirement prohibited by section 402 (b), or that in the administration of the plan any such prohibited requirement is imposed, with the knowledge of such State agency, in a substantial number of cases; or (2) that in the administration of the plan there is a failure to comply substantially with any provision required by section 402 (a) to be included in the plan; the Board shall notify such State agency

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that further payments will not be made to the State until the Board is satisfied that such prohibited requirement is no longer so imposed, and that there is no longer any such failure to comply. Until it is so satisfied it shall make no further certification to the Secretary of the Treasury with respect to such State.

ADMINISTRATION SEC. 405. There is hereby authorized to be appropriated for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1936, the sum of $250,000 for all necessary expenses of the Board in administering the provisions of this title. DEFINITIONS SEC. 406. When used in this title— (a) The term dependent child means a child under the age of sixteen who has been deprived of parental support or care by reason of the death, continued absence from the home, or physical or mental incapacity of a parent, and who is living with his father, mother, grandfather, grandmother, brother, sister, stepfather, stepmother, stepbrother, stepsister, uncle, or aunt, in a place of residence maintained by one or more of such relatives as his or their own home; (b) The term aid to dependent children means money payments with respect to a dependent child or dependent children.

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AN ANALYST ASSESSES WHETHER THE SOCIAL SECURITY ACT OF 1935 WILL BENEFIT AFRICAN AMERICANS (1936) One year after the passage of the landmark Social Security Act of 1935, Bonita Golda Harrison analyzed its effect in Opportunity, the journal of the civil rights organization, the National Urban League. She demonstrated how African Americans desperately needed the benefits of its social insurance and public assistance programs. However, she predicted correctly that due to discrimination in government, society, and the labor market, African Americans were unlikely to actually benefit from the legislation.

SOCIAL SECURITY WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR THE NEGRO? By Bonita Golda Harrison The Social Security Act is a very long and involved document and one which few citizens, including this writer, have either attempted or been able to understand in full. A perusal of the many digests which are available indicates that the law embodies old age pensions, unemployment insurance, and child dependency . . . Let us examine the status of the Negro in relation to the needs which the Social Security Act will attempt to meet. In 1930 the proportion of Negro elders to Negro youth showed only a slight increase—but an increase nevertheless. Social scientists on President Hoover’s Research Committee on Social Trends estimate that between 1930 and 1950 the proportion of Negroes under 20 is likely to decline over one-sixth, with increases of

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one-fourth at the ages of 45–65, and over three-fourths at older ages. Keeping in mind that old age benefits do not begin until 1942, this estimated increase in the proportion of Negro elders is important. Passing to unemployment among Negroes we arrive at a subject where the least said the better. When we exclude agriculture where unemployment is practically negligible, we find that ten out of every one hundred workers are Negroes. In 1930, however, in the non-agricultural occupations, sixteen out of every one hundred workers unemployed were Negroes. The providing of aid for dependent children is evidence of a recognition of the right of a child to the care of a home and a mother, or an approximate equivalent of such. Since women in industry and child labor are out-growths of the inability of the husband and father, where there is such, to provide an adequate income, this is particularly important to the Negro group. Verily, the Negro has the need, but no one believes that he will secure his full share of the benefits of the Act. In the first place, in 1930, 78 per cent of the Negroes lived in the states which will be ages passing laws which will enable their citizenry to share in the benefits of the Act. Secondly, politicians in Southern States will never pass these laws unless they are certain that they have devised means to foil Negro participation. In the third place, the Act, by leaving the administration of its various phases to the local communities, makes it easy for the southern whites to prevent Negroes from receiving benefits. For example: Alabama, the first state to receive federal approval for its child dependency set-up, has vested administration in the Board of Education. It is difficult to visualize Negroes getting their just desserts from a body which gives Negro children 8 per cent of the total amount expended for education when Negro children constitute 39 per cent of the total population six to thirteen years of age. The Act made it even easier for southern politicians in its unemployment feature by not including in its benefits agriculture and domestic service, where 65 per cent of the gainfully employed Negroes were to be found in 1930. Of course, there are certain provisions to see that “sluggards” are not given benefits, and if not watched, many industrious Negroes will find themselves classified as “sluggards.” In its old age pension phase, the Act has the Negro beaten from the start by reason of the need for establishing proof of age. The lack of accurate birth registrations in Southern States is well known and for the Negro population there are hardly any registrations. The mid-wife problem further complicates the issue in the South. As of June 31, 1931, only seventeen states had passed old age pension laws and among these, the border state of West Virginia was the nearest approach to a Southern State. The slight chance of the Negro to participate in the child dependency feature has already been indicated in the state of Alabama. It seems the height of optimism to expect

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a group to change its life-long policies simply because a law of a different name is passed. Dependent children, and especially Negro dependent children, had better not wait for Alabama and its sister states to aid them. Announcements are coming from Washington concerning Civil Service examinations for jobs with the Social Security Board, and all indications point to the selection of a well-trained and impartial national personnel. But the struggle over administration is not in Washington, but in the local communities. It is there that the Act is to be interpreted and administered, and it is there that the local politicians will fasten their tentacles. The disfranchised Negro can hardly hope for social security without political security. Old age pensions and the unemployment insurance are designed to take care of persons “who have been wage earners.” It is an established fact that millions of people will never be reabsorbed by private industry, and a proportion out of proportion to their per cent of the total population will be Negroes. Many other Negroes who are reabsorbed will never share the benefits because of the marginal nature of their work as well as the exclusion of their jobs from the benefits of the Act. Social security under the Act is, therefore, impossible without economic security which the Negro does not possess. In a section of the country where every Negro is a potential lynch law victim, and where there has been a continuous sabotaging of any efforts of the federal government to require compensation of the lynch victims’ dependents, there is not likely to be much concern over the welfare of Negro children. Personal security, which does not exist for the Negro in the South, must precede social security. Thus, Negroes cannot expect much in the way of social security when the majority of the Negro population does not have political, economic or personal security. In the Negro’s present position, social security can mean only the security of a monopoly on the bread and soup line, security of being exploited by employers when employed, security of being unemployed when there is no possibility of being exploited, and finally, the security of paying taxes and having them administered in such a manner that the payees received no parts of the benefits. Social security can mean that to the Negro. ...

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A WPA PHOTO SHOWS A “TYPICAL” FAMILY HELPED BY THE ADC PROGRAM (CA. 1936–43) The Works Progress Administration (WPA) published this photograph of a “typical” ADC family with the caption, “Aid to dependent children keeps families together.” As a white woman, this woman was typical of the average ADC client, but she probably had more children than the average recipient. Note that mother and children are depicted reading.

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THE SOCIAL SECURITY BOARD PROMOTES THE ADC PROGRAM (1940)

The Social Security Board held ultimate authority over the programs of the Social Security Act of 1935. This poster, published in 1940 as part of its Informational Service, explains the purpose of the ADC program to the public, both in words and imagery.

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THE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE CLAIMS WELFARE FRAUD (1950)

This article, published in Nation’s Business, the official magazine of the US Chamber of Commerce, laments the expansion of welfare programs including the Old Age Assistance program aiding the elderly poor, and the Aid to Dependent Children program. The author argues that widespread fraud and abuse threaten to bankrupt the system.

WHEN IT PAYS TO PLAY PAUPER By Charles Stevenson A lumberman offered to pay $10,000 for the privilege of cutting timber on an elderly Louisianan’s farm. He told how the money would enable the old man to retire without being a burden to his children. But in vain. “I’m going to keep every tree growing to increase the value of the estate I’ll leave my children,” the old man replied, “and I don’t need any money from them or you. Governor Long’s paying me.” “You mean with this timber you’re on relief?” demanded the lumberman. “The governor calls it an old-age pension,” the old man retorted. “He says we’re entitled to it.” When Congress agreed 15 years ago to subsidize state relief laws as approved and supervised by the Social Security Administration [SSA], public assistance was to be predicated on proof of destitution; for persons 65 or older it was envisioned as temporary aid, with need for it dwindling as the social security insurance program matured. Today, though, the old

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timber owner is typical of many who are consuming relief funds that could be better spent on persons whose poverty is real. . . . The trouble is that in some states relief funds are being used to purchase support of voters. Money intended for the deserving poor is handed out as free pensions in an approach to the premise that everyone at 65 is entitled to a government bonus. This is engendering a public “gimme” complex which is spreading abuses through the entire welfare system. It infects subsidies which Congress makes available, in the same way as old-age relief, to needy families with children whose father is absent or incapacitated. . . . To make relief still more alluring, the legislature repealed statutes which obligated children to help care for parents when able, and which prohibited getting rid of wealth to claim a handout. Recovery of relief payments from a deceased beneficiary’s estate already had been outlawed. . . . Primed by the invitation to regard relief as a right, Louisianans applied for it with enthusiasm. New Orleans politicians distributed relief applications on street corners, then exhorted all within range to fill in the blanks. . . . The right of Negro ex-sharecroppers to the relief is unquestioned, but old-age grants plus an additional average of $58 a month where a household has children whose father is absent or disabled have so raised their incomes that they are flocking to the towns. Recently the Avoyelles Parish police jury formally demanded that state authorities halt the movement. . . . Louisiana officials cannot comprehend why, in addition, there has been an increase of more than 50 per cent within the year in families receiving federal children’s aid on account of a missing or incapacitated father. Payments are being made on behalf of 77,000 children—one out of every 15 in the state. They are mystified about a similar increase in unemployable persons who receive only state grants; a sample screening in one parish showed one out of ten of these was a malingerer. If Louisiana had as much experience as Washington State, it would know that when the aged are taught to believe it proper to chisel a pension out of relief funds, other people react similarly. In Washington State the political advantage of an old folks’ organization which would trade votes for pensions was recognized years ago. The resulting Washington Pension Union became bargaining agent for all who regard relief as their vested right. In 1948 union membership swelled to 16,000 on the strength of its campaign to increase old-age payments from $50 to a “minimum standard of living of $60 a month” and provide free medical care for all persons on relief. The Democratic party endorsed the union’s measure, so the voters adopted it in a referendum when they elected President Truman. . . .

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The budgeting approved by SSA provides up to $50.80 for food if the relief recipient always eats in a restaurant. There are even combination budgets for those who prefer breakfast in, dinner out. Diets include a midafternoon candy bar. A home-cooked relief meal sanctioned by the U. S. Agriculture Department includes cubed-steak, mashed potatoes with gravy, green buttered beans, carrot strips, bread and butter, tea and cream pie. Allowances cover fuel oil, ice, laundry, phone, dry cleaning. . . . Upper middle-class folks have reinvested their savings out of the state in order to qualify. Wealthy families have put their parents on relief then at death called on the state to contribute $100 toward a $1,000 funeral. ... In every instance, tremendous increases in children’s benefits have accompanied the growth of old-age relief rolls. A subsidy is being given in behalf of every thirteenth child in Oklahoma. Nationally, three times as many families are receiving children’s aid as at the height of the depression in 1937, and new applications are coming in at the rate of 40,000 a month, particularly on account of “desertions.” . . . Worse, the legislators learned that, instead of spending the relief for their children, “many mothers squander the money, or give it to the father who is still in the vicinity.” Such charges are widespread. Philip H. Vogt, Omaha’s welfare administrator, adds: “When tavern operators show you 15 to 18 children’s checks; when bills for milk and coal go unpaid; and when a woman calls at 2:30 a.m. because a neighbor mother who got her check at 4 p.m. went out to a tavern and has not returned yet, you conclude there is justification for the criticism we receive. Our administrators, bogged down with machinery and mechanics, spend less than 20 per cent of their time in the field.” Excluding unemployment and old-age insurance, we are spending $1,950,000,000 a year for state and federal relief—nearly two and a half times as much as in 1937. However, closer supervision of the spending is no complete answer to the problem of wholesale abuse either in the children’s or the old-age relief programs. Already the intricacies of relief are overwhelming 50,000 social workers. The answer must lie in attacking the pension philosophy at the source. . . . Nevertheless, the cure as evolved now by SSA with the approval of President Truman is to put more people under old-age and survivors’ insurance, yet nullify the effect of this by throwing additional money into the competing relief system without demanding a single device for tightening up on the chiselers. Legislation considered by the Eighty-first Congress is but another step toward fulfillment of various programs which by SSA’s own calculations would eventually cost between $29,000,000,000 and $41,300,000,000 a year.

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We must help our people who are in genuine need, and old age presents special problems because of increasing longevity. But if we are to care for those who are entitled to aid it cannot be achieved through national bankruptcy.

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A SOCIAL WORKER ENCOURAGES ADC MOTHERS TO WORK OUTSIDE THE HOME (1952) Beginning in the 1950s, social workers and welfare administrators began to reconsider the purpose of the ADC program. Rather than allowing single mothers to stay in the home and care for their children, social workers began to encourage them to seek paid employment. Here, Alice E. Mertz of the American Public Welfare Association enumerates her reasons for thinking work benefited low-income single mothers.

WORKING MOTHERS IN THE AID TO DEPENDENT CHILDREN PROGRAM By Alice E. Mertz THE ADC MOTHER When the ADC mother in the fatherless family remains at home, is there a possibility that we are actually burdening her when we expect her to rear her child without father’s work experiences? We do not say to her, “Now that the father is gone, your child need be only half able to earn a living or be a good citizen half time.” Where the family is not too large and where the mother can give over some of the supervision during the day to others, should mother be encouraged to spend some time in a job relationship so that she can bring these experiences back to her child? We feel great appreciation for the mothers in our ADC families and for how valiantly they carry on. It is out of a desire to help and certainly not to make life harder for mother that these questions are raised.

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There are many values beyond the above that the mother and child in the fatherless home can gain from the mother’s employment, and we list five interrelated points. (1) There is that which was developed above, that the mother may gain social growth for herself and show to her child an enriched citizen interested and concerned not only with her own child and home but with the welfare of others as well. (2) The mother may gain creative self-expression. In the normal home some of mother’s sense of adult achievement comes from the help she gives her husband in his achievement, which is different from her help to her children. With the loss of the husband, there comes this additional loss of adult activity. Mother also is a person in her own right and has needs and creativeness that go beyond her abilities as a mother. Our past policy in ADC administration has been that mother should not have to go out to work for reasons of poverty alone. Would it be facetious to paraphrase this—that our ADC mothers should not have to remain in the home for reasons of poverty alone? . . . (3) A mother may get release from the emotional strains and worries at home; get perspective on her problems; get practical help from fellow employees in rearing her children. . . . (4) The working mother learns to share her child emotionally with others who give care when she is away. This is extremely important in any fatherless home but is especially so when there is only one child. Where there are a father, mother and one child, one parent must share the child with the other and the child share each parent. The mother and one child situation can be carried through successfully, but the sharing of the mother with employment may make this situation more healthful for mother and child. (5) The mother may get direct emotional satisfaction on the job in being liked and wanted by the employer and fellow employees, and in having healthy companionships. . . .

UNDER WHAT CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD MOTHER WORK (1) Mothers with preschool children can work only when very satisfactory supervision is found. In general, the younger the child, the more careful evaluation of supervision is required. The greatest caution must be taken where the child is under two years of age, because the connection between physical development, love, and character building is greatest for the very young child, and the mother may be best able to offer this combination. In those situations, however, where excellent supervision can be obtained and in those where the mother is not actually being the mother, employment may be considered.

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(2) Both the mother and child must be well physically and mentally. In those rare instances where mother’s poor relationship to the child may be the cause of his illness, great care must be taken. Separation may even worsen the situation and some other help to the mother and perhaps to the child of a case work nature might be indicated before separation could be beneficial. (3) The mother’s job must permit her to go home at night sufficiently fresh in body and spirit to be a loving mother to her child. She should be at home for the evening meal, evening hours (and to tuck the child into bed), and Sundays, since these are institutions of great significance. She should be accessible by telephone to the child during the day. (4) The mother must be reasonably satisfied she is not neglecting her child by working and must approve of the supervision of the child. Case work help may be needed here. The child must know his mother is as devoted to him as though she were at home. (5) There must be adequate day after-school care that provides good physical care for the child. The supervisor must have affection for the child and be able to help him build standards during the day in such a way that the discipline does not seriously conflict with that of the mother. . . .

SUMMARY In summary, we stress three points—that, above all, employment must be interpreted as opportunity for a more satisfactory life for our mothers and children and not as punishment for being in need; that each situation must be evaluated carefully so that only those mothers work who should; and that the agency must operate in such a way that the mother knows that we are always here to help her in her difficult problem of rearing her children alone.

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PUBLIC WELFARE REPORTS ON A TRAINING PROGRAM FOR ADC CLIENTS (1953) The journal of the American Public Welfare Association took the pulse of the welfare field in the postwar years. This article by a city welfare administrator shows readers the virtues of a work-training program for ADC clients. The “Domestic Worker Training Program” in East St. Louis, Illinois, taught welfare clients how to work as maids in area homes.

MAID TO ORDER A PRACTICABLE TRAINING PROGRAM TO MEET A COMMUNITY NEED By Frank P. Higgins . . . The Domestic Workers Training Program was first introduced in East St. Louis, Illinois about 15 months ago. The idea behind this plan was to train recipients of Aid to Dependent Children and General Assistance to qualify for domestic jobs in the area, where such help was known to be needed. The first training class met on March 19, 1952 and by December 31, 1952 five training classes had graduated 42 persons, and plans for future classes were complete. Starting as an experiment, the project has been so successful that the program is now about to be introduced in several other areas of the State. East St. Louis was chosen as the locale for the venture because there the Aid to Dependent Children rolls and the General Assistance rolls combined were large enough to provide an adequate number of women to be trained. In addition, the large population in the area (including St. Louis, Missouri)

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promised an excellent opportunity for job placement. This was confirmed by a survey prior to the start of the project, but the details of that survey will not be included here.

SELECTION OF TRAINEES The trainees for the program were selected on the basis of age, health, personal appearance, alertness willingness, and the availability of care for any children in the home. . . . SIZE OF THE CLASS DURATION OF TRAINING The size of the class was limited to ten women because the course was not one of theory, but a process of teaching through demonstration and practice. The method was time consuming but it enabled the instructor to gauge the abilities and limitations of each trainee, and this knowledge was useful when the trainees were being considered for job placement. The training sessions covered a three week period and the meetings were conducted Monday through Friday from 9:00 a.m. until 12:00 noon. The 45 hours of training proved to be long enough to furnish the trainee with a good basic knowledge of domestic duties, which is the aim of the program. We realized that much more time would be required to make the trainees expert in any special phase of domestic work, but the essentials taught in the course qualified them for job placement. STUDENT REQUIREMENTS Because the course was brief, punctuality and perfect class attendance were strict requirements. . . . Another requirement, which was also part of the curriculum, was the matter of maintaining a neat appearance at all times. Uniforms and low heel shoes were furnished each trainee, and the only prohibition on dress was the wearing of any type of jewelry that would be a safety hazard. By the time the trainee had completed the course, instructions on personal appearance, and grooming, combined with her observations of the standards of the others in the group, had usually made her well aware of the importance of personal appearance in the type of work she would be undertaking. . . . CURRICULUM The curriculum was arranged so that a maximum amount of time was devoted to demonstration and practice sessions. Lecture periods were held

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to a minimum. Considerable time was also given to group discussions during which the trainees were encouraged to contribute from their own knowledge for the benefit of the group. The instructor found that such discussions practically eliminated the need for direct criticism of the performance and conduct of the group because they usually brought out most of the points she had in mind. The course included instruction in the following areas: laundry techniques; safety in the home; care and storage of clothing; use and care of home appliances; preparation and storage of food; information on cleaning materials and abrasives; care of children; nutrition; planning and organization of work; telephone and doorbell etiquette; attitude toward the job, the employer, and supervision; personal hygiene; job interviews and opportunities; and personal appearance and grooming. . . .

GRADUATION AND JOB PLACEMENT All trainees who completed the course were awarded a diploma. In many instances they had never completed any phase of formal education and this diploma represented the only award they had ever earned. Their pride upon accepting the diploma was a source of deep satisfaction to the persons associated with the program. The awarding of diplomas was followed by refreshments and a social hour and the class was dismissed for the last time. Following the graduation the employment representative was responsible for placing trainees in jobs. When an employer requested domestic help the employment representative obtained as much information as possible regarding the requirements of the job, the amount of supervision the worker would have, and the personality type desired. The employment representative discussed possible referrals with the employer, utilizing all agency knowledge of the strengths and limitations of the persons discussed. Experience taught us that when an employer was furnished with complete knowledge of the limitations and potentialities of a prospective employee, the employee had a better chance of making good on the job than the person placed without this advance information being given to the employer. Indirectly this was a good way to let the employer know if the employee might need understanding and help in becoming adjusted to the job situation. After the worker had been placed and on the job for a short time, a second contact was made with the employer to determine the progress of the employee. In the event it became necessary, the instructor arranged to give special supplementary instruction to the employee in the performance of duties in which the employee was showing a lack of skill. . . . The placements were not restricted to the purely domestic field. The majority of the graduates were placed in private homes, but others accepted

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work as hotel maids, office cleaners, matrons in industrial plants, and matrons in beauty parlors. Placements in these varied settings were made according to the individual preference of the worker insofar as possible, but most of them were willing to accept any job that was available to them. A few graduates remained in domestic jobs for a short time and then transferred to unrelated jobs. Since the beginning of the program in March, 1952 more than 75 per cent of the graduates have been placed in employment, full or part time. Twothirds of the persons placed have become independent of any kind of assistance, and others are earning enough to allow for substantial reductions in their grants. . . . The state is realizing a considerable saving in funds even from this modest beginning of the program, because of the case closings and the reductions in grants made possible through job placements. The program has benefited the participants in their personal lives by teaching them higher standards of housekeeping and personal appearance—values which cannot be minimized, particularly in households where growing children are adopting the standards of the parent. . . .

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RESEARCHER OUTLINES DIFFICULTIES FACING AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN ON ADC (1957) In the 1950s, Winifred Bell, who would later write the first history of the ADC program (Bell 1965), undertook a study of ADC clients at the Adult Psychiatric Clinic in Detroit, Michigan. Here she describes the many difficulties facing four African American women who were trying to secure paid employment. Their struggles demonstrate how racial discrimination limited possibilities for African American women’s economic security.

CASEWORK WITH CHRONICALLY DEPENDENT FAMILIES By Winifred Bell . . . We shortly learned that employment was a virtual impossibility because of a combination of lack of skill, confidence, experience and opportunity. Day work was their only alternative, and these mothers hated the thought: it represented failure and had no advantage over the “Aid.” Two of them wished to work in stores, two of them in offices. There were few local stores hiring Negro sales people, unless the poorly paid soda fountain jobs were considered the goal. The other two not only had to face the usual discrimination, but they had no office skills. We investigated employment opportunities for Negroes in the community and learned that both practical nursing and office positions might be available. As the interest of all four women mounted, we determined to locate funds for vocational training, and we approached service clubs. We shortly had had sufficient funds to finance training courses for all four. Their part of the bargain was to work

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hard at school and to make adequate plans for the care of their children. There were no day care facilities available in their neighborhoods. However, with a goal in sight, and knowing that if employment materialized, this problem would have to be solved eventually, they explored their families and neighborhoods for solutions. Two of them had grandmothers living nearby, and with some reluctance and doubt these elderly women made plans to care for the children. They were home most of the day, they gradually became convinced that their grand-daughters were not “just dumping” their children, and later when employment did materialize, they enjoyed earning small sums of money for baby-sitting. The other two mothers worked out a cooperative plan with reliable neighbor women, who took care of their children for a few hours after school in return for similar services in the evening or on weekends. These arrangements also became permanent when the mothers eventually found employment. It was the impression of the Clinic social workers that these plans were beneficial to the children since their mothers were happy and excited about the possibility of working, were free to feel and show more affection, and were able to provide substitutes who were consistently present and less involved emotionally. Eventually, all four mothers completed their training courses and took Civil Service tests, which they all failed, and this led us to our next task. We conferred with a Clinical Psychologist who had been closely associated with civil service examinations given in our locality and learned that he and his colleagues had long had the impression that such procedures were discriminatory, not deliberately, but as part of the latent control mechanisms in the American scene overtly dedicated to equality but covertly “keeping minorities in their place.” Simple intelligence tests were then administered to our mothers and we isolated areas of weakness, which in all instances included vocabulary, spelling and simple arithmetic. Social workers promptly reviewed their own elementary arithmetic and approximately three or four hours were devoted to “tutoring” the women in these areas. The purpose was more to put them at ease with testing procedures than to actually increase information or knowledge, but to some slight extent both purposes were served, and in time all four successfully passed examinations, which gave them access to public employment where discrimination was less apt to be found, and eventual tenure could be secured. However unsophisticated this approach was, the social workers had the satisfaction of seeing these mothers blossom and eventually achieve their goals. . . .

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THE URBAN LEAGUE OF GREATER NEW ORLEANS REPORTS ON THE ADC CRISIS IN LOUISIANA (1960) In 1960, the state of Louisiana used a newly passed “suitable home” provision to strike 23,000 children and their mothers from the rolls of the state’s ADC program. The governor referred to these mothers as “a bunch of prostitutes.” While he and other officials insisted the new law aimed only to save the morals of the children, the National Urban League revealed how the suitable home provision was part and parcel of a broader agenda for racial segregation and discrimination.

MEMORANDUM To: National Agencies American Leaders Local Urban Leagues From: The National Urban League Subj: The Current Attack on ADC in Louisiana For some reason the national press has not devoted the attention that might be expected to the recent action of the State of Louisiana in dropping from its aid-to-dependent children rolls mothers with children born out of wedlock. Consequently, an event of deep national significance has aroused little or no widespread reaction. The National Urban League believes that such public inaction is dangerous to the welfare standards of this country and to the safety of the children who are the responsibility of their nation—children whose welfare

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was the subject of extended discussion at the Golden Anniversary White House Conference on Children and Youth. This memorandum is prepared by the National Urban League to supplement and underscore the scanty information provided by the press, and to emphasize the social dangers attending the action of the Louisiana state government. At its last session, the Louisiana Legislature, at the behest of Governor James H. Davis, passed a series of some thirty bills aimed at strengthening segregationist practices in that state. Included in the package was a Suitable Home Bill, which stipulated that as a condition of receiving aid to dependent children grants the child must be in a suitable home. (An “unsuitable” home is one which includes an illegitimate child or children in the family, or one in which the mother is living with a person to whom she is not married; and/or home in which other standards of health and decency are not maintained.) Louisiana’s Attorney General issued an interpretation that the provisions of the Suitable Home Bill were retroactive. This resulted in the removal from ADC rolls of all families receiving grants as of July 15, 1960; upon reinvestigation those found living in “suitable” homes could be reentered upon the rolls. Superficially, the bill could be interpreted as expression of the state’s concern with the moral conditions under which its children live, and this interpretation has been stressed by Louisiana’s welfare authorities and reported by the nation’s press. Examination of the actual facts, however, reveal the bill as an act of reprisal or of intimidation against a Negro population which has been insistently pressing for an end to racial segregation in education and other areas of living. The very fact that the bill was included in the “segregationist package” sponsored by Governor Davis speaks for the racial bias behind it and highlights the heavy proportion of Negro families affected by administration of the act. More than 6,000 mothers, with over 23,000 children, were displaced from public relief by the act—5,300 of the children in the city of New Orleans. The Urban League of Greater New Orleans was immediately drawn into the middle of the affair not only because of the heavy proportion of Negro children involved, but also because of the absence of any other agency able and willing to move in the matter. . . . Practically none of the families involved have any reserve funds. Their very social classification tend to isolate them from normal supportive resources. Consequently, with the stoppage of relief checks as of July 15th desperate cases of need began to arise among these families toward the end of July, and by mid-August conditions had become intolerable. . . . [I]ntensive local activity in New Orleans could not possibly meet the steadily mounting needs as more and more mothers spent their remaining

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scanty funds. In other communities, less well organized, rescue services are even less adequate than in New Orleans. In the rural areas there are practically no rescue facilities because of total lack of organizational structure that might aid Negroes. The National Urban League supported its New Orleans affiliate by communicating with Secretary Arthur Flemming of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, the American Red Cross and several other national organizations. The impossibility of meeting the Louisiana crisis through local volunteer funds was made plain to Secretary Flemming. The Red Cross was asked to consider the Louisiana situation as a major disaster and to distribute food and clothing supplies. Other national agencies were pressed to express their grave concern to federal and Louisiana state officials. The National Urban League reminded Secretary Flemming that the Louisiana state government’s action was in violation of the contract between the Bureau of Assistance and various states administering ADC by ignoring the stipulation that “no child must go hungry because of the condition of its birth.” The Secretary was also reminded of his authority to declare the Louisiana situation a case of serious need requiring distribution of federal surplus food by the American Red Cross. His attention was called to the sanctions which HEW can apply in cases where a state is out of conformity with the federal law involving welfare allocations. Thus far the general picture set forth above has not changed. Louisiana officials have responded to a formal HEW inquiry by denying any racial motivation, by pointing out that if federal allocations for ADC in the state of Louisiana (which provides 78% of the state’s disbursements in each case) should be withheld this would deprive an additional 53,000 children of their present rights and would only increase their hardships. Louisiana officials also assured HEW that by November 15th 50% of the children displaced from relief rolls would be receiving assistance again. The statement did not indicate how these children would stay alive until November 15th, nor what would happen to the 50% who will still be denied public assistance. There has been little general public indignation over the Louisiana situation in this country. Abroad it has been a different story, for the international wire services have carried the story throughout the world. In Newcastle, England, a group of fifteen angry City Council women sent an airlift of free baby food for needy Negro children in New Orleans, raising more than $400 for the purpose and making certain that their action, described as “Bundles From Britain”, received worldwide attention. Louisiana’s “war against babies” is beginning to assume the proportions that the Little Rock school riots assumed in world discussion circles.

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The National Urban League is gravely disturbed that public response to the Louisiana case has been so weak and fitful. Though the New Orleans Urban League’s broadcast appeal for funds to aid the penniless families in their crisis has met with scattered response, organized social work has remained silent on the issue, with only a few exceptions. . . . This inaction is costly even beyond its encouragement to neglect and possible starvation of the Louisiana children involved. (Reports from Monroe, Shreveport and New Orleans declare that children are already feeding from the garbage cans of their cities.) Also involved is the structure of child care throughout the nation, for already five states in addition to Louisiana have passed almost identical legislation. They will be encouraged to implement that legislation, and the passage of similar laws throughout the country will be encouraged to the extent that Louisiana is successful in her raid against dependent and neglected children. . . .

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CITY OFFICIAL MAKES A PLAN TO CUT CLIENTS FROM THE WELFARE ROLLS (1961) In 1961, Newburgh, New York, city manager Joseph Mitchell declared “a war on the welfare state” in his small Hudson River town. His thirteen-point plan, here in the minutes of the city council, constituted the most restrictive welfare rules ever enumerated, meeting widespread approval across the nation.

MINUTES OF THE CITY COUNCIL OF NEWBURGH, NEW YORK, JUNE 19, 1961 NEW BUSINESS . . . The City Manager announced to the Council a list of thirteen procedural changes in welfare administration, as follows: 1. All cash payments which can be converted to food, clothing and rent vouchers and the like without basic harm to the intent of the aid shall be issued in voucher form henceforth. 2. All able-bodied adult males on relief of any kind who are capable of working are to be assigned to the Chief of Building Maintenance for work assignment on a 40-hour week. 3. All recipients physically capable of and available for private employment who are offered a job but refuse it, regardless of the type of employment involved, are to be denied relief. 4. All mothers of illegitimate children are to be advised that should they have any more children out of wedlock, they shall be denied relief.

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5. All applicants for relief who have left a job voluntarily, i.e., who have not been fired or laid off, shall be denied relief. 6. The allotment for any one family until shall not exceed the take-home pay of the lowest paid city employee with a family of comparable size. Also no relief shall be granted to any family whose income is in excess of the latter figure. 7. All files of all Aid to Dependent Children cases are to be brought to the office of the Corporation Counsel for review monthly. All new cases of any kind will be referred to the Corporation Counsel prior to certification of payment. 8. All applicants for relief who are new to the city must show evidence that their plans in coming to the city involved a concrete offer of employment, similar to that required of foreign immigrants. All such persons shall be limited to two weeks of relief. Those who cannot show evidence shall be limited to one week of relief. 9. Aid to persons except the aged, blind and disabled shall be limited to three months in any one year—this is a feature similar to the present policies on unemployment benefits. 10. All recipients who are not disabled, blind, ambulatory or otherwise incapacitated, shall report to the Department of Public Welfare monthly for a conference regarding the status of their case. 11. Once the budget for the fiscal year is approved by the Council, it shall not be exceeded by the Welfare Department unless approved by Council by supplimental appropriation. 12. There shall be a monthly expenditure limit on all categories of Welfare aid. This monthly expenditure limit shall be established by the Department of Public Welfare at the time of presenting its budget, and shall take into account seasonal variations. 13. Prior to certifying or continuing any more Aid to Dependent Children cases, a determination shall be made as to the home environment. If the home environment is not satisfactory, the children in that home shall be placed in foster care in lieu of Welfare aid to the family adults. Councilman McKneally moved that these changes be put into effect July 15, 1961. Ayes—Councilmen Doulin, Green, McIntyre, McKneally—4. Carried. On motion adjourned. LEMMA B. CRABTREE City Clerk

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YOUNG AMERICANS FOR FREEDOM SUPPORT HARD LINE ON WELFARE (1961)

Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) was a conservative youth organization created in 1960 with the assistance of movement leader and intellectual William F. Buckley. It grew rapidly on college campuses in the early 1960s and rallied around causes like the Newburgh anti-welfare plan. Fierce libertarians and anticommunists, the students, here from Hunter College, opposed the welfare state, and helped make Joseph Mitchell a hero for conservatives around the United States. This photo was originally published in the Middletown, New York, Record.

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A POLITICAL CARTOON SUPPORTS MITCHELL’S THIRTEEN-POINT PLAN (1961)

This cartoon, originally published in the Rochester Times-Union, was one of many that supported Joseph Mitchell’s anti-welfare stance. The cartoon reflected widely held beliefs that welfare was “a mess,” fostering dysfunctional behavior among clients and promoting fraud. Note the depiction of those opposing the Newburgh plan.

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NEWSPAPER AIMS TO DISPEL RUMORS ABOUT WELFARE (1961)

In the wake of the Newburgh crisis, some journalists tried to determine whether the accusations against welfare programs and clients were true. Here, a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer publishes the fifth of a series of seven articles that dispelled stereotypes and distinguished between rumor and fact in the ADC program.

THE ABCS OF RELIEF IMAGE OF RECIPIENTS WRONG By Frank H. Weir Employees of the Philadelphia County Board of Assistance held one of their cake sales the other day on the sixth floor of the State Office Building at Broad and Spring Garden streets. William P. Sailer, executive director, explains: “Very often relief people came in to talk things over. Occasionally we’ll send one to check on a job opening but he’s flat broke—doesn’t even have carfare. The State has no money for that sort of thing and our people were dipping into their own pockets for about $40 a month. Now we keep the fund going by selling each other cakes.” His point is this: “Our case workers know the people on relief better than anyone in Philadelphia. They visit their homes, they know who’s sick, who’s having trouble with his children. They know most of them are on the level and they

Newspaper Aims to Dispel Rumors about Welfare • 131

have enough confidence in them to help out with their own money, even if it’s just small change. “And remember – we’re all taxpayers. We pay the wage tax, the sales tax and the income tax just like everyone else.” Sailer is sensitive to taxpayers, since it’s their money that pays for relief and they have a right to protest about deserting parents, illegitimate children, juvenile delinquency and other abuses that drain away their dollars. “These angry reactions are understandable, since they’re usually based on a limited knowledge of the program and the few sensational cases of misbehavior that come to the public’s attention,” he says, “but the extent of public misunderstanding is enormous.” To separate rumors from fact, Philadelphia took part in a national study of Aid to Dependent Children families who left the rolls last March. Here’s a rundown of the results. 1. Rumor—The ADC rolls are full of unmarried mothers. Fact—Of the families leaving the rolls last March, only 7 percent were headed by unmarried mothers. 2. Rumor—Mothers deliberately have illegitimate children to boost their allowances. Fact—Only 5 percent of the children were born illegitimately while their mothers received assistance. 3. Rumor—Relief discourages the work habit. Fact—Six of every seven who left the rolls did so because they found jobs. 4. Rumor—Most ADC children are juvenile delinquents. Fact—Of the children between 7 and 17, more than 90 percent never had a brush with police, 40 percent of those over 6 had won special awards in school. 5. Rumor—ADC mothers make relief their way of life. Fact—Half of the families had been on assistance less than a year. Greenleigh Associates, a New York social research organization, made a more elaborate study and reached similar conclusions. “The public image of the typical ADC family is erroneous,” it reports. “The false image is of a mother who is shiftless and lazy, unwilling to work, promiscuous, and neglectful of her children. She is seen spending her time and relief check in a bar room, she has child after child to increase her payments and she enjoys living on the public largesse. This study revealed not more than 3 percent of mothers who fit this image in any way.”

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SECRETARY OF HEALTH, EDUCATION AND WELFARE, ABRAHAM RIBICOFF, DECLARES A NEW DIRECTION IN WELFARE (1961)

In 1961, the newly elected presidential administration of John F. Kennedy responded to increasing controversy over the ADC program. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) Abraham Ribicoff drew up a plan for transforming the program that would culminate in the 1962 Public Welfare Amendments. He drew on social workers’ new-found advocacy of rehabilitation as well as critics’ demands for a stricter program that encouraged work. These themes animated his “SPIRIT” plan, outlined for welfare administrators and social workers in the December, 1961, Field Letter of the Department of HEW.

DHEW SECRETARY FORECASTS NEW PUBLIC WELFARE PROGRAM DESIGNED TO MEET ABUSES AND TO IMPROVE THE QUALITY OF WELFARE SERVICES Secretary Ribicoff told the American Public Welfare Association at their meeting in Chicago on December 1 that the administrative changes he will announce this month and the legislative changes he will propose to the next Congress will instill a new spirit in public welfare. This aim Secretary Ribicoff spelled out with the initial letters of the six points of his new program, as follows:

A New Direction in Welfare • 133

S—Services P—Prevention I—Incentives R—Rehabilitation I—Independence T—Training “We are met at a most critical time for our public welfare programs,” said Secretary Ribicoff. “As the Cabinet officer responsible for these programs, I admit it. As the officials responsible for them in the 50 States, you admit it.” He added: “The question is not whether our public welfare services should be revised. . . . They must be revised. The question is only how to move toward revising and improving them . . . for the greatest good of all concerned.” He proposed “a new constructive approach: to make public welfare a positive productive force in our society, a force which helps people move off relief and into the self-respecting and satisfying lives for which the vast majority hunger.” On the six points he included in this new approach Secretary Ribicoff said: Services—“Too often our so-called ‘services’ are most concerned with one thing: who is or who is not eligible for financial assistance.” “The very essence of our new and vital program will be full use of preventive and rehabilitative services including, but not confined to, the provision of financial assistance.” “Its ultimate aim? To help families to become self-supporting and independent by strengthening all their own resources.” Prevention—“It costs society less to prevent a problem or deal with it in earlier stages than to correct it after it becomes serious.” “We intend to expand our programs to emphasize the prevention of dependency.” Incentives—“We intend to provide incentives for people to improve their lot through earnings. And we intend to provide incentives to the States to improve their welfare systems.” Rehabilitation—“We intend to combine services with opportunities for rehabilitation through work—job training, community projects—designed to pave the way to a productive place in society for those once unskilled.”

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Independence—“We intend to assist each American—though he might now be dependent—to achieve the independence which is his birthright.” Training—“We must have the special talents and knowledge of skilled personnel with graduate training. We intend to train more and more people to help in the gigantic task ahead.”

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AN ADVOCATE FOR WELFARE DESCRIBES THE EMERGING FIELD OF “POVERTY AND THE LAW” (1963) In 1963, long-time welfare policymaker Elizabeth Wickenden summarized the emerging thinking of a new generation of lawyers and activists regarding poverty and the law. Here she explains to the National Social Welfare Assembly, an organization of social welfare agencies, how welfare laws are used to violate the civil rights of poor Americans, and how the laws might successfully be challenged in court.

POVERTY AND THE LAW By Elizabeth Wickenden THE CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS OF ASSISTANCE RECIPIENTS Many critics of the contemporary social scene, including lawyers and others dedicated to the role of law in the democratic process, have recently expressed their concern over the mounting evidence that poverty itself constitutes a barrier to equal treatment under law. For example, in a recent interview on The Law published by the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, Mr. Edward Bennett Williams in reply to the question, “What do you consider to be the most urgent problem in the administration of the law?” answered: “The most urgent one centers around the defense of the indigent.” In a brief before the Supreme Court challenging the constitutionality of the situation created for indigent defendants in states which do not provide defense counsel in such cases, Mr. Abe Fortas argues:

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“To convict the poor without counsel while we guarantee a right to counsel to those who can afford it is also a denial of equal protection of the laws.” There are many other areas where lack of resources precludes an adequate defense, freedom from incarceration under bail, the ability to appeal an adverse decision, or access to the facilities of the law as in civil proceedings. Recently, however, a new concern has arisen among lawyers, social workers, and others interested in protecting the constitutional rights of all Americans regardless of their economic or social status. This is the growing disposition in some states and localities to apply a different standard of law enforcement to persons because of their poverty, especially if that poverty is reflected in dependence upon tax-supported benefits such as public assistance. Examples of this trend may be seen in the following kinds of specific cases: In three New Jersey counties mothers of illegitimate children have been subject to prosecution under otherwise unenforced adultery and fornication laws upon applying for public assistance. Newspaper articles have made it clear that this type of action is restricted to applicants for, or recipients of, welfare aid. In Connecticut a mother of an illegitimate child receiving public assistance, who had recently come to Connecticut from a southern state, was subject to deportation action by the state. Court action brought by the Legal Aid Society on a question of constitutionality (under the Supreme Court decision in the Edwards case) resulted in a withdrawal of this particular action but the policy is said to persist. In many jurisdictions night raids upon assistance recipients to determine the presence of a “man in the house” are common practice. (This is based on the assumption that such a man is either the father of the children, who should therefore be legally responsible for their support, or his very presence presumes a moral responsibility to support the mother’s children.) Recently in Alameda County, California, for example, a widely publicized night raid was conducted in a single night on 500 mothers receiving assistance for the support of their needy children. It is maintained that no search warrant is required in these cases on the ground that these investigations are solely concerned with eligibility for a benefit conditioned by specified eligibility criteria, some of which can only be checked in this manner. Failure to “cooperate” by admitting such night raid investigators typically results in the discontinuance of public assistance.

In each of these situations a constitutional guarantee (equal treatment under the law, the right to free movement, and the right to privacy) would seem to have been denied to persons primarily distinguished by their poverty.

“Poverty and the Law” • 137

Dependency on public aid may also invite two other types of penalty deriving from an inequitable application of the concept of child neglect. Since the protection of children (together with their responsible parents) from destitution and their protection from neglect on the part of those same parents are both typically public welfare functions, the relationship between the two presents more complex problems which are discussed separately below. However, for purposes of identification, the two types of penalizing action which might raise constitutional issues of inequitable treatment currently developing are: referral or threatened referral of mothers of children in receipt of public assistance (most commonly illegitimate children) to courts on neglect charges on a different basis from that applied to children in similar circumstances who are not receiving public assistance. application of criminal or civil penalties to mothers in receipt of assistance for alleged “mismanagement” of their assistance grants without allegation of fraud or child neglect (with its concomitant obligation of protective action toward the child).

. . . The real effect of such policies is, however, one of intimidation. For many women in this situation, especially among Negroes, Puerto Ricans, and Mexican-Americans, the unforgivable sin is to “give up” their children to public authorities. If this becomes the actual or threatened price of public assistance, they will withdraw from or fail to apply for assistance no matter what their need or what the ultimate deprivation to their children. . . .

USE OF LEGAL PROCEEDINGS TO TEST ASSISTANCE POLICIES Welfare policies have rarely been challenged in the courts by individuals or groups who feel that their rights have been abridged. The very poverty of those who depend upon assistance makes this impractical and organizations have not interested themselves in this area to the same extent as in questions of racial or religious discrimination. Organizations interested in welfare policy have typically sought to exert their influence at the point of legislative or administrative decision rather than seeking court review of such policy. Nevertheless, the possibilities for legal remedy do exist in the appeals procedure and in the courts, both federal and state. This memorandum has been written with the thought that it might encourage lawyers and others interested in assuring the protections of the Constitution to all groups in the population to consider these possibilities.

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A LABOR DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL SEES AFDC AS PART OF A DANGEROUS TREND (1965) As a Labor Department official in the Johnson administration, Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote this important report lamenting the rise in the number of African American welfare recipients and the breakdown of the black family. Here, he argues that the supposedly “matriarchal” black family structure, a result of black male disadvantage, is the most significant barrier to racial equality and should be a target for federal action.

THE NEGRO FAMILY THE CASE FOR NATIONAL ACTION Office of Policy Planning and Research, US Department of Labor THE NEGRO AMERICAN FAMILY At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family. It is the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community at the present time. . . . But there is one truly great discontinuity in family structure in the United States at the present time: that between the white world in general and that of the Negro American. The white family has achieved a high degree of stability and is maintaining that stability.

AFDC as Part of a Dangerous Trend • 139

By contrast, the family structure of lower class Negroes is highly unstable, and in many urban centers is approaching complete breakdown. ... As a direct result of this high rate of divorce, separation, and desertion, a very large percent of Negro families are headed by females. While the percentage of such families among whites has been dropping since 1940, it has been rising among Negroes. . . . The majority of Negro children receive public assistance under the AFDC program at one point or another in their childhood. At present, 14 percent of Negro children are receiving AFDC assistance, as against 2 percent of white children. . . . The steady expansion of this welfare program, as of public assistance programs in general, can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States.

THE ROOTS OF THE PROBLEM . . . With the emancipation of the slaves, the Negro American family began to form in the United States on a widespread scale. But it did so in an atmosphere markedly different from that which has produced the white American family. The Negro was given liberty, but not equality. Life remained hazardous and marginal. Of the greatest importance, the Negro male, particularly in the South, became an object of intense hostility, an attitude unquestionably based in some measure on fear. When Jim Crow made its appearance towards the end of the 19th century, it may be speculated that it was the Negro male who was most humiliated thereby; the male was more likely to use public facilities, which rapidly became segregated once the process began, and just as important, segregation, and the submissiveness it exacts, is surely more destructive to the male than to the female personality. Keeping the Negro “in his place” can be translated as keeping the Negro male in his place: the female was not a threat to anyone. Unquestionably, these events worked against the emergence of a strong father figure. The very essence of the male animal, from the bantam rooster to the four-star general, is to strut. Indeed, in 19th century America, a particular type of exaggerated male boastfulness became almost a national style. Not for the Negro male. The “sassy nigger” was lynched. In this situation, the Negro family made but little progress toward the middle-class pattern of the present time. Margaret Mead has pointed out that while “In every known human society, everywhere in the world, the

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young male learns that when he grows up one of the things which he must do in order to be a full member of society is to provide food for some female and her young.”[1] This pattern is not immutable, however: it can be broken, even though it has always eventually reasserted itself. . . . The conclusion from these and similar data is difficult to avoid: During times when jobs were reasonably plentiful (although at no time during this period, save perhaps the first 2 years, did the unemployment rate for Negro males drop to anything like a reasonable level) the Negro family became stronger and more stable. As jobs became more and more difficult to find, the stability of the family became more and more difficult to maintain. . . . Because in general terms Negro families have the largest number of children and the lowest incomes, many Negro fathers literally cannot support their families. Because the father is either not present, is unemployed, or makes such a low wage, the Negro woman goes to work. Fifty-six percent of Negro women, age 25 to 64, are in the work force, against 42 percent of white women. This dependence on the mother’s income undermines the position of the father and deprives the children of the kind of attention, particularly in school matters, which is now a standard feature of middle-class upbringing. . . .

THE TANGLE OF PATHOLOGY . . . In essence, the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is so out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well. There is, presumably, no special reason why a society in which males are dominant in family relationships is to be preferred to a matriarchal arrangement. However, it is clearly a disadvantage for a minority group to be operating on one principle, while the great majority of the population, and the one with the most advantages to begin with, is operating on another. This is the present situation of the Negro. Ours is a society which presumes male leadership in private and public affairs. The arrangements of society facilitate such leadership and reward it. A subculture, such as that of the Negro American, in which this is not the pattern, is placed at a distinct disadvantage. Here an earlier word of caution should be repeated. There is much evidence that a considerable number of Negro families have managed to break out of the tangle of pathology and to establish themselves as stable, effective units, living according to patterns of American society in general.

AFDC as Part of a Dangerous Trend • 141

E. Franklin Frazier has suggested that the middle-class Negro American family is, if anything, more patriarchal and protective of its children than the general run of such families. Given equal opportunities, the children of these families will perform as well or better than their white peers. They need no help from anyone, and ask none. . . . Nonetheless, at the center of the tangle of pathology is the weakness of the family structure. Once or twice removed, it will be found to be the principal source of most of the aberrant, inadequate, or antisocial behavior that did not establish, but now serves to perpetuate the cycle of poverty and deprivation. . . . A fundamental fact of Negro American family life is the often reversed roles of husband and wife. Robert O. Blood, Jr. and Donald M. Wolfe, in a study of Detroit families, note that “Negro husbands have unusually low power,” and while this is characteristic of all low income families, the pattern pervades the Negro social structure: “the cumulative result of discrimination in jobs . . . the segregrated housing, and the poor schooling of Negro men.” In 44 percent of the Negro families studied, the wife was dominant, as against 20 percent of white wives. “Whereas the majority of white families are equalitarian, the largest percentage of Negro families are dominated by the wife.”[2] . . . The white family, despite many variants, remains a powerful agency not only for transmitting property from one generation to the next, but also for transmitting no less valuable contracts with the world of education and work. In an earlier age, the Carpenters, Wainwrights, Weavers, Mercers, Farmers, Smiths acquired their names as well as their trades from their fathers and grandfathers. Children today still learn the patterns of work from their fathers even though they may no longer go into the same jobs. White children without fathers at least perceive all about them the pattern of men working. Negro children without fathers flounder—and fail. . . . This difference in ability to perform has its counterpart in statistics on actual school performance. Nonwhite boys from families with both parents present are more likely to be going to school than boys with only one parent present, and enrollment rates are even lower when neither parent is present. When the boys from broken homes are in school, they do not do as well as the boys from whole families. Grade retardation is higher when only one parent is present, and highest when neither parent is present. . . . It is probable that at present, a majority of the crimes against the person, such as rape, murder, and aggravated assault are committed by Negroes. There is, of course, no absolute evidence; inference can only be made from arrest and prison population statistics. The data that follow unquestionably are biased against Negroes, who are arraigned much more casually than are

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whites, but it may be doubted that the bias is great enough to affect the general proportions. . . . The ultimate mark of inadequate preparation for life is the failure rate on the Armed Forces mental test. The Armed Forces Qualification Test is not quite a mental test, nor yet an education test. It is a test of ability to perform at an acceptable level of competence. It roughly measures ability that ought to be found in an average 7th or 8th grade student. A grown young man who cannot pass this test is in trouble. Fifty-six percent of Negroes fail it. . . . There is another special quality about military service for Negro men: it is an utterly masculine world. Given the strains of the disorganized and matrifocal family life in which so many Negro youth come of age, the Armed Forces are a dramatic and desperately needed change: a world away from women, a world run by strong men of unquestioned authority, where discipline, if harsh, is nonetheless orderly and predictable, and where rewards, if limited, are granted on the basis of performance. . . .

THE CASE FOR NATIONAL ACTION . . . Three centuries of injustice have brought about deep-seated structural distortions in the life of the Negro American. At this point, the present tangle of pathology is capable of perpetuating itself without assistance from the white world. The cycle can be broken only if these distortions are set right. [NOTES] [1. [2.

Margaret Mead. 1962. Male and Female. New York: New American Library, p. 146.] Robert O. Blood Jr. and Donald M. Wolfe. 1960. Husbands and Wives: The Dynamics of Married Living. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, p. 34.]

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TWO ACTIVIST ACADEMICS OFFER “A STRATEGY TO END POVERTY” (1966)

As welfare mothers began organizing locally, sociologists Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward estimated that a vast number of Americans who were eligible for welfare were not receiving assistance. Here, they urge organizing and protest efforts designed to create a fiscal and political crisis at the state and local level serious enough to push legislators into instituting a new federal guaranteed income system. This strategy became one possible approach for the emerging welfare rights movement to adopt.

A STRATEGY TO END POVERTY By Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven . . . It is our purpose to advance a strategy which affords the basis for a convergence of civil rights organizations, militant anti-poverty groups and the poor. If this strategy were implemented, a political crisis would result that could lead to legislation for a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty. The strategy is based on the fact that a vast discrepancy exists between the benefits to which people are entitled under public welfare programs and the sums which they actually receive. This gulf is not recognized in a society that is wholly and self-righteously oriented toward getting people off the welfare rolls. It is widely known, for example, that nearly 8 million persons (half of them white) now subsist on welfare, but it is not generally known that for every person on the rolls at least one more probably meets existing criteria of eligibility but is not obtaining assistance. . . .

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Thus, public welfare systems try to keep their budgets down and their rolls low by failing to inform people of the rights available to them, by intimidating and shaming them to the degree that they are reluctant either to apply or to press claims, and by arbitrarily denying benefits to those who are eligible. . . . Widespread campaigns to register the eligible poor for welfare aid, and to help existing recipients obtain their full benefits, would produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments. These disruptions would generate severe political strains, and deepen existing divisions among elements in the big-city Democratic coalition: the remaining white middle class, the white working-class ethnic groups and the growing minority poor. To avoid a further weakening of that historic coalition, a national Democratic administration would be constrained to advance a federal solution to poverty that would override local welfare failures, local class and racial conflicts and local revenue dilemmas. By the internal disruption of local bureaucratic practices, by the furor over public welfare poverty, and by the collapse of current financing arrangements, powerful forces can be generated for major economic reforms at the national level. . . . First, adequate levels of income must be assured. (Public welfare levels are astonishingly low; indeed, states typically define a “minimum” standard of living and then grant only a percentage of it, so that families are held well below what the government itself officially defines as the poverty level.) Furthermore, income should be distributed without requiring that recipients first divest themselves of their assets, as public welfare now does, thereby pauperizing families as a condition of sustenance. Second, the right to income must be guaranteed or the oppression of the welfare poor will not be eliminated. Because benefits are conditional under the present public welfare system, submission to arbitrary governmental power is regularly made the price of sustenance. People have been coerced into attending literacy classes or participating in medical or vocational rebabilitation regimes, on pain of having their benefits terminated. Men are forced into labor on virtually any terms lest they forfeit their welfare aid. One can prize literacy, health and work, while still vigorously opposing the right of government to compel compliance with these values. . . . Ignorance of welfare rights can be attacked through a massive educational campaign. Brochures describing benefits in simple, clear language, and urging people to seek their full entitlements, should be distributed door to door in tenements and public housing projects, and deposited in stores, schools, churches and civic centers. Advertisements should be placed in newspapers; spot announcements should be made on radio. Leaders of social, religious, fraternal and political groups in the slums should also be

“A Strategy to End Poverty” • 145

enlisted to recruit the eligible to the rolls. The fact that the campaign is intended to inform people of their legal rights under a government program, that it is a civic education drive, will lend it legitimacy. But information alone will not suffice. Organizers will have to become advocates in order to deal effectively with improper rejections and terminations. The advocate’s task is to appraise the circumstances of each case, to argue its merits before welfare, to threaten legal action if satisfaction is not given. In some cases, it will be necessary to contest decisions by requesting a “fair hearing” before the appropriate state supervisory agency; it may occasionally be necessary to sue for redress in the courts. Hearings and court actions will require lawyers, many of whom, in cities like New York, can be recruited on a voluntary basis, especially under the banner of a movement to end poverty by a strategy of asserting legal rights. However, most cases will not require an expert knowledge of law, but only of welfare regulations; the rules can be learned by laymen, including welfare recipients themselves (who can help to man “information and advocacy” centers). To aid workers in these centers, handbooks should be prepared describing welfare rights and the tactics to employ in claiming them. Advocacy must be supplemented by organized demonstrations to create a climate of militancy that will overcome the invidious and immobilizing attitudes which many potential recipients hold toward being “on welfare.” In such a climate, many more poor people are likely to become their own advocates and will not need to rely on aid from organizers. . . . Since this plan deals with problems of great immediacy in the lives of the poor, it should motivate some of them to involve themselves in regular organizational activities. Welfare recipients, chiefly ADC mothers, are already forming federations, committees and councils in cities across the nation; in Boston, New York, Newark, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles, to mention a few. Such groups typically focus on obtaining full entitlements for existing recipients rather than on recruiting new recipients, and they do not yet comprise a national movement. But their very existence attests to a growing readiness among ghetto residents to act against public welfare. . . . We ordinarily think of major legislation as taking form only through established electoral processes. We tend to overlook the force of crisis in precipitating, legislative reform, partly because we lack a theoretical framework by which to understand the impact of major disruptions. By crisis, we mean a publicly visible disruption in some institutional sphere. Crisis can occur spontaneously (e.g., riots) or as the intended result of tactics of demonstration and protest which either generate institutional disruption or bring unrecognized disruption to public attention. Public trouble is a political liability; it calls for action by political leaders to stabilize

146 • Welfare in the United States

the situation. Because crisis usually creates or exposes conflict, it threatens to produce cleavages in a political consensus which politicians will ordinarily act to avert. . . . If this strategy for crisis would intensify group cleavages a federal income solution would not further exacerbate them. . . . [L]egislative measures to provide direct income to the poor would permit national Democratic leaders to cultivate ghetto constituencies without unduly antagonizing other urban groups; as is the case when the battle lines are drawn over schools, housing or jobs. Furthermore, a federal income program would not only redeem local governments from the immediate crisis but would permanently relieve them of the financially and politically onerous burdens of public welfare—a function which generates support from none and hostility from many, not least of all welfare recipients. . . .

DOCUMENT

19

TWO DEMOCRATIC SENATORS OFFER ALTERNATE SOLUTIONS TO RISING WELFARE ROLLS (1967) In this exchange during Congressional hearings on the 1967 welfare amendments, liberal Senator Robert Kennedy, a Democrat from Massachusetts, opposes work requirements for AFDC mothers and argues that jobs for poor men would be the best solution to growing welfare rolls. Meanwhile, conservative Senator Russell Long, a Democrat from Louisiana, argues in favor of work requirements for poor single mothers on AFDC. Note, however, that they both agree that AFDC encourages “broken families” and out-of-wedlock births.

US CONGRESS, SENATE, COMMITTEE ON FINANCE, HEARINGS ON H.R. 12080: SOCIAL SECURITY AMENDMENTS OF 1967, NINETIETH CONGRESS, FIRST SESSION, AUGUST 29, 1967 Senator KENNEDY. In the ghetto areas of our country there are just not jobs available. I think it is partially due to the fact that we have emphasized the welfare system for such a long period of time, over the last 30 years, that instead of providing jobs we thought we would keep the poor happy by giving them welfare. Now, we find the cost is too high to pay and too high a burden to carry, not just the financial cost but the cost in human misery because the welfare system also puts a premium on a broken home. So, you have in Harlem Hospital, last year, for example, 50 percent of all the births were illegitimate, but at least a large part of this is because you do not get welfare unless the family is broken. If this man lives in the house, you

148 • Welfare in the United States

do not get welfare any more. If the woman marries she does not get welfare any more. So, I think that system, the way we have handled welfare, is wrong and I think the fact that we have relied solely on welfare instead of providing employment, is wrong. And I think it is wrong, the provision in this bill about compulsory work for welfare mothers. I am all in favor of men working, but I think we have to take some care if a woman has children at home. It may well be better if she does not work, and in any event it is wrong to take her away from her children and start a job training program for a job that might not exist. So I think a good deal of care must be taken by this committee before that provision is accepted. . . . I am all in favor of getting people off welfare. I think that is the only answer. We must take them off welfare and find them jobs and have them go to work and live their lives with their wives and with their children, but that is not the kind of society that we have created here in this country over the period of [the] last several decades. We put the premium on welfare, the premium on the broken family, and we put a premium on neglecting the fact that the man should be head of the family and we put a premium on welfare rather than the provision of jobs and employing people. The CHAIRMAN [LONG]. Well, may I just say that the first responsibility for support of a child, I am sure you will agree, is on the parents. I find no fault with a mother who must apply for welfare assistance because the father of that child could but is not doing anything to help support that child, whether the child is legitimate or illegitimate. I have had the experience of trying to chase those poppas down as a young lawyer. A wife comes and wants to do something about it and about the time I think I have it all fixed up to get some support for the child, then poppa leaves town. It occurs to me that maybe we can help out in this area; maybe we can write up a tax on poppas, particularly those who leave town to avoid the necessity of supporting their children. Senator KENNEDY. It seems to me, if I may say so, Mr. Chairman, that if we had jobs available for people, men could go to work and their wives would not have to go on welfare. . . . Senator MORTON [THURSTON B. MORTON, R-KY]. Senator, one point that you make, and I am glad you emphasized it, has disturbed me for many years and I know it has disturbed members of this committee. And that is that our present welfare program, whether we intend it to do so or not, really does not help the family life but stimulates broken families. Senator KENNEDY. That is correct. Senator MORTON. And as I get it from your study of the House-passed bill, you do not feel that it does anything or very much to improve what we agree has been one of the faults of this program.

Alternate Solutions to Rising Welfare Rolls • 149

Senator KENNEDY. Right. I think, if I may say so, I think it puts a premium on—emphasizes those provisions which have caused the breaking of the family rather than the family unit staying together and the head of the family unit going out and finding a job. Now you get paid much more money, you do much better financially, if you—if the family breaks up or the children are born illegitimate, and the man, the head of the house, does not work and does not stay at home. That is the way you are going to get money from the welfare system and that does not seem to me to make a great deal of sense. Senator MORTON. Of course, our society has changed a lot in its complexity in the last 50 years but I can remember as a child that the family unit in the Negro community, be it rural or be it urban, was a very strong unit, and there was a great feeling of family responsibility. Their resources were extremely meager. This I admit. But it was a very cohesive unit. Senator KENNEDY. Yes. Senator MORTON. When old Aunt Minnie had to quit working and she was a widow, she was taken in by one of the nieces or nephews. Then came the great migrations to the cities. I think many of our programs have discouraged this family feeling that was so really outstanding among Negro families in the South and in the border States—— Senator KENNEDY. Yes. Senator MORTON (continuing). During the early years of the century. Senator KENNEDY. I would agree. . . . The CHAIRMAN. Well, let me say that as between two mothers, I am not the least bit embarrassed to say I regard that mother as a better one who goes to work and brings the family several hundred dollars a month income than one who simply sits there and draws welfare checks and continues to increase the brood, may I say, and asks for bigger and bigger welfare checks while the other is out there working and supporting those children to give them a better chance to live and also to provide better for the family. . . .

DOCUMENT

20

A CHICAGO WELFARE RECIPIENT GROUP PUBLISHES A “WELFARE RIGHTS” HANDBOOK (1960S) In this pamphlet a local welfare rights organization in Chicago, the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization, informs recipients of their rights to special allowances, shows them how their monthly check is calculated, and offers assistance if they encounter a problem. Numerous welfare rights organizations in the 1960s developed handbooks to translate the rules and regulations of welfare into easy to understand language.

YOUR WELFARE RIGHTS People on welfare often do not know what their rights really are. They wonder How do you get on Welfare? How much SHOULD you get? Why are people cut off? Can you have a phone? a washing machine? extra beds? How much can you pay for rent? Many people on Welfare are not getting all they are supposed to get. ARE YOU? TURN THE PAGE and figure it out for yourself! Or bring your question to KOCO WELFARE COMMISSION CALL: 538–1875

“Welfare Rights” Handbook • 151

COME TO: 1058 E. 43rd St. KOCO WILL HELP YOU GET YOUR RIGHTS! (KOCO stands for Kenwood Oakland Community Organization) HOW DO YOU GET ON WELFARE? If you have children under 17 and no way to support them; If you are over 65 years old, or physically disabled, or blind AND If you have lived in Illinois for one year, and If you have no money, no job and no one to support you, YOU CAN GET ON WELFARE. Check the following: 䊐 My budget is figured wrong. 䊐 I should be getting a special allowance for 䊐 I do not have the following furniture: 䊐 I need help, but the Welfare turned me down. 䊐 I would like a KOCO Welfare worker to visit. NAME ____________________ ADDRESS _________________ PHONE ___________________ Bring or mail to: KOCO Welfare Commission 1058 E 43rd Street Chicago 53, Illinois If you are on ADC, here’s how your check is figured: Adult in family of 2 $34.67 " in family of 3 to 7 32.33 " in family of 8 or more 30.37 Child 13 thru 17 in family of 2 $40.66 in family of 3 to 7 38.03 in family of 8 or more 36.27 Child 6 thru 12 in family of 2 $30.66 in family of 3 to 7 28.52 in family of 8 or more 26.86 Baby thru 5 yrs. in family of 2 $21.59 in family of 3 to 7 20.01 in family of 8 or more 19.06 (Above includes allowances for food, clothing, household supplies and personal essentials.) ADD AMOUNT PAID FOR RENT

152 • Welfare in the United States

If you pay your own electricity, add: $3.90 for family of 2 4.30 for family of 3 or 4 4.60 for family of 5 or 6 4.85 for family of 7 or more If you pay your own gas bill, add: $2.10 for family of 2 2.35 for family of 3 or 4 2.60 for family of 5 or 6 3.15 for family of 7 or more HOW TO FIGURE YOUR BUDGET Example: A mother with 3 children, ages 14, 7 and 3 Mother 14 yr. old child 7 yr. old child 4 yr. old child Electricity Gas Rent 9

$32.33 38.03 28.52 20.01 4.30 (if paid direct) 2.35 (if paid direct) 5.00 (whatever amount you pay)

MONTHLY CHECK SHOULD BE $220.54 You may also be eligible for SPECIAL ALLOWANCES for special needs, such as: Laundry (if you have no washing machine and have to use the laundromat) Special Diet (for pregnant mothers or if a doctor puts you on a special diet) Carfare: for children who have to take a bus to school for regular clinic visits for a working parent or teenager $25 a month extra for a parent who is working full time $5 a month extra for each child who is a junior or senior in high school Telephone (if you are employed or for medical reasons) IF YOU ARE WORKING, YOU MAY STILL BE ELIGIBLE FOR AN ADDITIONAL ALLOWANCE, if your earnings are less than your expenses (as figured on opposite page.) If your earnings are under a certain amount. you may be eligible for FREE MEDICAL CARE. FURNITURE: The Welfare Dept. says that every family on Welfare should have the following furniture:

“Welfare Rights” Handbook • 153

Heater Chest of drawers Cook stove Beds Refrigerator Mattresses Table Pillows Chairs Blankets In special cases: Storage cabinet, washing machine, lamps, linoleum.

DOCUMENT

21

A FEMINIST CONGRESSWOMAN SPARS WITH WELFARE RIGHTS ACTIVISTS (1968) During Congressional hearings on income maintenance programs in 1968, Congresswoman Martha Griffiths, a Democrat from Michigan and a selfdescribed feminist, insisted that exempting AFDC mothers from work requirements would confine them to economic dependence. Welfare rights activists agreed that welfare mothers, and women in general, should have greater access to federal job training programs. However, they rejected any mandatory or coercive work requirements. Note the different emphases of George Wiley, executive director of the NWRO, and Beulah Sanders, a single mother and AFDC recipient activist.

US CONGRESS, SUBCOMMITTEE ON FISCAL POLICY OF THE JOINT ECONOMIC COMMITTEE, HEARING ON INCOME MAINTENANCE, NINETIETH CONGRESS, SECOND SESSION, JUNE 12, 1968 Representative GRIFFITHS. To your knowledge, do you know anybody that the welfare department ever got a job for? Mrs. SANDERS. I do not know anybody. Representative GRIFFITHS. Do you know anybody on welfare who was ever contacted by the Labor Department? Mrs. SANDERS. No. Mr. WILEY. Mrs. Griffiths, may I turn that around a minute? Representative GRIFFITHS. Yes. Mr. WILEY. I have some figures from Miss Orshansky’s study of poverty which show that of the female-headed family, 69 percent in 1966 were

Welfare Rights Activists • 155

not in the labor force. Our feeling is that a good number, in fact the vast majority, of the welfare recipients and many of the other people who need income support legitimately should not be in the labor force because they have other important responsibilities at home, to take care of their families. And in some cases, they are disabled or aged, and what not. It is an important question for many people, that they find jobs. But the important thing is that the men, that the people who are able to be heads of households or ought to be legitimate heads of households be the ones that get those jobs. Representative GRIFFITHS. Let me ask you one other question. In the State of New York a family can draw ADC with the father at home? Mr. WILEY. Yes. Representative GRIFFITHS. Now, I regret to say, Mr. Wiley, you are speaking to the most dedicated feminist we have in Congress. I want to point out to you what I think the welfare program does. In the first place, we discovered in Ways and Means [Committee] that the welfare department and the Labor Department were not really attempting to find jobs for people on welfare at all, that if they had their choice between a person who was on welfare and a person who was just out of a job and both were equally qualified, they would simply put on the people who were just out of a job. If you are going to do it this way, you are going to have forever in this country a group of people who are on welfare. Maybe that is all right for the country, but it is not all right for the people on welfare. Those people have a right to participate in the economy of this country. They have just as much right to have a job as anybody else has. You say that this work incentive program [will] be used to force mothers to work. Well, they will have a choice as to which mothers work and which do not. But if you do not say anything about mothers working, then they are going to see to it that none work. They are not going to be given any chance to work. And in my opinion, this is wrong. After we went through all of this in the Ways and Means Committee, [Secretary of the federal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare] Mr. [Wilbur] Cohen called me and told me that they were quite surprised. They had run a survey in New York City and they had discovered that 70 percent of the women drawing welfare in New York City who had families, 70 percent of them wanted to work if they had a place to put their children. And I said to him, well, Mr. Cohen, the other 30 percent did not understand the question or they would have wanted to work, too. Who would not prefer to have a job? But if you give the welfare officials a chance, and the Labor Department, you are going to consign the women to welfare. I just do not think that is

156 • Welfare in the United States

fair. I am a woman, Mr. Wiley, and I know the kinds of discriminations that have been used against women. Mr. WILEY. I work for 5,000 or 6,000 women. Representative GRIFFITHS. I know the discriminations that have been used against women. I am not for just consigning poor women forever to welfare. Mr. WILEY. But the problem is that your law, if you are accepting responsibility for that law—I hope you are not—but your law requires the mother to work. . . . Representative GRIFFITHS. [D]o not work yourself into a position where you are going to come out of this saying that, well, we must give these women the right to stay at home, because it will not be a right. That will be where they will be staying. They will not have a choice, either. They will have to, because the welfare department and the Labor Department are not going to do anything for them. They are not doing much now and they are going to do less if they are given that choice. Now, my time is up. Mrs. SANDERS. Could I say one thing before you go, woman to woman? Representative GRIFFITHS. Yes. Mrs. SANDERS. The fact is, Mrs. Griffiths, that most of us . . . are very concerned about [the Work Incentive Program], because, take for example, me. I have qualifications that can hold down a number of jobs. Representative GRIFFITHS. I am sure you have. Mrs. SANDERS. But the thing is that there is still something lacking, because the Labor Department tells me that: you do not have a college degree. I only have a high school diploma. I was unfortunate. I was not able to go to college. This is what I have against me. This is what a lot of mothers are going to face. One of the things we are concerned about is being forced into these nonexisting positions which might be going out and cleaning Mrs. A’s kitchen. I am not going to do that because I feel I am more valuable and can do something else. This is one of the things these people are worrying about, that they are going to be pushed into doing housework when they can be much more valuable doing something else. But they do not have the training, they do not have the experience, they do not have the college degree. But what they have that is going for them is the nitty-gritty stuff and that is out into the community, mixing with the people, finding out what their problems are, and trying to help solve those problems. Because we all have the same common problem, we are women who are heads of households. We have children, small children that we have no day care facilities for. We have nobody to leave our kids with that we can feel that if we go to work, our kids are going to be taken care of properly. These are the things that we are worried about.

Welfare Rights Activists • 157

Representative GRIFFITHS. I understand. Mrs. SANDERS. The fact that they are talking about giving us counseling, I say to you, Mrs. Griffiths, I don’t need anyone to give me counseling. Our people do not need it. We need concrete programs that if you have to put the people to work, why can’t you give them something that they will be able to get off the welfare completely. . . .

DOCUMENT

22

WELFARE RIGHTS ACTIVISTS PROPOSE A GUARANTEED ANNUAL INCOME (1969)

In 1969, the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) proposed a guaranteed annual income of $5,500 for a family of four. They intended the plan to replace the existing AFDC program. Available to all poor people, regardless of work or family status, the plan had no work requirement but did have a work incentive. NWRO calculated its minimum income using the Bureau of Labor Standard’s Lower Standard Budget.

NWRO’S GUARANTEED ADEQUATE INCOME PLAN NATIONAL WELFARE RIGHTS ORGANIZATION NWRO is launching a nationwide campaign for a GUARANTEED ADEQUATE INCOME for every American citizen. NWRO is challenging the country to change its priorities from an emphasis on death and destruction to an emphasis on life and peace. We believe that every man, woman, and child has the right to live. We call upon our country to begin subsidizing life! The Bureau of Labor Statistics [BLS] of the U.S. Department of Labor says that a family of four needs at least $5500 a year for the basic necessities of life, not counting medical care. We call upon the Federal Government to guarantee every American this minimum income. This income should be automatically adjusted for variations in the size of family, costs of living in various parts of the country, and changes in cost-of-living as they occur.

A Guaranteed Annual Income • 159

Eligibility should be based solely on need and should be based on a person’s declaration of what his needs are, with spot checks as is done under our income tax system. The system should provide a work incentive by permitting recipients to keep 50% of earned income, up to 25% of their grant level. Recipients should be entitled to a fair hearing prior to the termination or reduction of benefits. The hearing should take place within fifteen (15) days of the application for appeal. Special grants should be provided for recipients to obtain lawyers or other advocates. The regulations pertaining to rights and entitlements under this system should be public information. Simplified versions should be distributed to every recipient and potential recipient. Persons eligible for these benefits should be entitled to free medical care, legal services and day care facilities of a high quality in the neighborhoods where they live. Other services to the recipients should be on a completely voluntary basis, administered by agencies separate from those administering the guaranteed income payments. Example of these are family planning, homemaker services, family counseling, child welfare, etc. Special grants should be available to take care of all special or unusual situations. These would include grants for clothing and furniture to bring the recipients’ household up to minimum standards of health and decency at the time they come under the program. Replacement costs would be provided in case of fire, flood, or substantial change in circumstance. A recipient should have the right to choose between a flat grant or an itemized assessment of his needs, taking into account actual cost of housing, transportation, clothing, and other special requirements he might have. This would be similar to the income tax system where an individual may either itemize his deduction, depending on which method of benefits suits him more. The so-called “poverty line” is not an adequate income budget, but a level below which everyone is desperately poor. It is based upon the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s [USDA’s] “economy food plan” on which it is only possible to survive with adequate nutrition for “short emergency periods of time” and only under very special circumstances (Poverty Line income is $3335 for a family of four). The so-called “low income poverty line” is based on the USDA’s “low-cost food plan.” It sets an income of approximately $4400 a year for a family of four. Government surveys show, however, that only 23% of the families with food budgets equivalent to the low-cost food plan actually have nutritionally adequate diets.

160 • Welfare in the United States

The NWRO adequate income budget therefore uses the USDA “moderate food plan” which would insure the average family an adequate diet. NWRO contends that providing an adequate income is the only sure way to combatting hunger in America. The adjusted budget excludes the basic costs of hospital and doctor’s care since it is assumed that free medical care would be available through national health insurance or Medicaid or some other program. It should also be noted that this budget includes no money for cigarettes (regarded by BLS as a health hazard), non prescription drugs or medical supplies, out-of-town travel, long-distance telephone calls, dry cleaning, or use of a laundromat. The budget is based on statistical averages and is subject to 10% to 20% per variations depending on the locality. The range runs from $5209 in most non-metropolitan areas to $6649 for Honolulu. . . . Inflation has caused a 9.4% increase in the cost of living since BLS computed the cost of living in 1967. The NWRO budget has been updated to Spring 1969 prices. The importance of continued recognition of special needs and of providing alternate ways of meeting needs, either through the adequate income (flat grant) or through individual considerations (computations), is important for two reasons: BLS assumed in establishing the budget that the family had been established for fifteen (15) years and had accumulated stock of clothing and furniture. The budget was intended only to cover replacements. This assumption does not apply to the average family in poverty. Thus, special grants for wardrobe and furnishings to bring persons up to minimum standards for health and decency. The budget is based on statistical averaging formulas which do not necessarily apply to real people of real situations. For example, an individual family of four may or may not be able to obtain adequate housing in good condition at $92 a month rent that the budget allows, even if that happens to be the average for the city in which he lives. Similar arguments can be applied to transportation costs, where the transportation quantity for school children in the BLS budget was less than the number of days in the school year! This is because it was an average among children who rode to school and those who walked. It can be assumed that some families would be over in one category and under in another. These statistical differences may not always average out in any given family. If a family has greater need in a number of categories, they should have the option of itemizing their family budget, and applying for a grant that meets the actual needs that they have. . . .

A Guaranteed Annual Income • 161

WELFARE Much has been said and written of the inadequacies of our present welfare system. As we press toward a guaranteed adequate income much can be done to improve the welfare custom now! The following should be implemented immediately: 1. Repeal the compulsory work provisions of the Work Incentive Program. 2. Repeal the Federal freeze on AFDC payments. 3. Repeal the 1967 restrictions on the AFD-IP program and make AFDC-UP mandatory on all states. 4. The principal costs of welfare should be borne by the Federal Government. 5. The Federal Government should set standards of eligibility using financial need as the basic requirement. 6. The Federal Government should require states to provide special grants for clothing, household furnishing, other basic needs to insure that recipients have the minimum standards for health and decency. 7. Retain Medical standards and provisions as originally provided in Title 19 of the Social Security Act. 8. Make welfare payments retroactive to the date of application. 9. Make the declaration methods universal to all categories. 10. Permit recipients access to their own case records. 11. Provide special grants for legal services for appeals and for conduct of fair hearings. 12. Provide for participation of WRO’s in rule making, enforcement of regulations at Federal, state and local levels.

1969 MINIMUM ADEQUACY BUDGET Adjusted BLS Budget* By Family Size Family Size

Year

Budget Month

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

$1,900 3,100 4,300 5,500 6,200 7,200 8,200 9,200

$160 260 360 460 520 600 680 770

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Family Size

Year

Budget Month

9 10 11 12 13

10,200 11,100 12,100 13,100 14,100

850 930 1,000 1,100 1,200

* Computed from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Lower Standard Budget . . . and from the BLS Revised Equivalence Scale “for estimating equivalent incomes or budget costs by family types”.

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23

PRESIDENT RICHARD M. NIXON PROPOSES WELFARE REFORM (1969)

In 1969 Republican President Richard M. Nixon proposed replacing the existing welfare program with a federal program he called the Family Assistance Plan (FAP). FAP had a guaranteed basic minimum income, which was well below the poverty line, and had built-in work requirements. It was a response to the widely held view that the current welfare system was a failure. Here, Nixon bills his proposal as one that would keep families together and aid the working poor.

SPECIAL MESSAGE TO THE CONGRESS WELFARE SYSTEM, AUGUST 11, 1969 By Richard M. Nixon

ON

REFORM

OF THE

NATION’S

. . . The present welfare system has failed us—it has fostered family breakup, has provided very little help in many States and has even deepened dependency by all-too-often making it more attractive to go on welfare than to go to work. I propose a new approach that will make it more attractive to go to work than to go on welfare, and will establish a nationwide minimum payment to dependent families with children. I propose that the Federal government pay a basic income to those American families who cannot care for themselves in whichever State they live. . . . A welfare system is a success when it takes care of people who cannot take care of themselves and when it helps employable people climb toward

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independence. A welfare system is a failure when it takes care of those who can take care of themselves, when it drastically varies payments in different areas, when it breaks up families, when it perpetuates a vicious cycle of dependency, when it strips human beings of their dignity. America’s welfare system is a failure that grows worse every day. First, it fails the recipient: In many areas, benefits are so low that we have hardly begun to take care of the dependent. And there has been no light at the end of poverty’s tunnel. After four years of inflation, the poor have generally become poorer. Second, it fails the taxpayer: Since 1960, welfare costs have doubled and the number on the rolls has risen from 5.8 million to over 9 million, all in a time when unemployment was low. The taxpayer is entitled to expect government to devise a system that will help people lift themselves out of poverty. Finally, it fails American society: By breaking up homes, the present welfare system has added to social unrest and robbed millions of children of the joy of childhood; by widely varying payments among regions, it has helped to draw millions into the slums of our cities. . . . We would assure an income foundation throughout every section of America for all parents who cannot adequately support themselves and their children. For a family of four with less than $1,000 income, this payment would be $1,600 a year; for a family of four with $2,000 income, this payment would supplement that income by $960 a year. . . . The new system would do away with the inequity of very low benefit levels in some States, and of State-by-State variations in eligibility tests, by establishing a Federally-financed income floor with a national definition of basic eligibility. . . . The new plan rejects a policy that undermines family life. It would end the substantial financial incentives to desertion. It would extend eligibility to all dependent families with children, without regard to whether the family is headed by a man or a woman. The effects of these changes upon human behavior would be an increased will to work, the survival of more marriages, the greater stability of families. We are determined to stop passing the cycle of dependency from generation to generation. The most glaring inequity in the old welfare system is the exclusion of families who are working to pull themselves out of poverty. Families headed by a non-worker often receive more from welfare than families headed by a husband working full-time at very low wages. This has been rightly resented by the working poor, for the rewards are just the opposite of what they should be. . . . For people now on the welfare rolls, the present system discourages the move from welfare to work by cutting benefits too fast and too much as

President Nixon Proposes Welfare Reform • 165

earnings begin. The new system would encourage work by allowing the new worker to retain the first $720 of his yearly earnings without any benefit reduction. For people already working, but at poverty wages, the present system often encourages nothing but resentment and an incentive to quit and go on relief where that would pay more than work. The new plan, on the contrary, would provide a supplement that will help a low-wage worker—struggling to make ends meet—achieve a higher standard of living. For an employable person who just chooses not to work, neither the present system nor the one we propose would support him, though both would continue to support other dependent members in his family. However, a welfare mother with preschool children should not face benefit reductions if she decides to stay home. It is not our intent that mothers of pre-school children must accept work. Those who can work and desire to do so, however, should have the opportunity for jobs and job training and access to day care centers for their children; this will enable them to support themselves after their children are grown. . . . The bridge from welfare to work should be buttressed by training and child care programs. For many, the incentives to work in this plan would be all that is necessary. However, there are other situations where these incentives need to be supported by measures that will overcome other barriers to employment. I propose that funds be provided for expanded training and job development programs so that an additional 150,000 welfare recipients can become job worthy during the first year. . . . I am also requesting authority, as a part of the new system, to provide child care for the 450,000 children of the 150,000 current welfare recipients to be trained. . . . The new system will lessen welfare red tape and provide administrative cost savings. To cut out the costly investigations so bitterly resented as “welfare snooping,” the Federal payment will be based upon a certification of income, with spot checks sufficient to prevent abuses. The program will be administered on an automated basis, using the information and technical experience of the Social Security Administration, but, of course, will be entirely separate from the administration of the Social Security trust fund. . . .

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24

A COUNTRY SINGER DECRIES “WELFARE CADILLAC” (1970)

This 1970 Top Ten hit song, written and recorded by Guy Drake, is premised on stereotypes of welfare recipients as undeserving. The song portrays an impoverished father with little incentive to work because of a government check (though in fact few fathers had access to public assistance). The song contrasts hard-working people who pay taxes with welfare recipients who get free commodities and drive brand-new Cadillacs. That same year, President Nixon requested that Johnny Cash perform “Welfare Cadillac” at the White House. Cash refused.

WELFARE CADILLAC By Guy Drake I’ve never worked much, In fact I’ve been poor all my life I guess all I really own Is ten kids and a wife This house I live in is mine But it’s really a shack But I’ve always managed to somehow drive me a brand new Cadillac. The back door steps . . . They done fell plumb down

A Country Singer Decries “Welfare Cadillac” • 167

The front screen door is off and Laying somewhere out there on the ground The wind just now whooped Another piece of that old tar Roofing off the back; I sure hope it don’t Skin up that new Cadillac. The front porch post fell Loose at the bottom It don’t make no sense to fix ’em ’Cause that floor’s just too darn rotten In Winter time we sometimes have some snow That blows in through the cracks If it gets too bad we all just pile up And sleep out there in that new Cadillac. I know the place ain’t much But I sure don’t pay no rent I get a check the first of every month From this here Federal Goverment Every Wednesday I get commodities Sometimes four or five sacks Pick ’em up down at the Welfare Office Driving that new Cadillac. Some folks say I’m crazy And I’ve even been called a fool But my kids get free books and All them there free lunches at school We get peanut butter and cheese And man, they give us flour by the sack ’Course them Welfare Checks They meet the payments on this new Cadillac. Now the way that I see it These other folk are the fools They’re working and paying taxes Just to send my young’uns through school The Salvation Army cuts their hair and Gives them clothes to wear on their backs So we can dress up and ride around And show off this new Cadillac.

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But things are still gonna get better yet At least that’s what I understand They tell me this new President Has put in a whole new poverty plan He’s gonna send us poor folks money They say we’re gonna get it out here in sacks In fact, my wife’s already shopping around For her new Cadillac.

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25

A POPULAR PERIODICAL REPORTS ON THE “WELFARE CRISIS” (1971)

This article appeared in U.S. News and World Report in February 1971 and was typical of popular treatments of the “welfare crisis” in the early 1970s. Its authors enumerate various criticisms of AFDC and briefly describe Nixon’s evolving approach to welfare reform as well as alternative proposals from liberal Democrats and from conservatives.

WELFARE OUT OF CONTROL— STORY OF FINANCIAL CRISIS CITIES FACE Government spending on the “welfare state” in America has finally reached a point where it is threatening to bankrupt the States and cities, and to drain the U.S. Treasury with chronic federal deficits for as far ahead as the budget planners can see. Many Governors and mayors regard the soaring costs of the publicassistance and medical programs as the most crucial domestic problem in the nation today. State and local officials say the open-end benefits that are mandated by law under the welfare program are forcing a cutback in other vital services, such as public safety, education and transportation. Adding to the taxpayers’ burden are a number of related Government-aid programs for the underprivileged, including such things as food stamps, job training, public housing, rent supplements, “model cities,” communityaction projects, legal services for the poor, neighborhood health centers and other elements of the “war on poverty.”

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Add up all the various programs of welfare, social security, health and medical programs, veterans’ benefits, education and housing, and an analysis by the Economic Unit of “U.S. News & World Report” indicates this: Social-welfare spending of all kinds by all levels of government this year is likely to top 160 billion dollars—and by 1972 more than half of all the money American taxpayers contribute will be going for such purposes. Yet there is little evidence that heavy spending of the past has served to raise the educational level of the poor people in the central cities or to lift the underprivileged out of a dependency status and bring them into the mainstream of the economic system where they can contribute to the productivity and wealth of the nation. On the contrary, experience of the recent past indicates that there is a stampede to get on a government dole and to demand even more government aid as a matter of “legal right.” Second, third and even fourth generations of welfare families in this country are living on relief as a permanent way of life. President Nixon, in his state-of-the-union message on January 22, declared: “The present welfare system has become a monstrous, continuing outrage against the community, against the taxpayer, and particularly against the children it is supposed to help.” Now President Nixon is trying once again to change this system. He has served notice that he will submit to the new Congress a “workfare” plan somewhat similar to the one that died in the last Congress. . . . Another bitter battle over welfare reform is foreseen in the congressional session now beginning. Pressures for reform, however, are mounting. Governors and mayors are crying out to Washington for financial help. Governor Ronald Reagan of California, in his 1971 message to the State legislature, called the welfare program “a cancer eating at our vitals.” He called for a complete overhaul of the welfare system to eliminate waste and “the impropriety of subsidizing those whose greed is greater than their need.” . . . In New York City—financial center of the nation—Mayor John V. Lindsay is facing a deficit of 300 million dollars in this year’s 7.7-billiondollar operating budget, with a billion-dollar shortage in sight for next year. One out of every six persons in New York City is now on relief. Mr. Lindsay is proposing to sue the federal and State governments to strike down spending mandates in social-welfare programs. . . . The financial crisis in these big States and cities is symptomatic of what is happening all over the country, as the skyrocketing costs come home to the taxpayers from a host of social-welfare programs voted by Congress.

Reports on the “Welfare Crisis” • 171

Most of them were launched in a crusade against poverty during the “Great Society” era of the Johnson Administration. . . . Now, the mounting costs of welfare programs are raising the hackles of the working class—the home owners and wage earners who carry the main burden of property and sales and income taxes at every level of government. Many middle-class workers complain that their standard of living is being whittled away by rising taxes and consumer prices. They blame much of this on government spending on the welfare class, and on the creation of large governmental bureaucracies serving a growing number of special interests. . . . There is no quarrel over such welfare programs as aid to the aged and the blind. Aid to the disabled also is largely noncontroversial, except for recent regulations which have lowered the standards of what constitutes the kind of disability that entitles a person to lifetime government support. The big controversy—in Congress and among the public—is focused on Aid to Families With Dependent Children. AFDC has mushroomed into a monster program that accounts for more than two thirds of all people receiving public assistance. In mid-1960 there were 3 million AFDC recipients. Today there are more than 9 million. And costs have skyrocketed from 621 million dollars in 1955 to 4.1 billion in 1970. The proportion of children in fatherless homes—where the father has deserted or the children were born out of wedlock—has jumped from 60 to 80 per cent of all AFDC children in the last few years. Few States make much of an effort to trace missing fathers or to hold them legally responsible for child support. Critics claim this amounts to a “baby bonus,” which encourages illegitimacy among those who are least equipped to bring up children. . . . A big factor in New York’s welfare spiral is “desertion”—either the husband leaves home or his wife claims that he does. Another big factor is illegitimacy. A recent study showed that 60 per cent of all out-of-wedlock births in New York are taking place among women on welfare. “Desertion” and illegitimacy together account for 7 out of every 10 applicants for relief in New York. Social workers call this “fiscal abandonment,” for the purpose of getting more welfare money. “The fact is,” said one authority, “in many cases, the father never really deserts. He just stays out of sight so the woman can get on AFDC rolls. In slum areas, everyone knows this goes on. It is widespread in New York City.” The State of Michigan recently appropriated a million dollars to contract with local lawyers for aid in locating missing fathers of welfare children. In one county alone, it was found that child-support orders had been issued by the court in 625 AFDC cases, where more than a million dollars in support payments remained uncollected. . . .

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Cheating by welfare recipients has been charged in many areas. . . . In California, a group of San Francisco Bay area residents—all fully employed—conducted an experiment to prove to county supervisors how easy it is to get on relief. They traveled the circuit of welfare offices, applying for and getting on welfare, usually without even furnishing identification. Governor Reagan said that “one managed to get on welfare four times under four different names in one day—all at the same office.” . . . During the 1968 campaign, Richard Nixon declared that he was opposed to a guaranteed annual income, whether it be called a “family allowance” or a “negative income tax.” Mr. Nixon said he was convinced that it “would not end poverty,” and that it would have “a very detrimental effect on the productive capacity of the American people.” After becoming President, however, in a message to Congress on Aug. 11, 1969, Mr. Nixon called for a welfare-reform program with “a nationwide minimum payment to dependent families with children,” including federal payments to supplement the income of the “working poor.” . . . In his recent state-of-the-union message, the President urged Congress: “Let us place a floor under the income of every family with children in America. . . . But let us also establish an effective work incentive and an effective work requirement.” Mr. Nixon has described his welfare plan as “the most important piece of social legislation in our nation’s history.” HEW Secretary Elliot Richardson said “the heart of the reform” is the extension of public assistance to the “working poor” for the first time. . . . In its latest version, officials say the Administration welfare plan would do these things: • Separate the three adult categories of assistance—the aged, the blind and the disabled—from the AFDC program, putting them under the Social Security Administration. Their monthly minimum benefits would be raised to $130. • Abolish the controversial AFDC program, and establish a new system of family-assistance payments to be handled by a new bureau in HEW to be called the Family Assistance Agency. The Federal Government would take over administration and income payments from the States and cities, including determinations of eligibility. Applicants could obtain aid upon filing a simple declaration of need. . . . • Establish a stronger “work requirement” of a yet unspecified nature. Varying estimates have been made of what the costs and case load might be under the new Nixon proposal.

Reports on the “Welfare Crisis” • 173

The original Administration estimate in 1969 was that the Family Assistance Plan would more than double the number of persons on relief— from 10 to 24 million—and add 4.4 billion dollars to current costs. Later estimates are much higher. . . . “Liberal” Democrats are proposing to raise the ante in the Administration’s Family Assistance Plan to a $5,400-a-year minimum demanded by the National Welfare Rights Organization. The Administration estimates that this would cost 40 billion dollars a year. . . . A bipartisan group of “conservatives” in the Senate will try to cut back the existing welfare and medicaid programs to eliminate frauds and abuses, restoring a one-year residency requirement for getting on welfare and the “man in the house” rule, and making it more difficult for fathers to evade child support. Whoever wins in the congressional battle ahead, this seems clear: The welfare program has reached a critical point.

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26

A BUSINESS LEADER URGES A SHIFT IN WELFARE POLICIES (1971)

In this speech at the annual meeting of the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce, the Chamber’s national president, Archie Davis, blames “welfarism” for the nation’s economic problems and urges business leaders to fight the Nixon administration’s welfare reform plan. Davis insists that AFDC (rather than the nation’s failure to aid two-parent families, or the “working poor”) is the nation’s primary welfare “problem” and argues that Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan would have a number of detrimental effects. Although Davis offers an alternative welfare reform model centered on training AFDC mothers for jobs, the Chamber consistently opposed increased federal funding for job training and child care.

WELFARE REFORM: TIME TO DO IT RIGHT By Archie K. Davis [T]his country of ours, without question and in a very positive way, is deeply in trouble. . . . The postwar era of total American industrial and technological supremacy has ended. We now live in an age of intensifying international competition, but we have continued to behave, in many ways, as if nothing has changed. . . . In a relative sense, other parts of the world were positioning themselves to move ahead of us. We could no longer afford the illusion of unchallengeable supremacy; that day had long passed, and yet there were . . . and still are

A Shift in Welfare Policies • 175

. . . those among us who seem to think we still have unlimited resources, that the law of supply and demand, a desire to work, competitive efficiency in production, and financial responsibility really don’t apply to us. The irony of the moment is why this great nation of ours, at a time when its world leadership is seriously challenged, is so preoccupied with welfarism that it has been neglecting the basic ingredients of economic opportunity. . . . “Welfare” today comprises four major income-maintenance or incomesupplement programs. . . . There are really no problems with the first three of these programs—aid to the aged, the blind and the disabled. The numbers of recipients in these categories have remained fairly stable over the years. There is no alarming growth trend, nor is there any argument about the justification for aid. These unfortunate citizens are unable to work through no fault of their own. Our society can care for them, and simple compassion demands that we do so. . . . The entire welfare problem is associated with the fourth category of aid— Aid to Families with Dependent Children. AFDC began modestly enough in the 1930’s, as a federal supplement to state widow’s pensions. It has since become a monster that seems to feed and grow larger on every attempt to reduce its size. By the beginning of this year, there were nearly 10 million people on AFDC rolls. The typical AFDC family has three children, one adult. Most live in big cities. Half the families are white, half black. In three cases out of four, the father is absent. Two out of five families include illegitimate children. From the early 1950’s to 1970, the average monthly benefit of AFDC families more than doubled. Throughout these same years, the number of welfare workers has increased 50 percent faster than the number of welfare recipients. . . . The result is almost incredible: The AFDC rolls increased by nearly 300 percent during the most affluent period in this nation’s history. In the last ten years alone, the cost of AFDC benefits has gone up nearly 500 percent, to $4.85 billion for 1970. . . . H.R. 1 [the Family Assistance Plan] attempts to meet this problem by permitting the welfare recipient to keep some of his welfare check even after getting a job. As the bill now stands, the government would provide a minimum of $2,400 a year for a family of four with no income, and would pay benefits on a decreasing scale until a family’s earned income reached $4,320. That means the government would be paying money to those with low-paying jobs as well as to those without jobs. . . . What . . . might be the net effect of the kind of welfare program embodied in H.R. 1? It could expand dramatically the numbers on welfare in our

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nation, reduce significantly the amount of work performed, and raise ominously the taxes ordinary Americans may have to pay in order to finance a huge underclass of nonworkers and part-time workers who will have, with government approval, a vested interest in steadily increasing the level of income guarantee in the years ahead. . . . [S]uch an expansion of the welfare state would threaten the middle class family with continued chronic inflation, just when the country is at last trying to come to grips with that danger. . . . The National Chamber is urging the Administration and Congress to develop a continuing new program which recognizes (1) that most AFDC families are on welfare because they have lost their regular breadwinner, and (2) that the long-range solution must be found in helping the family adult— in most cases, a mother—become a regular breadwinner. This new program must emphasize occupational rehabilitation, and operate at the community level in our 130 larger cities (where the majority of AFDC families live). The goal must be to train able-bodied adults now on AFDC and to get them into jobs. This can be done by: • Identifying the manpower potential of AFDC adults in each of these communities. • Developing priorities among these adults for referral to job training. • Making expanded child care facilities available, so that AFDC mothers can take job-training and subsequent jobs. • Identifying shortages of qualified workers for entry-level jobs—on a continuing basis, through such methods as the Job Bank. • Providing adequate training allowances. • Continuing some welfare for a period of time; for about one year of regular full-time employment, to facilitate debt repayment and help overcome the uncertainties of initial job success. Solution of the AFDC problem must be given top priority in any welfare reform. . . . Business leadership will still be sorely needed to combat with all the vigor at its command the potentially disastrous effects of a guaranteed income. Every businessman in this country, who cares about the social values which have made this nation great, should urge his senators to defer H.R. 1 not just for a year, but forever. Then let’s get busy and find a real solution to the welfare problem. We in the National Chamber intend to do all we can, and we need your help.

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27

JOHNNIE TILLMON ARGUES THAT “WELFARE IS A WOMEN’S ISSUE” (1972)

In this article Johnnie Tillmon, first chairperson and later executive director of NWRO (and an AFDC recipient herself), makes a case for why welfare is a women’s issue. She posits a racial and gendered analysis of the welfare system and argues that AFDC controlled and regulated the sexuality and lives of women. The publication of this article in Ms. magazine symbolizes the culmination of a struggle within the welfare rights movement to define welfare as a women’s issue and the welfare rights movement as part of the larger women’s movement.

WELFARE IS A WOMEN’S ISSUE By Johnnie Tillmon I’m a woman. I’m a black woman. I’m a poor woman. I’m a fat woman. I’m a middle-aged woman. And I’m on welfare. In this country, if you’re any one of those things you count less as a human being. If you’re all those things, you don’t count at all. Except as a statistic. I am 45 years old. I have raised six children. There are millions of statistics like me. Some on welfare. Some not. And some, really poor, who don’t even know they’re entitled to welfare. Not all of them are black. Not at all. In fact, the majority—about two-thirds—of all the poor families in the country are white. Welfare’s like a traffic accident. It can happen to anybody, but especially it happens to women.

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And that’s why welfare is a women’s issue. For a lot of middle-class women in this country, Women’s Liberation is a matter of concern. For women on welfare it’s a matter of survival. Survival. That’s why we had to go on welfare. And that’s why we can’t get off welfare now. Not us women. Not until we do something about liberating poor women in this country. Because up until now we’ve been raised to expect to work, all our lives, for nothing. Because we are the worst-educated, the least-skilled, and the lowest-paid people there are. Because we have to be almost totally responsible for our children. Because we are regarded by everybody as dependents. That’s why we are on welfare. And that’s why we stay on it. Welfare is the most prejudiced institution in this country, even more than marriage, which it tries to imitate. Let me explain that a little. Ninety-nine percent of welfare families are headed by women. There is no man around. In half the states there can’t be men around because A.F.D.C. (Aid to Families With Dependent Children) says if there is an “ablebodied” man around, then you can’t be on welfare. If the kids are going to eat, and the man can’t get a job, then he’s got to go. Welfare is like a super-sexist marriage. You trade in a man for the man. But you can’t divorce him if he treats you bad. He can divorce you, of course, cut you off anytime he wants. But in that case, he keeps the kids, not you.The man runs everything. In ordinary marriage, sex is supposed to be for your husband. On A.F.D.C., you’re not supposed to have any sex at all. You give up control of your own body. It’s a condition of aid. You may even have to agree to get your tubes tied so you can never have more children just to avoid being cut off welfare. The man, the welfare system, controls your money. He tells you what to buy, what not to buy, where to buy it, and how much things cost. If things— rent, for instance—really cost more than he says they do, it’s just too bad for you. He’s always right. That’s why Governor [Ronald] Reagan can get away with slandering welfare recipients, calling them “lazy parasites,” “pigs at the trough,” and such. We’ve been trained to believe that the only reason people are on welfare is because there’s something wrong with their character. If people have “motivation,” if people only want to work, they can, and they will be able to support themselves and their kids in decency. The truth is a job doesn’t necessarily mean an adequate income. There are some ten million jobs that now pay less than the minimum wage, and if you’re a woman, you’ve got the best chance of getting one. Why would a 45year-old woman work all day in a laundry ironing shirts at 90-some cents an hour? Because she knows there’s some place lower she could be. She could be on welfare. Society needs women on welfare as “examples” to let every

“Welfare is a Women’s Issue” • 179

woman, factory workers and housewife workers alike, know what will happen if she lets up, if she’s laid off, if she tries to go it alone without a man. So these ladies stay on their feet or on their knees all their lives instead of asking why they’re only getting 90-some cents an hour, instead of daring to fight and complain. Maybe we poor welfare women will really liberate women in this country. We’ve already started on our own welfare plan. Along with other welfare recipients, we have organized so we can have some voice. Our group is called the National Welfare Rights Organization (N.W.R.O.). We put together our own welfare plan, called Guaranteed Adequate Income (G.A.I.), which would eliminate sexism from welfare. There would be no “categories”— men, women, children, single, married, kids, no kids—just poor people who need aid. You’d get paid according to need and family size only and that would be upped as the cost of living goes up. As far as I’m concerned, the ladies of N.W.R.O. are the front-line troops of women’s freedom. Both because we have so few illusions and because our issues are so important to all women—the right to a living wage for women’s work, the right to life itself.

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28

A FEMINIST CRITICIZES FEDERAL ANTIPOVERTY POLICIES (CA. 1972)

Merrillee A. Dolan of Albuquerque, New Mexico, chaired the National Organization for Women’s Task Force on Women and Poverty in the early 1970s. In this essay from that period, she critiques the 1965 Moynihan Report and argues that its premises—particularly its idealization of male breadwinning and female dependence—continue to shape federal antipoverty and welfare policy, including the Nixon administration’s welfare reform proposals.

MOYNIHAN, POVERTY PROGRAMS, AND WOMEN—A FEMALE VIEWPOINT By Merrillee A. Dolan . . . Government policy is now focusing on “bolstering” the family. Emphasis is on providing jobs and job training for men. The assumption is that women should be forced into family relationships, and this can be accomplished if they must find a man in order to obtain economic support. Policy has never focused on aiding the woman to become independent and able to earn a decent living. The assumption remains that if she has anything to do with a man she should be capable of getting support from him. . . . Never has the woman been considered human enough to make her own decisions about how and with whom she shall live (and sleep). Never has she been given any freedom in governing her own life or earning a living in a respectable manner. Thus, women are again getting the shaft—this time by

A Feminist Criticizes Federal Antipoverty Policies • 181

the Nixon Administration which has not won any fame for humanitarian concerns. The ideas of Daniel P. Moynihan are behind every poverty program of the Nixon Administration. Moynihan was an advisor to Nixon, and he is chief architect of the proposed Family Assistance Plan (FAP). He put forth his ideas in a report called “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” (Document 17). His ideas are so damaging to women that they bear close examination. . . . His entire report is a strong statement on the desirability of patriarchy. It is a plea for the government’s poverty policies to strengthen the patriarchal system and leave women to the mercy of a man’s economic support. . . . One would think that Moynihan could see that the problem of poverty is very much a problem of women being unable to earn a decent living, but Moynihan does not concern himself with this aspect of poverty. He does not even include any charts or discuss the unemployment rate among women, nor does he discuss the wages women on welfare are able to earn. In his own words, he showed “a clear relation between male unemployment . . . and the number of welfare dependent children.” . . . Moynihan accepts the idea that women should not work outside the home. He says that when unemployment hits a family and the wife enters the labor force, “the father is no longer the provider and the elder children become resentful.” It is amazing that it never occurred to Moynihan that what the children might resent is poverty rather than the fact of their mother working. Every child who has experienced the slightest bit of poverty can tell how humiliating it is. There is absolutely no evidence that children resent their mothers working per se. There is every kind of evidence, however, that children and adults alike resent poverty. . . . Moynihan perpetuates the vicious myth that welfare mothers are immoral. The primary charge against them is that all they do is “lay” around and have “illegitimate” children. Moynihan includes charts showing that the percentage of “nonwhite illegitimate” births coincided with low incomes and high unemployment rates. Perhaps it is true that illegitimacy rates coincide with poverty. Obviously if a person is poor it is difficult to obtain a divorce which people with money have more chance of obtaining. Furthermore, birth control is obtained according to economic status. And it should not be overlooked that women with money are more likely to be able to get abortions to prevent “illegitimate” births. Furthermore, “illegitimate” children are not readily accepted in middle class value systems. . . . What should be questioned, however, is the very concept of “illegitimacy.” The term itself degrades both women and children who are not the property of a man. It is a vestige of ancient customs to be so insensitive as to consider any human child not legitimate. It means they are not sanctioned by law or

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custom. Needless to say the concept works a terrible hardship on millions of women, many of whom seek abortions or adopt out their children to avoid the stigma of having an “illegal” child. Moynihan believes that a child which is not “legal” or “legitimate” is less likely to succeed in society by mere virtue of her legal status. Obviously, however, it is not the legal status on a piece of paper which makes or breaks a child. It is social attitudes toward the child and certainly economic status. The entire concept of “illegitimacy” should be abandoned. . . . Moynihan discusses “broken homes” and includes a chart indicating that “One Third of Nonwhite Children Live in Broken Homes.” The assumption that a home without a father is “broken” implies a moralistic value judgement that the home is necessarily bad, and that it is only “whole” when a father is there. One would think a sociologist would be a little more careful about using such value judgements, especially such questionable ones. Certainly any observer of white children emerging from middle class American families must question the desirability of the white nuclear family. It is obvious that plenty of these children question it. They seem to be saying that all is not lovely and “stable” even if daddy is bringing in the bread and mommie is staying home waiting on daddy and the kids. . . . Moynihan assumed that women do not want to work. Obviously, no one wants to or should be forced to work at a dull and difficult job for low pay. But the National Welfare Rights Organization says that a study conducted by the City University of New York called “Families on Welfare in New York City” showed women want to work. When asked, “Would you prefer to work for pay or stay home?” seven out of ten mothers on welfare replied they would prefer to work. However, merely providing “jobs” will not end the need for some form of financial assistance since 85% of all welfare recipients are children, the elderly, disabled, blind or too sick to work. THE REMAINING 15% ARE NEARLY ALL WOMEN LEFT TO SUPPORT THEIR CHILDREN. Lack of adequate child care facilities and decent jobs are their major problem. . . . [T]he sort of job training now in effect or that which only helps men will not help welfare women. The National Welfare Rights Organization says a study of recipients involved in job training programs indicates that the training offered did not enable large numbers of trainees to become selfsufficient. Most often, recipients are sent to short term training programs rather than longer educational ones that enable them to qualify for higher paying jobs and get off welfare. Furthermore, in thirty-six states responding to a government survey of 21,300 mothers enrolled in Work Incentive Program (WIN—put into effect by the Nixon Administration and influenced by Moynihan’s ideas), 4,600 could not be referred to work or job training SOLELY BECAUSE THEY LACKED ADEQUATE CHILD CARE

A Feminist Criticizes Federal Antipoverty Policies • 183

ARRANGEMENTS. Thirty-seven percent of the children under six and thirty percent of the children over six who needed child care so their mothers could work lacked it. Rather than pus[h] the government to establish adequate child care centers, Moynihan would prefer to avoid this expensive proposition and force women to compete for mates—no matter what their personal preference. . . . [G]overnment leaders, including the advisor, Moynihan, have said and are saying nothing about making educational programs available to those who need and want them. Moynihan was interested in publishing a fancy study skirting all the real issues, making women the scapegoat for poverty, and offering impossible and totalitarian “solutions.” (Government meddling in women’s lives to try to force them to hook male “breadwinners” is certainly totalitarian, even if it is done through economic coercion measures.) . . . Rather than focus on the real reason for poverty—an unwillingness to end it—Moynihan clouds the issue with implications that women caused the problems by being too strong. Just as Eve was created and blamed by some male story teller for the downfall of mankind, so Moynihan blames women for poverty and high delinquency rates, and so on. His is a convenient means of taking the blame off of racism and an exploitative economic system. Women did it. Nothing has changed where women are concerned since the first tales about them were told and later recorded. . . . Early in the 1960’s, local welfare groups had sprung up spontaneously, and Johnnie Tillmon had started a group in her Watts housing project in 1963. One wonders if Moynihan was getting nervous from the sight of strong women organizing and demanding their rights. Perhaps Moynihan set out to quiet these women who meant business. If he could force them into the middle class family situation, isolated from one another, he would be successful. . . . Most certainly the problems of the United States are the problems inherent in patriarchal societies. The basic strength of a patriarchal society is its economic hold over its female subjects. The position of women in patriarchy will not change as long as they are held in economic dependence. Their relation to the economy is that they are profit makers for others— through selling their bodies and their labor at cheap prices. . . .

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A CARTOONIST DEPICTS AFDC AS UNFAIR TO WAGE-EARNING MOTHERS (1973)

This cartoon appeared in Business Week on April 3, 1973. It contrasts a “welfare mother,” with several children and a shopping cart full of various “welfare benefits,” to a “working mother,” whose paycheck seems meager in comparison. As the cartoon suggests, during the 1970s, many critics painted AFDC as an unfair privilege, enabling poor single mothers to devote themselves to full-time caregiving even as married mothers were forced into the labor market by rising costs and stagnant wages.

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A FEMINIST ORGANIZATION URGES WORK-BASED SOLUTIONS TO WOMEN’S POVERTY (1977) In October 1977, Lupe Anguiano testified before Congress about President Carter’s welfare reform proposal. Representing the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC), Anguiano drew on her experiences living and working with AFDC families in San Antonio, Texas. As her testimony suggests, the NWPC supported Carter’s emphasis on employment as an alternative to welfare but demanded policies that provided the well-paid jobs and support services that would bring poor single mothers out of poverty.

US CONGRESS, HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, SUBCOMMITTEE ON WELFARE REFORM OF THE COMMITTEE ON AGRICULTURE, HEARINGS ON H.R. 9030: THE ADMINISTRATION’S WELFARE REFORM PROPOSAL, NINETY-FIFTH CONGRESS, FIRST SESSION, OCTOBER 31, 1977 . . . At our National Convention September 11, 1977, in San Jose, California, the National Women’s Political Caucus expressed support for the overall goals and objectives of President Carter’s Welfare Reform proposal. We support the concept of a program that places heavy emphasis on job opportunities and self-support opportunities. We specifically support the creation of a single coordinated program that would guarantee basic income support to poor or low-income working and non-working citizens. . . . The National Women’s Political Caucus has made Welfare Reform one of its priority issues because welfare is an issue which deeply affects women. The American people, I feel, have no quarrel with providing an adequate livelihood for the disabled, handicapped, elderly and for abandoned children. Of national controversy is the A.F.D.C. (Aid to Families with

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Dependent Children) Welfare Program—or the SINGLE PARENT FAMILY as it is called in H.R. 9030—a program which serves predominately women and their children. More than 90% of single parent families on the current A.F.D.C. Welfare Program are headed by women. Roughly speaking, about 45% of these women are young, healthy, and intelligent, but trapped in a cycle of poverty because A.F.D.C. does not offer opportunities for the female head of the family to become self-supporting. A large number are minority women. . . . For the record, I’d like to elaborate on a few of the many personal experiences I’ve had living, working with and assisting women heads of household on A.F.D.C. to become self-supporting. I started this Welfare Project by living in the San Antonio Housing Projects with families headed by women on A.F.D.C. The first pinch of poverty I experienced was running out of food after the third week of the month (in Texas an A.F.D.C. family of four receives $140.00 each month). I often accompanied the women to a visit to the doctor, to a food stamp office or to a visit to the Department of Public Welfare. Finding transportation was the first problem. Having very little or no money, but trying to find a baby sitter to stay with the younger children or having someone stay at home to wait for the children when they came home from school was another problem. Waiting in line in the welfare office or the doctor’s office or the food stamp line was another problem. Trying to deal with attorneys who insisted that the women should know where the father of her children lived—then the women fearing a beating by the husband if she did tell where he could be found was another problem. . . . As we discussed solutions to these many problems, the woman would express more criticisms of the existing welfare system than does the publi[c] at large. To them the welfare system is beyond repair—the only solution they found was to find a way to get out of welfare. . . . The women and I announced a “Get Off Welfare Campaign”, and our first program effort was to find employment for the women. I did an assessment of the talents and skills which the women possessed. I found that they had many talents and skills which they were using as volunteer workers; for example, raising money for the church (organizing all the carnivals), they were excellent volunteer teacher aids helping teachers in the classroom and playground, they were all great social workers, helping many families in the housing projects—they had excellent referral lists. Why shouldn’t they get paid for these services? Scholarship assistance was given to the women by the San Antonio Kiwanis Club to help them attend a San Antonio Junior College “Cash Register” course. Thirty-eight women registered for the course. All but two members graduated with honors and perfect attendance. The teachers were

Work-based Solutions to Women’s Poverty • 187

surprised at what they called the high motivation of the women. In response to their question of what we had done, we told them we had simply provided transportation and helped arrange child care. Other women learned to type and to drive a car. In all, we helped 500 women find their way off the welfare rolls. About 300 women completed a Nurses’ Aide program. The motivation gained by successfully completing these courses had a major impact on the attitudes of the women. . . . I have examined the status of the women in the Nurses’ Aide jobs and I found that they are no better off economically than when they were on welfare. The women are paid minimum wages—$2.10 to $2.30 an hour. Their salary does not cover the cost of transportation to and from work or for necessary child care and medical expenses (which many times are as high as food bills). As a result, I found women were leaving their children alone at home at night, since many of the women were given night shifts. Still the women remained in these jobs—why? They felt freer, more productive and less oppressed [than] when they were on welfare. Perhaps the most serious outcome of this situation is that the women are not able to improve their employment skills because they are faced with bare, survival wages which trap them in the poverty cycle, a condition which does not allow them mobility or resources to improve their economic status. I cannot describe the extreme frustration of this experience. . . . WE HAD GREAT DIFFICULTY HELPING JOB DEVELOPERS SEE THAT CHILDREN RAISED BY WOMEN HAVE THE SAME NEEDS AS THOSE RAISED BY MEN. THAT WOMEN HAVE TO PAY THE SAME PRICES THAT MEN DO FOR THE NECESSITIES OF LIFE.

We found that 86% of the WIN program administrators were retired military men who had little or no training in dealing with women heads of households. They would spend more time with the business community seeking job openings than they did preparing the women for adequate employment. I had great difficulty discussing with them the necessity of training women for non-traditional jobs for example. . . . I AM CONVINCED THAT THE SOLUTION TO RESOLVING THE MANY A.F.D.C. PROGRAM PROBLEMS IS BASICALLY TO ASSIST WOMEN HEADS OF FAMILY BECOME ECONOMICALLY SELFSUFFICIENT SO THAT SHE MAY BE ABLE TO SUPPORT HER FAMILY WITH DIGNITY AND RESPECT. IN OTHER WORDS, I THINK IT HAS BEEN A MISTAKE TO FOCUS A NATIONAL PROGRAM ON PROVIDING SERVICES ONLY TO CHILDREN WHILE IGNORING THE ECONOMIC STABILITY, THROUGH EMPLOYMENT AND

188 • Welfare in the United States EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES, OF THE FAMILY HEAD WHO SHOULD BE THE FAMILY PROVIDER. . . .

We believe that the jobs component in H.R. 9030 is extremely inadequate in helping women heads of households become self-supporting. Minimum wage jobs, even when accompanied by a federal subsidy which is phased out when a family of four reaches an income of $8,400.00 does not sufficiently unlock a family from the poverty cycle. We believe that this bill must make it financially possible for a working woman head of family to pay for whatever form of child care she chooses. Therefore, we recommend that the cost of child care be totally disregarded from a woman’s income if it costs her $50.00 or whatever amount per week to purchase satisfactory child care for her children.

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RONALD REAGAN CRITICIZES “WELFARE QUEENS” (1976)

As the Washington Star reported, in the 1976 presidential primary, candidate Ronald Reagan, former Governor of California, repeatedly referred to a woman in Chicago, Linda Taylor, who had been accused of welfare fraud, as the “Welfare Queen.” Although Reagan greatly exaggerated the facts of the case, he made this a centerpiece of his campaign. In the process, he popularized the use of the term “Welfare Queen” and helped establish and reinforce associations between welfare and cheating in the public discourse.

‘WELFARE QUEEN’ BECOMES ISSUE IN REAGAN CAMPAIGN WASHINGTON, Feb. 14—Few people realize it, but Linda Taylor, a 47-yearold Chicago welfare recipient, has become a major campaign issue in the New Hampshire Republican Presidential primary. Former Gov. Ronald Reagan of California has referred to her at nearly every stop, using her as part of his “citizens’ press conference” format. “There’s a woman in Chicago,” the Republican candidate said recently to an audience in Gilford, N.H., during his free-swinging attack on welfare abuses. “She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veterans’ benefits on four nonexisting deceased husbands.” He added: “And she’s collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income alone is over $150,000.”

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HITTING A NERVE Mr. Reagan never mentions the woman by name. But the effect is the same wherever he goes. During his second campaign swing through the state last month, for example, he startled people in Dublin and Jaffrey and Peterborough and Salem and in all the other little towns where he appeared. They were angry at “welfare chislers.” Mr. Reagan had hit a nerve. The problem is that the story does not quite check out. According to the welfare authorities in Illinois, Mr. Reagan has based his anecdotes on newspaper accounts of Miss Taylor, who became known in the headlines as the “welfare queen” after sensational disclosures about her case were made by state Senator Don A. Moore, chairman of a committee that has been investigating alleged welfare abuses. A spokesman for the committee said the story was not quite as exciting as Mr. Reagan put it. “We figure she [Miss Taylor] probably made between $100,000 and $150,000 during the year we checked,” he said, “but we could never be sure because the Welfare Department wouldn’t cooperate with us.” And, according to James Piper, the assistant state’s attorney who is prosecuting Miss Taylor, the story is not even as exciting as that. NOW 4 ALIASES After a series of indictments each one of which was replaced by another indictment, winnowing down the number of charges, Miss Taylor is now charged with using not 80 aliases but four. The amount the state is charging that she received from her alleged fraud is not $150,000 but $8,000. “You have to go with what you can prove,” Mr. Piper said. And so far, nobody has proven anything, he added, because Miss Taylor is still awaiting trial. The “welfare queen” item in Mr. Reagan’s repertoire is one of several that seem to be at odds with the facts. The former California Governor fairly bristles with what he calls facts, figures and statistics demonstrating what he thinks is wrong with welfare, Big Government and the United States. The national press entourage following Mr. Reagan usually is prevented from pinning him down on the specifics because his citizens’ press conferences are reserved for questions for local audiences. ITEMS IN NOTEBOOK The following items were taken from a reporter’s notebook after attending 18 citizens’ press conferences on Jan. 15, 16 and 17, all of them in small towns in southern New Hampshire:

Ronald Reagan Criticizes “Welfare Queens” • 191

Mr. Reagan usually praises his welfare reform program in California. “We lopped 400,000 off the welfare rolls,” he asserted at several stops. According to a spokesman for California’s Department of Benefit Payments, the state’s highest welfare case load was 2,292,945 cases in March 1971, six months before Mr. Reagan’s welfare reform package became law. The only provable low point during the subsequent period is a level of 2,060,875 cases reached in January 1975, the month after Mr. Reagan left office, mking it a total of 232,070 who were “lopped” off the rolls. After first noting that his audience is composed of “hardworking people” who pay their bills and put up with high taxes, Mr. Reagan frequently tells them about Taino Towers, a four-building subsidized housing project in New York City. “If you are a slum dweller,” Mr. Reagan says, “you can get an apartment with 11-foot ceilings, with a 20-foot balcony, a swimming pool and gymnasium, laundry room and play room, and the rent begins at $113.20 and that includes utilities.” According to Robert Nichol, project coordinator for the development, which is in a primarily Puerto Rican section of East Harlem, only 92 of 656 units in the development have 11-foot ceilings. These are the six-bedroom units for large families and the high ceiling—which is only over the kitchen and living room—is to allow a space configuration that saves what would otherwise be wasted corridor space. There is no way, Mr. Nichols said, that anyone could get such an apartment for $113.20. The going rent would either be $450 a month or one-fourth of a family’s income. The large family that would need such a unit, he added, would probably receive enough welfare benefits so that its rent would work out to about $300 a month. If New Hampshire residents decided to move to New York and live in Taino Towers, Mr. Nichol continued, they would find that they have to share the pool, gymnasium and other amenities with the community of 200,000 Puerto Ricans and blacks who live around the project, because these amenities were built for community use.

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WELFARE RECIPIENTS ORGANIZE TO DEMAND A BETTER DEAL (1982)

In the early 1980s, New York City’s Downtown Welfare Advocacy Center (DWAC), founded in 1975, boasted six thousand members and eleven fulltime staff. With church and foundation funding, DWAC helped poor women negotiate the welfare bureaucracy, lobbied the city and state for more generous welfare grants, and demonstrated against restrictive welfare policies through its Redistribute America Movement (RAM), which tried to build a broad movement among the poor and working classes. This narrative describes the group’s activities during 1982.

NARRATIVE REPORT, 1982 From: The Downtown Welfare Advocacy Center The economic conditions in 1982 were grim for many American families. Particularly hard hit were those families whose incomes have always been inadequate and who suffered not only inflation, but budget cuts as well. And the nation watched idly as millions of dollars were given away or “abated” to the richest corporations in the world. The military industrial complex is budgeted to blossom. Minority youths are enticed into Junior ROTC [Reserve Officers’ Training Corps] since the military is one of the few places with jobs. The nation marched to stop the nuclear bomb, yet few, bar those most devastated, are organizing to stop the economic bomb. DWAC and RAM organized on many fronts this year—from winning illegally denied monies for and with welfare recipients, to attempting to

Welfare Recipients Organize to Demand a Better Deal • 193

change the way people think about our economic situation—and to do something about it. It was our experience over many years in New York State fighting to win a welfare grant increase, that creating a climate wherein change can take place is more than half the battle. Our focus for the first part of the year was in organizing broad based support for a demonstration at Mobil Oil International Headquarters to challenge the “trickle down” notion and to demand corporate responsibility from Mobil in concrete, dollar terms. To develop ongoing support for poor peoples’ efforts in the ’80’s, meetings of various groups were organized. Sam Meyers, president of Local 259 of the United Auto Workers organized 17 unions to a breakfast meeting. Support was pledged for the upcoming Mobil action and the need for organized labor to become actively involved in poor peoples’ struggles was emphasized. Academicians and social workers were organized with the help of a Columbia student and endorsements from many academicians, including Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. Similar meetings were held with active feminists, the Coalition of Denomin[ation]al Executives, Black Agency Executives, and a Regional gathering of Baptist Ministers. DWAC and RAM organized a group of unions, clergy, politicians, and community organizations who called themselves People United for Economic Justice, and were the support group for RAM’s organizing efforts. These events culminated April Fools Day at noon. Lunching Mobil executives and employees, thousands of New Yorkers and the media were exposed to a rally of 400 people—from welfare mothers to rank and file union members. Speeches were interrupted with a guest appearance by “Ronny and Nancy”, who presented a $300 billion “welfare check” to a “Mobil executive” who then threw crumbs to the crowd. Our demand was simple—meet with us to discuss your role in corporate responsibility. We won that meeting for one week later (only after sitting-in at the main entrance). Welfare mothers made history as they met with corporate executives from Mobil—explaining their plight prior to Reaganomics and their current crisis due to additional cuts. After stating our demands to Mobil, they agreed to seriously consider one demand if presented in proposal form. . . . DWAC and RAM continued organizing poor people at the grassroots level—running the ongoing advocacy hotline, supervised by our staff advocate and increasingly “staffed” by recipient volunteers learning welfare rules and regulations. By this time many of the oppressive federally mandated changes in welfare were being implemented, often illegally, at the local welfare center level. Since caseworkers are never adequately trained, recipients who have information from our advocate or attended RAM welfare rights training clinics often know more than their workers. By going to local centers with groups of five to ten “support advocates”, one family’s crisis was

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often immediately solved. The people left the center with check in hand— an exciting and empowering process for all who participated. In a year’s time, these actions, coupled with phone advocacy, moved millions of dollars in illegally denied benefits to those who were entitled to the money in the first place. [W]e continued to organize smaller “hit and run” actions. Throughout the year, two Governor’s Task Force Meetings on the budget were disrupted with demands from RAM members to use state money (from uncollected taxes, tax abatements) to make up some of the federal cuts, such as in food stamps. A demonstration at city welfare headquarters was necessary to obtain the current books of regulations. The regulations were being used in local centers but denied to us – and to Legal Services even after an FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] request had been filed. The action won the regulations that day. Locally, leadership development is an important part of our work. Training is both formal and informal—outside trainers are invited to educate us about specifics, and we all “learn by doing” in our daily activities. This past year a group of us attended the Center For Popular Economics where we learned and analyzed various economic theories. We also got a chance to talk to organizers from around the country about poverty generally and income security specifically. . . . [M]ost significant is the growth in self esteem and self confidence experienced by individuals, and the group as a whole. Women who are constantly blamed not only for their family’s poverty, but for the economic downturn of the country, often have one of their first positive experiences vis-a-vis welfare with their involvement with RAM. Understanding welfare and how it works leads to control over their lives which many of these women have never known before. People change before your very eyes. The caseworker’s supervisor you never met before produces an overdue check because you know your rights; women who can’t read can learn to run a mimeo machine; strong statements are made to the press about our right to survival—adequate survival. Whether they remain involved directly with DWAC and RAM, go to school to get a G.E.D. [Certificate of General Educational Development], go to college, or enter the paid labor force, both the self confidence and skills they learned stay with them. . . .

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WELFARE RIGHTS ACTIVISTS CHALLENGE THE DEFINITION OF “WELFARE” (1981)

This flyer, created by the Downtown Welfare Advocacy Center as part of its Redistribute America Movement (RAM), contrasts the nation’s miserly assistance to poor women and children with its generous tax shelters for the wealthy and calls for participants in a wide variety of federal programs threatened by the Reagan administration’s budget to organize together to fight the “real welfare cheats.” (This document uses “Advocate Center” but the correct name is “Advocacy Center.”)

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A CONSERVATIVE SCHOLAR CONDEMNS FEDERAL WELFARE POLICIES (1984)

In his book, Losing Ground (1984), which was supported and heavily promoted by the conservative Manhattan Institute, Charles Murray blamed federal antipoverty policies for deepening poverty by encouraging selfdestructive work behaviors and family patterns among the poor. His solution was to abolish all federal income support for able-bodied adults. Murray’s data contained significant flaws, but his premise had a significant influence on welfare reform debates.

LOSING GROUND AMERICAN SOCIAL POLICY, 1950–1980 By Charles Murray . . . In 1968, as Lyndon Johnson left office, 13 percent of Americans were poor, using the official definition. Over the next twelve years, our expenditures on social welfare quadrupled. And, in 1980, the percentage of poor Americans was—13 percent. Can it be that nothing had changed? . . . The complex story we shall unravel comes down to this: Basic indicators of well-being took a turn for the worse in the 1960s, most consistently and most drastically for the poor. In some cases, earlier progress slowed; in other cases mild deterioration accelerated; in a few instances advance turned into retreat. The trendlines on many of the indicators are— literally—unbelievable to people who do not make a profession of following them.

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The question is why. Why at that moment in history did so many basic trends in the quality of life for the poor go sour? Why did progress slow, stop, reverse? The easy hypotheses—the economy, changes in demographics, the effects of Vietnam or Watergate or racism—fail as explanations. As often as not, taking them into account only increases the mystery. Nor does the explanation lie in idiosyncratic failures of craft. It is not just that we sometimes administered good programs improperly, or that sound concepts sometimes were converted to operations incorrectly. It is not that a specific program, or a specific court ruling or act of Congress, was especially destructive. The error was strategic. A government’s social policy helps set the rules of the game—the stakes, the risks, the payoffs, the tradeoffs, and the strategies for making a living, raising a family, having fun, defining what “winning” and “success” mean. The more vulnerable a population and the fewer its independent resources, the more decisive is the effect of the rules imposed from above. The most compelling explanation for the marked shift in the fortunes of the poor is that they continued to respond, as they always had, to the world as they found it, but that we—meaning the not-poor and un-disadvantaged—had changed the rules of their world. Not of our world, just of theirs. The first effect of the new rules was to make it profitable for the poor to behave in the short term in ways that were destructive in the long term. Their second effect was to mask these long-term losses—to subsidize irretrievable mistakes. We tried to provide more for the poor and produced more poor instead. We tried to remove the barriers to escape from poverty, and inadvertently built a trap. . . . It is indeed possible that steps to relieve misery can create misery. The most troubling aspect of social policy toward the poor in late twentiethcentury America is not how much it costs, but what it has bought. . . . We have available to us a program that would convert a large proportion of the younger generation of hardcore unemployed into steady workers making a living wage. The same program would drastically reduce births to single teenage girls. It would reverse the trendline in the breakup of poor families. It would measurably increase the upward socioeconomic mobility of poor families. These improvements would affect some millions of persons. All these are results that have eluded the efforts of the social programs installed since 1965, yet, from everything we know, there is no real question about whether they would occur under the program I propose. A wide variety of persuasive evidence from our own culture and around the world, from experimental data and longitudinal studies, from theory and practice, suggests that the program would achieve such results.

Scholar Condemns Federal Welfare Policies • 199

The proposed program, our final and most ambitious thought experiment, consists of scrapping the entire federal welfare and income-support structure for working-aged persons, including AFDC, Medicaid, Food Stamps, Unemployment Insurance, Worker’s Compensation, subsidized housing, disability insurance, and the rest. It would leave the working-aged person with no recourse whatsoever except the job market, family members, friends, and public or private locally funded services. It is the Alexandrian solution: cut the knot, for there is no way to untie it. . . . [L]et us consider what this hypothetical society might look like. . . . Sons and daughters who fail to find work continue to live with their parents or relatives or friends. Teenaged mothers have to rely on support from their parents or the father of the child and perhaps work as well. People laid off from work have to use their own savings or borrow from others to make do until the next job is found. All these changes involve great disruption in expectations and accustomed roles. Along with the disruptions go other changes in behavior. Some parents do not want their young adult children continuing to live off their income, and become quite insistent about their children learning skills and getting jobs. This attitude is most prevalent among single mothers who have to depend most critically on the earning power of their offspring. Parents tend to become upset at the prospect of a daughter’s bringing home a baby that must be entirely supported on an already inadequate income. Some become so upset that they spend considerable parental energy avoiding such an eventuality. Potential fathers of such babies find themselves under more pressure not to cause such a problem, or to help with its solution if it occurs. Adolescents who were not job-ready find they are job-ready after all. It turns out that they can work for low wages and accept the discipline of the workplace if the alternative is grim enough. After a few years, many—not all, but many—find that they have acquired salable skills, or that they are at the right place at the right time, or otherwise find that the original entry-level job has gradually been transformed into a secure job paying a decent wage. A few—not a lot, but a few—find that the process leads to affluence. . . . When it becomes highly dysfunctional for a person to be dependent, status will accrue to being independent, and in fairly short order. Noneconomic rewards will once again reinforce the economic rewards of being a good parent and provider. . . . [L]et us consider the plight of the stereotypical welfare mother—never married, no skills, small children, no steady help from a man. It is safe to say that, now as in the 1950s, there is no one who has less sympathy from the white middle class, which is to be the source of most of the money for the private and local services we envision. Yet this same white middle class is a

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soft touch for people trying to make it on their own, and a soft touch for “deserving” needy mothers—AFDC was one of the most widely popular of the New Deal welfare measures, intended as it was for widows with small children. Thus we may envision two quite different scenarios. In one scenario, the woman is presenting the local or private service with this proposition: “Help me find a job and day-care for my children, and I will take care of the rest.” In effect, she puts herself into the same category as the widow and the deserted wife—identifies herself as one of the most obviously deserving of the deserving poor. Welfare mothers who want to get into the labor force are likely to find a wide range of help. In the other scenario, she asks for an outright and indefinite cash grant—in effect, a private or local version of AFDC—so that she can stay with the children and not hold a job. In the latter case, it is very easy to imagine situations in which she will not be able to find a local service or a private philanthropy to provide the help she seeks. The question we must now ask is: What’s so bad about that? If children were always better off being with their mother all day and if, by the act of giving birth, a mother acquired the inalienable right to be with the child, then her situation would be unjust to her and injurious to her children. Neither assertion can be defended, however—especially not in the 1980s, when more mothers of all classes work away from the home than ever before, and even more especially not in view of the empirical record for the children growing up under the current welfare system. Why should the mother be exempted by the system from the pressures that must affect everyone else’s decision to work? . . .

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AN ACTIVIST ACADEMIC EXAMINES THE REAL LIVES OF AFRICAN AMERICAN SINGLE MOTHERS (1986)

This essay, originally published as a pamphlet by Kitchen Table Press, draws attention to the hardships and obstacles that black single mothers face. The author, Barbara Omolade, counters the assessment that black single mother families are pathological and describes the formation of the Sisterhood of Black Single Mothers, a self-help organization in Brooklyn.

IT’S A FAMILY AFFAIR THE REAL LIVES OF BLACK SINGLE MOTHERS By Barbara Omolade All my close women friends and I are Black single mothers, connected to each other by our commitment to our families and to political and community organizations in central Brooklyn. About half my friends were teenage mothers; nearly all of us have been on welfare. We share similar past experiences of poverty, mental torment and physical abuse, self doubt and confusion. But now we are heading our households and raising our children in well-functioning families. To most Black and white politicians and social scientists, our families are by definition pathological—”broken,” “illegitimate,” “incubators of the Black underclass” that perpetuate poverty, teenage pregnancy, crime, and welfare dependence. Since the early 1900s, about 25 per cent of all Black families have been headed by women, but in the 20 years between 1960 and

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1980, our numbers almost doubled. A significant proportion of us are teenagers; 45 per cent are poor. These statistics have led to increasing hysteria about “the breakdown of the Black family.” During the 1960s, most Black social scientists and elected officials condemned Daniel Moynihan and others who suggested that the “matriarchal” character of the Black family was the cause of continuing racial inequality. But the changes during the past 20 years have so alarmed many of those same Black spokespeople that they now advocate programs to restore the two-parent Black family and accept the conventional wisdom that disparages Black families headed by women. The media reinforce these distorted perceptions by highlighting the successes of white two-parent households while focusing on the weaknesses of Black single mothers and Black fathers. . . . Today, the context of the struggle to have a Black family is legal desegregation and superficial political gains for Black people, along with high unemployment among Black men, depressed wages for Black women, and public denigration of poor people. The concept of a pathological underclass has become the rationale for continued racism and economic injustice; in attempting to separate racial from economic inequality and blaming family pathology for Black people’s condition, current ideology obscures the system’s inability to provide jobs, decent wages, and adequate public services for the Black poor. And in a racist-patriarchal society, the effects of the system’s weaknesses fall most heavily on Black women and children. Just as Black family life has always been a barometer of racial and economic justice and at the same time a means of transcending and surviving those injustices, Black families headed by women reflect the strength and the difficulty of Black life in the ‘80s. . . . Contrary to the myth, most Black single mothers are not second and third generation welfare recipients who sit around having babies in order to collect the government’s pittance. “Although three-fifths of all Black families headed by women receive public assistance, only one-fifth are totally dependent on welfare,” states Robert Hill, formerly director of research for the Urban League. Welfare payments most often supplement Black women’s low wages: in 1980, the median income for Black female heads of households was $7425. When welfare is their sole source of income, it’s because they’re disabled or have no child care. Most poor Black women reject welfare as soon as they can. As one former welfare recipient I know put it, “Welfare makes you feel that poor people aren’t better than spit. So I got off as soon as my children started school even though I made about the same amount of money as my check, once child care expenses were deducted.” Most Black single mothers are the working poor. We do domestic work, sew in factories, and are self-employed as merchants and caterers. We

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commute daily to city, state, and federal government agencies. As paras, aides, and clerks, we are the backbone of the hospital, child care, and nursing home systems. Although the wages are low and the work tedious, Black women stay with their city jobs for years because they offer stability and benefits. Black single mothers are the majority of students in many evening college programs. The typical student at the City College Center for Worker Education, a degree-granting program for working adults where I work as a counselor and instructor, is a 35-year-old Black woman who works for the city and heads her household. Higher education will bring her a decent wage, job security, and the hope of upward mobility. Getting a degree is a lifelong goal for many Black women who were forced to interrupt their education because of family and financial pressures. Many who have steady jobs and attend college were yesterday’s teenage mothers or welfare recipients. If any of us were frozen in those past crises brought on by unemployment, lack of decent, affordable housing, or trouble with our spouses or mates, we would have seemed destined to live out the stereotype of perpetual poverty and despair. In fact, after surviving the trauma of losing a loved one through separation, divorce, or death, most Black single mothers slowly stabilize their families. Though social scientists choose to focus on Black single mothers in crisis, they are not in the majority; if nearly half of all families headed by Black women have incomes below the poverty line, as the Center for the Study of Social Policy reports, then over half do not. But housing, welfare and court systems that treat us like social lepers are constantly working to undo our struggle. Black single mothers face discrimination because of our color, our sex, our marital status and, of course, our children; landlords often prefer a family with a male head. In addition, exorbitant rents price us out of most neighborhoods. As a result, Black women and their children are relegated to the oldest and most precarious housing in the city, apartments often owned by landlords who prey on poor families and provide few services or repairs even when their tenants do pay rent. . . . Black women who do need welfare are subjected to a system whose implicit assumption is that it’s a crime for men not to support women and children and for women not to force men to support them. That system blames Black women for “allowing” men to impregnate them without benefit of marriage or money. Welfare policies confuse the economic issue of how to support a family with the personal issues of sexuality and procreation, and this confusion shapes the perception of Black femaleheaded households as lacking men rather than money. Recently the Human Resources Administration in New York City began requiring women applying for welfare to provide explicit sexual information about themselves

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and the fathers of their children, but backed off under protest from community groups and civil libertarians. . . . After becoming single mothers, most Black women do not stop having intimate relationships with men. But integrating dating and sex with family, household, and work responsibilities poses serious problems. After carefully and often painfully stabilizing our families, we have learned to weigh every step to make sure that no relationship with a man throws our families into crisis. We have become quite pragmatic and guarded about our finances and our hearts. When the children and the household are a woman’s highest priority, she can lose the relationship. If the relationship becomes too important she may neglect or even lose her children. Having both is difficult, and for some women impossible, because a single mother’s lover must be flexible enough to fit into her intact family, and must balance commitments to her family with commitments to other children and former mates. Her children must be secure enough to accept her lover into their household. If the relationship exacerbates family tensions, teenage daughters and sons will fight them, fight her, or bail out fast to the streets or their own mates. These dilemmas and pressures are compounded for Black Lesbian single mothers, who are stigmatized and ostracized by both Black and white communities. A Black Lesbian mother’s access to support from her family and from other Black women can be severely limited or non-existent, depending upon the degree of homophobia she faces from these potentially significant sources of help. The society’s general hostility toward Lesbians and Gay men is often compounded when it must deal with the fact that many Lesbians and Gay men do indeed have children. If a woman is not heterosexual, she is considered, by definition, to be an unfit mother. Custody of her children is potentially under threat, not only from the children’s father or from his or her family, but from any individual or institution that has knowledge of her Lesbianism and decides to make a case out of it. Women, both Black and white, lose custody of their children every day based upon no other criterion than their sexual orientation. If a Black Lesbian mother doesn’t have money and must deal with the welfare system, she is in even more danger of being scrutinized, “discovered,” judged unfit, and having her children taken away. Black women who do not remarry or live with men are likewise seen as social Lesbians, regardless of their sexual preference. Women without men “to take care of them” or take them out are considered freaks in a society where coupling and heterosexual partnerships are the norm. These pressures force far too many Black women into accepting men into their lives without question or demand. The fear of being “deviant” or of failing at child-rearing by not having a “legitimate” family with a father, drives many Black single

African American Single Mothers • 205

mothers to casual or live-in lovers, whether or not those lovers meet her and her family’s needs. No family survives without resources and support. Black single mothers, like Black families generally, rely heavily on relatives and friends for help in raising the children and managing a household. When I became a single parent, one of the first people who helped me was another Black single mother who daily encouraged me to look for work. The Black woman principal of a private preschool allowed me to work part-time to offset the school fees of my three children. Black male friends and white female coworkers did child care and helped me shop. My aunts and uncles stood by in case I needed money or babysitting. And most important, my children’s father continued his relationship with them. These new networks and the traditional kinship ties of Black families are the most useful support systems for Black single mothers. Though many believe that they’re disintegrating, they remain vital and effective. It is when they are weak or problematic because loved ones are dead, ill, or far away that Black women and their families go into crisis and must rely on the church or social service agencies. Growing numbers of women in central Brooklyn now supplement or replace these supports with help from the Sisterhood of Black Single Mothers, a 12-year-old self-help organization founded and built by Daphne Busby, herself a single parent. I found out about the Sisterhood while working on my master’s degree, when I was still married. I was immediately impressed with the positive attitude of the women in it. A few years later a friend invited me to a conference sponsored by the Sisterhood where men conducted workshops on money, pornography, and relationships for participants of both sexes. I volunteered to help the group and was asked to participate in their Big Sister program for teenage mothers. In 1982, I coordinated a successful 13-week Black women’s history series for the Sisterhood. Though I’ve used its services only informally, I know how well it helps Black single mothers survive. The Sisterhood’s first step in empowering a Black single mother is to encourage her to name her own reality, rejecting negative labels like “unwed,” “illegitimate,” and “teenage mother” (this last a code for saying you will have a lifetime of misery and trouble). The organization then offers practical support: every day women come in or phone for help with welfare, housing, protection from violence, health and education problems. It is truly a sisterhood, not a social work agency with paid advocates, who are often distanced from the problems and possibilities of Black women and their families. Daphne and her two-person staff regard other Black single mothers as sisters and peers. Their philosophy is rooted in our past, when Black women supported each other in day-to-day living as well as helping each other through crisis and celebration. . . .

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We know that all families are in trouble: it’s hard rearing children in a country burdened with a narrow puritan moralism, racial and sexual stratification, poverty and oppression obscured by selective social visions of national success and material wealth. Focusing solely on the problems of Black single mothers only deflects our attention from the real crisis in the family—the nation’s lack of commitment to children’s welfare and progressive social policies; the conflicts between men and women, adults and children, that prevent loving relationships. Many Black spokespeople would rather lament the increase of Black single mothers than seek to understand its causes; they would rather be alarmed about Black teenage pregnancy than do something concrete for Black teenagers and speak out firmly against the sexual abuse of young women. Since few of the social scientists, public officials, and media commentators of either race who purport to analyze and judge our lives understand the real strengths or difficulties of Black single mothers and their families, their suggestions for solving the “crisis of the Black family” are paternalistic and impractical. Many, assuming that the major cause of the rise in Black female-headed households in Black male unemployment, propose that job training and employment programs focus mainly on Black men. This idea not only condones job discrimination against Black women but ignores the chauvinism that so often causes Black women to leave their relationships in the first place. Appeals to Black men to find their manhood in employment so as to reassert their dominance over Black women can only increase the number of Black single mothers. Many Black men are overcoming their sexist attitudes and seeking loving and equitable relationships with their spouses and children; Black women are also beginning to explore their own weaknesses and problems in establishing positive relationships with Black men. Yet dreams of patriarchal restoration have continued to permeate the Black family debate. If this is to change, Black women must speak truthfully, naming our own reality and vision of the Black family. . . . But in their struggle against those limits—weathering changes from within and without, pitting themselves against social agencies and public opinion—Black single mothers and their families have something to offer us all. By daily demonstrating that they can survive and succeed without marriage, that they may even be better off without it, they challenge the basic patriarchal ideal. My children and other children of Black single mothers are better people because they do not have to live in families where violence, sexual abuse, and emotional estrangement are the daily, hidden reality. They are not burdened by violent sexist nightmares that block their strength and sensibilities at the core of where they live. They know that fathers and mothers are only men and women, not infallible tyrants or gods. They

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have choices and a voice. In a society where men are taught to dominate and women to follow, we all have a lot to overcome in learning to build relationships, with each other and with our children, based on love and justice. For many Black single mothers, this is what the struggle is about.

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WOMEN ACADEMICS OPPOSE ENDING AFDC AS AN ENTITLEMENT (1995)

As Congress took up welfare reform in 1995, a group of feminist welfare scholars joined with activists and other advocates to form the Women’s Committee of One Hundred. In this statement, printed as an ad in the New York Times, the Women’s Committee attributes women’s poverty to society’s undervaluing of women’s work inside and outside the home, defends poor single mothers’ rights, deplores punitive policies, and demands welfare policies that would enable poor single mothers to escape poverty through generous income support for all families and services to improve their earning power. WHY EVERY WOMAN IN AMERICA SHOULD BEWARE OF WELFARE CUTS Welfare is the ultimate security policy for every woman in America. Like accident or life insurance, you hope you’ll never need it. But for yourself and your family, sisters, daughters and friends, you need to know it’s there. Without it, we have no real escape from brutal relationships or any protection in a job market hostile to women with children. Why is Congress trying to take it away? IMAGINE THE WORST You’re laid off from your job. You lose your health insurance. Your marriage falls apart. Your young children need child care. And you have no family close enough to help.

This is the kind of thing that “happens to someone else.” Someone we like to think is “different.” And to underline the difference, we usually figure the woman is somehow at fault. “Why did she have kids if she can’t support them?” we ask. “What’s the matter with her?” But, at heart, we know how uncomfortably close we are, ourselves, to being without support, without savings. All it takes is a few strokes of hard luck. Hard luck so common, it strikes millions of women with children every year. Women with no job security, in unstable or abusive relationships, with nowhere to turn but welfare (see stories at right). Would you let your employer take away your health insurance? Would you let the government cancel your social security?

Women Academics Oppose Ending AFDC as an Entitlement • 209 Everybody agrees that the current welfare system is flawed. But these reckless and irresponsible cuts do nothing to fix anything. They only make it harder for a woman raising her children to recover from life’s hard knocks—which today’s system, even with all its flaws, actually manages to do. That’s why we say that welfare isn’t supporting failure. In most cases, it’s enabling success. The fact that most women who must resort to welfare find a way off within two years by their own efforts, while keeping their children fed and clothed, says a great deal about them. It certainly demonstrates their “personal responsibility.” And it should make the rest of us ask why they’re being maligned, threatened and lectured. HOW DEFENDING POOR WOMEN PROTECTS US ALL

Of course not. But the public program that benefits struggling women most—Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)— is now considered fair game in Washington. And women are supposed to be quiet about it. WHAT MYTHS UNDERLIE THE ATTACK ON WELFARE? The welfare “reform” proposal in Congress is based on myths about women and about welfare. Even the phrase describing the bill—the “Personal Responsibility Act,” taken from Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America— exploits these myths. It implies that impoverished women with children, unlike people who get VA benefits or retirees on Social Security, are responsible for their own troubles and need a whack from a morality paddle to get back in line. This is not only insulting, but dangerous. Those who want to cut welfare assume the American job market is hungry for untrained, unskilled workers. It’s not. Mothers shoved off welfare will not find jobs waiting. And even if a mother finds a job available, chances are it won’t pay a living wage that’s enough to cover child care, let alone include health insurance.

The assault on poor women aims to divide American women, leaving all of us more vulnerable than ever. Legislation now pending in Congress would end Aid to Families with Dependent Children and critical nutrition programs. It would free states to reduce their own level of support far below the poverty line. Most inexcusable of all, it would allow the richest society on Earth to break its most fundamental pledge to women: That if the worst happens, a woman can keep her children with her, with food on the table and a roof over their heads. These punitive provisions have no offsetting benefits. They won’t save money, speed women into jobs, improve health care, or provide more child care. They won’t do anything but complete the humiliation of women who have no other choice and jeopardize the well-being of our poorest children. No American woman has anything to gain from thisso-called “welfare reform.” Each one of us has everything to lose. That’s why we ask you to act quickly. President Clinton must stop this attack on women’s security. Mail the coupon to us, and we’ll speed it along with thousands of others to the White House. And call or write your Senators and Representatives today. This fight is for all of us. Make sure help is there when women need it most.

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WISCONSIN BECOMES A LEADER IN WELFARE-TO-WORK (1996) In 1995 the federal government gave states a green light to bypass federal regulations and institute experimental welfare programs. Wisconsin implemented one of the first and most ambitious plans to end the entitlement of welfare and move women into the workforce. The plan instituted a five-year time limit on welfare receipt and required recipients to work.

WISCONSIN WORKS (W-2) A BRIEF DESCRIPTION Wisconsin Legislative Reference Bureau Wisconsin Works, the state’s newly enacted welfare plan, has recently been the focus of national attention as many states seek to reform existing AFDC programs. . . . W-2 ends the “entitlement” aspect of AFDC assistance. Participants will no longer be automatically granted cash payments and health care because they fit into certain categories and meet prescribed requirements. In general, their participation is limited to an overall total of 60 months, consecutive or nonconsecutive, and they will be expected to work in unsubsidized employment or in government-subsidized placements. Individuals who are incapacitated can be assigned to transitional placements suited to their abilities. Although W-2 services or benefits will depend on compliance with work requirements, W-2 participants have no guarantee that work will be available to them. . . .

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Under the W-2 program, a participant’s monthly cash benefit will depend on the type of placement and the number of hours worked during the month. Unlike AFDC, it will not be determined by family size. Eligibility for Employment. In order to be eligible for W-2 employment, an individual must meet a number of requirements. The participant must be a custodial parent at least 18 years of age. He or she must be a U.S. citizen (or a qualifying alien) who has resided in Wisconsin for at least 60 consecutive days prior to application for W-2 and has demonstrated an intent to become a state resident. . . . W-2 eligibility also depends on income and other financial resources. The ceiling for family income is set at 115% of the federal poverty level. . . . Types of Employment. Participants in W-2 will be required to work in unsubsidized employment, including self-employment and entrepreneurial activities, or in placements subsidized by government. The law requires individuals in subsidized jobs to search for unsubsidized employment throughout their W-2 participation. Case workers, known as “financial and employment planners” under Act 289, will assist participants in finding qualified jobs. There are three types of subsidized placements, also termed “W-2 employment positions”: • Trial jobs. These subsidized jobs provide on-the-job training and work experience for participants unable to obtain unsubsidized employment. Wages are established in a contract between the W-2 agency and the employer and must meet minimum wage requirements. Trial job employers will be paid a wage subsidy of up to $300 per month for each W-2 worker employed. Employment in a particular trial job is limited to a 3-month maximum, although a 3-month extension may be permitted. • Community service jobs. A community service job (CSJ) is subsidized employment designed to give participants work experience and training to assist them in moving into unsubsidized employment or a trial job. The law requires that service projects must serve a useful public purpose or that their costs be partially offset by project revenues. Participants receive a maximum monthly grant of $555 for up to 30 hours of work and not more than 10 hours of classes or training per week, but the grant must be reduced by $4.25 per hour for work or training missed without good cause. A particular CSJ placement is limited to a 6-month maximum, although a 3-month extension may be permitted. • Transitional placements. Persons who are: incapacitated, needed at home because of the incapacity of a spouse or dependent child, or

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otherwise unable to perform a CSJ will be given subsidized transitional placements. These participants receive a maximum monthly grant of $518 for up to 28 hours of assigned activities (including physical rehabilitation, counseling, alcohol and other drug abuse treatment) and not more than 12 hours of training and educational activities per week. The grant must be reduced by $4.25 per hour for required activities missed without good cause. Participation in any of the three subsidized categories generally is limited to 24 months per placement type, but case-by-case extensions are possible. Likewise, although overall participation in W-2 is limited to 60 months, consecutive or nonconsecutive, extensions are permitted. After the effective date of the act, participation in the federally subsidized Job Opportunities and Basic Skills (JOBS) program counts toward the 60-month limit. W-2 participants may be eligible for child care, health care, food stamps, and educational and transportation assistance, whether or not they earn grants through W-2 employment positions. Those working in unsubsidized employment or trial jobs may be eligible to claim the federal and state earned income tax credit. The law provides that a W-2 custodial parent of a child 12 weeks old or younger can receive a $555 monthly grant without having to participate in employment activities. It also creates job access loans to meet immediate and discrete financial crises encountered by W-2 participants who need the loans to obtain or continue employment. . . . Child Care. The child care provisions of the W-2 plan will cover a broader range of low-income participants than the W-2 employment positions, including minor custodial parents and certain families with income at or below 165% of the federal poverty level. However, assistance generally is available to a narrower group of individuals than under the previous low-income child care program. Under W-2, child care subsidies may be provided for children age 12 and younger, but all recipients are required to pay a portion of their child care costs, as determined by the Department of Health and Family Services (DHFS). Persons participating in training or educational programs generally will not receive child care subsidies, but exceptions are made for recipients under age 20 who are trying to complete a high school education. . . . Health Care. Current AFDC-related and Healthy Start Medical Assistance programs will be replaced by the Wisconsin Works Health Plan. The new plan, which covers a broader range of low-income participants than the W-2 employment positions, will also include minor custodial parents, pregnant women with no dependent children, and certain families with income at or below 165% of the federal poverty level. The W-2 health plan does not cover all persons included in the current Medical Assistance

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program, and coverage is time-limited for many. All those covered by the health plan will be expected to make a monthly copayment, as determined by DHFS. Individuals are excluded from the plan if they are eligible for an employer-subsidized health care plan in which the employer pays 50% of the cost of coverage. . . . Kinship Care. A relative who is providing custodial care and maintenance for a child may be eligible for kinship care payments of $215 per month if certain conditions are met. The definition of a “kinship care relative” includes a stepparent, brother, sister, stepbrother, stepsister, first cousin, nephew, niece, aunt, uncle, or persons denoted by the prefix “grand”, “great”, or “great-great”. . . . Sanctions. A participant who refuses any component of W-2 employment three times will become ineligible to participate in that component. Participation in one of the other components would still be permitted. W-2 benefits can be permanently denied if it is determined by a court or through an administrative hearing that a participant has intentionally violated any W-2 provision on three separate occasions.

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CONGRESS ABOLISHES AFDC (1996)

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) ended the federal government’s sixty-one-year commitment to aid needy children. Passed with wide bipartisan support and the blessings of President Clinton, the new law focused on shoring up marriage, enforcing work requirements, and cutting welfare grants. The excerpt from the law below reveals a powerful preoccupation with single motherhood. It also describes the purpose of the newly created Temporary Aid to Needy Families program, far different from the Social Security Act of 1935.

PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY AND WORK OPPORTUNITY RECONCILIATION ACT OF 1996, PUBLIC LAW 104–193, AUGUST 22, 1996 [H.R. 3734], 104TH CONGRESS, 1ST SESSION PRWORA H.R. 3734 TITLE I—BLOCK GRANTS FOR TEMPORARY ASSISTANCE FOR NEEDY FAMILIES SEC. 101. FINDINGS. The Congress makes the following findings: (1) (2) (3)

Marriage is the foundation of a successful society. Marriage is an essential institution of a successful society which promotes the interests of children. Promotion of responsible fatherhood and motherhood is integral to successful child rearing and the well-being of children.

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(4)

(5)

(6)

In 1992, only 54 percent of single-parent families with children had a child support order established and, of that 54 percent, only about one-half received the full amount due. Of the cases enforced through the public child support enforcement system, only 18 percent of the caseload has a collection. The number of individuals receiving aid to families with dependent children (in this section referred to as “AFDC”) has more than tripled since 1965. More than two-thirds of these recipients are children. Eighty-nine percent of children receiving AFDC benefits now live in homes in which no father is present. (A) (i) The average monthly number of children receiving AFDC benefits— (I) was 3,300,000 in 1965; (II) was 6,200,000 in 1970; (III) was 7,400,000 in 1980; and (IV) was 9,300,000 in 1992. (ii) While the number of children receiving AFDC benefits increased nearly threefold between 1965 and 1992, the total number of children in the United States aged 0 to 18 has declined by 5.5 percent. (B) The Department of Health and Human Services has estimated that 12,000,000 children will receive AFDC benefits within 10 years. (C) The increase in the number of children receiving public assistance is closely related to the increase in births to unmarried women. Between 1970 and 1991, the percentage of live births to unmarried women increased nearly threefold, from 10.7 percent to 29.5 percent. The increase of out-of-wedlock pregnancies and births is well documented as follows: (A) It is estimated that the rate of nonmarital teen pregnancy rose 23 percent from 54 pregnancies per 1,000 unmarried teenagers in 1976 to 66.7 pregnancies in 1991. The overall rate of nonmarital pregnancy rose 14 percent from 90.8 pregnancies per 1,000 unmarried women in 1980 to 103 in both 1991 and 1992. In contrast, the overall pregnancy rate for married couples decreased 7.3 percent between 1980 and 1991, from 126.9 pregnancies per 1,000 married women in 1980 to 117.6 pregnancies in 1991. (B) The total of all out-of-wedlock births between 1970 and 1991 has risen from 10.7 percent to 29.5 percent and if the

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(7)

(8)

current trend continues, 50 percent of all births by the year 2015 will be out-of-wedlock. An effective strategy to combat teenage pregnancy must address the issue of male responsibility, including statutory rape culpability and prevention. The increase of teenage pregnancies among the youngest girls is particularly severe and is linked to predatory sexual practices by men who are significantly older. (A) It is estimated that in the late 1980’s, the rate for girls age 14 and under giving birth increased 26 percent. (B) Data indicates that at least half of the children born to teenage mothers are fathered by adult men. Available data suggests that almost 70 percent of births to teenage girls are fathered by men over age 20. (C) Surveys of teen mothers have revealed that a majority of such mothers have histories of sexual and physical abuse, primarily with older adult men. The negative consequences of an out-of-wedlock birth on the mother, the child, the family, and society are well documented. ...

PART A—BLOCK GRANTS TO STATES FOR TEMPORARY ASSISTANCE FOR NEEDY FAMILIES SEC. 401. PURPOSE. (a) IN GENERAL.—The purpose of this part is to increase the flexibility of States in operating a program designed to— (1) provide assistance to needy families so that children may be cared for in their own homes or in the homes of relatives; (2) end the dependence of needy parents on government benefits by promoting job preparation, work, and marriage; (3) prevent and reduce the incidence of out-of-wedlock pregnancies and establish annual numerical goals for preventing and reducing the incidence of these pregnancies; and (4) encourage the formation and maintenance of two-parent families. (b) NO INDIVIDUAL ENTITLEMENT.—This part shall not be interpreted to entitle any individual or family to assistance under any State program funded under this part. . . .

DOCUMENT

39

A WELFARE RIGHTS ORGANIZATION FIGHTS FOR THE RIGHTS OF THE POOR (1998) In 1998 the Kensington Welfare Rights Union of Philadelphia established the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign to highlight national problems of poverty and to build an interracial coalition of poor people with a goal of ending poverty. Using the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a platform, the Union argues that economic security is a human right to which all residents of the United States are entitled.

POOR PEOPLE’S ECONOMIC HUMAN RIGHTS CAMPAIGN MISSION STATEMENT The Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign is committed to unite the poor across color lines as the leadership base for a broad movement to abolish poverty. We work to accomplish this through advancing economic human rights as named in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, such as the rights to food, housing, health, education, communication and a living wage job. VISION STATEMENT The Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign is building a movement that unites the poor across color lines. Poverty afflicts Americans of all colors. Daily more and more of us are downsized and impoverished. We share a common interest in uniting against the prevailing conditions and

218 • Welfare in the United States

around our vision of a society where we all have the right to health care, housing, living wage jobs, and access to quality primary, secondary, and higher education. The Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign includes people of many backgrounds. We are mothers, fathers, children, and grandparents; we are the unemployed, the working poor, the downsized, the homeless, the victims of welfare reform and NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement], the cast-asides of the new economy; we are social workers, religious leaders, labor leaders, artists, lawyers, and other people of conscience; we are young and old; we live in rural areas and in urban centers. We are committed to uniting the poor as the leadership base for a broad movement to abolish poverty everywhere and forever. We work to accomplish this aim through the promotion of economic human rights, named in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [UDHR] as Articles 23, 25, and 26. These articles state our right to such provisions as housing, health care, a living wage job, and education. The founding creed of the United States of America, which asserts our rights to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, inspired the formulation of these human rights. Our government signed the UDHR in 1948; its full implementation would mean that our country would be living out the true meaning of its creed. This American Dream is possible because our country is the richest and most powerful in the world. We do not seek pity. We do seek power to end conditions that threaten all of us with economic human rights violations denying us our birthrights to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

DOCUMENT

40

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH LAYS OUT A PLAN FOR WELFARE REFORM (2002)

As Congress considered reauthorizing the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in 2002, President George W. Bush offered his administration’s assessment and recommendations. In the Executive Summary of the White House report, “Working Toward Independence,” the administration praises the 1996 law for reducing welfare rolls and urges greater efforts to replace government income support with wage labor (in part by increasing the number of hours recipients are required to work to forty hours a week) and/or marriage (in part by offering states federal funds for marriage promotion programs).

WORKING TOWARD INDEPENDENCE White House EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The welfare reform law of 1996 marked a turning point in national welfare policy. The new policy aimed to encourage personal responsibility by promoting work, reducing nonmarital births, and strengthening and supporting marriage. No longer could able-bodied adults remain on welfare year after year without working. Individuals were given strong financial incentives to leave welfare for work; families were given essential support for child care and health care to facilitate the transition to work; states were given equally strong incentives to help parents prepare for and find jobs. And state and local governments were given more control over welfare than ever before.

220 • Welfare in the United States

The result has been an historic decline in the welfare rolls, substantial increases in employment by low-income mothers, unprecedented increases in earnings by low-income females heading families, and a sustained decline in child poverty, particularly among African-American children. In addition, for the first time in several generations, the percentage of children born outside wedlock leveled off and has remained nearly flat for the last five years. But there is plenty of work left to do as Congress reauthorizes the 1996 legislation. The Bush Administration’s detailed plan for reauthorization is explained in this document. The plan has four major pillars, all of which build on the achievements of the 1996 law. Promoting work is the key to both the 1996 reforms and the Administration’s reauthorization plan. Although nearly three million families have left welfare, most of them for work, there are still over two million families remaining on the rolls. Policymakers and welfare administrators have an obligation to help these families follow in the footsteps of those who have already abandoned welfare for work. . . . Strengthening families is the second major element of the Administration plan. One of the hardest jobs in America is being a single parent. . . . The Administration’s plan continues the current high level of spending for childcare, maintains the commitment to providing health insurance to the children of low-income working families, and expands the child support enforcement program so that more payments by fathers will be given directly to mothers and children. In addition, the Nation’s most important program for assisting low-income working families with children, the Earned Income Tax Credit, will continue to provide income supplements of up to $4,000 per year to single mothers leaving welfare for work. Although our policy must and does continue to support singleparent families, national policy must do a better job of promoting healthy marriages. Research shows that both adults and children are better off in two-parent families. Children reared by married parents in intact families are more likely to complete high school and are less likely to be poor, to commit crimes, or to have mental health problems than are children reared in single-parent families. It is no criticism of single parents to acknowledge the better outcomes for children of married-couple families. Rather, it is simply wise and prudent to reorient our policies to encourage marriage, especially when children are involved. For this reason, the Administration plan commits up to $300 million per year for states to design and implement programs that reduce nonmarital births and increase the percentage of children in married-couple families. . . . The Administration’s approach to promoting marriage is to provide financial incentives for states, often working together with private and faith-based organizations, to develop and implement innovative programs. . . .

A Plan for Welfare Reform • 221

[T]he Administration’s plan includes legislation that would allow cabinetlevel agencies to have expanded authority to grant waivers to states for the purpose of improving the efficiency and effectiveness of cash, housing, nutrition, and especially workforce programs. The primary goal of the expanded state flexibility is to improve coordination across programs so that more adults can achieve independence from welfare while attaining greater financial and social security for themselves and their children. Finally, the Administration’s plan includes an important restoration of nutrition benefits for legal immigrants. . . . Federal policy should strive to find a balance between the needs of poor immigrants and the obligation to ensure that welfare policy neither attracts noncitizens to the U.S. to take advantage of welfare programs nor induces welfare dependency among immigrants who receive welfare benefits. Thus, the Administration supports continuation of the five-year ban but proposes to align food stamp rules with the rules for cash welfare and Medicaid by allowing legal immigrants to receive food stamps after five years. This policy helps ensure adequate nutrition among children and other vulnerable immigrant groups, while continuing to require new entrants to the country to support themselves and their families through work. . . . America has made great progress in welfare reform. Doors of opportunity that were shut and sealed have been opened – in no small measure because of the efforts of welfare recipients themselves. . . .

NOTES

1 2

1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8

1 2

CHAPTER 1 Proceedings of the White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1909, pp. 9–10, quoted in Skocpol (1995: 425). See Document 1. CHAPTER 2 Rufus Jarman, “Detroit Cracks Down on Welfare Chiselers.” Saturday Evening Post, December 10, 1949, p. 19. Jacob Panken, “I Say Relief is Ruining Families.” Saturday Evening Post, September 30, 1950, p. 25. “Governor Davis Scoffs at Aid Cases.” Chicago Sun-Times, September 23, 1960. Original source cited as HEW, SSA, BPA, “State Letter No. 452,” dated January 17, 1961 (Mimeo., the Bureau, 1961), pp. 1–2, quoted in Bell (1965: 147). Elizabeth Wickenden, “Poverty and the Law.” Memorandum for the National Social Welfare Assembly, February 25, 1963, Folder 7, Box 2, Elizabeth Wickenden Collection, Wisconsin Historical Society (Document 16), quoted in Nadasen (2005: 19). See Document 11. The quotations in this paragraph come from American Public Welfare Association press release, “An American Dependency Challenge,” May 9, 1963, Folder 7, Box 34, American Public Welfare Association Collection, Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota, p. 3. See Document 8. US Congress, Senate, Public Welfare Amendments of 1962, Eighty-seventh Congress, Second Session, 1962, S. Rept. 1589. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1963, p. 1. CHAPTER 3 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “The Negro Family: A Case for National Action,” US Department of Labor, 1965. See Document 17, in this book. See Document 17.

Notes • 223 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Ebony magazine, January 1966. Russell Long, Congress, Senate, Committee on Finance, Hearings on H.R. 12080, Social Security Amendments of 1967, Ninetieth Congress, First Session, September 21, 1967, p. 1648. Whitney Young, quoted by Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, in an interview with Premilla Nadasen, June 19, 1997, New York City. See Document 27. Margaret H. Mason, “Poverty: A Feminist Issue,” National Organization for Women, 1966, Box 98, Folder 23, NOW Papers, p. 18. Kathleen Riordan, “Women and Work, Women and Poverty: A Look at a Women’s Bureau Project,” Supplement 1, Box 26, Folder “SCAN Manuscripts, 105th Annual ForumLos Angeles (1978), Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Beyond Welfare,” Statement before the Senate Subcommittee on Social Security and Family Policy, January 23, 1987, quoted in Novak et al. (1987: 52).

CHAPTER 4 1 See Document 31. 2 “The American Underclass: Destitute and Desperate in the Land of Plenty.” Time, August 29, 1977: 14–27 (p. 14). 3 Ibid., p. 14. 4 Testimony of George Gilder, Congress, Joint Economic Committee, Hearing on the 1981 Economic Report of the President, Ninety-seventh Congress, First Session, January 28, 1981, p. 112. 5 Robert Carleson to Kevin Hopkins, “Principles of Responsible Welfare Reform,” n.d. (June 1981), Robert Carleson Files, OA9590, “Welfare Reform II,” Reagan Library. 6 New York State, Task Force on Poverty and Welfare, A New Social Contract: Rethinking the Nature and Purpose of Public Assistance, Report of the Task Force on Poverty and Welfare, Submitted to Governor Mario Cuomo, December 1986, p. 71. 7 Ibid., p. 9. 8 Ford Foundation (1989: 6). This kind of language, in these and similar quotations elsewhere in the book, is commonly sprinkled throughout reports (even from liberals) about welfare in the second half of the 1980s. 9 “Bill Moyers Examines the Black Family.” Newsweek, January 27, 1986, p. 58. 10 See, for example, Duncan and Hoffman (1986, 1990); Bane and Ellwood (1994); Panel Study of Income Dynamics, http://psidonline.isr.umich.edu/ (accessed October 4, 2008). 11 Kurz (1999) cites a Massachusetts study that 20 percent of current welfare users have been victims of abuse within the past twelve months and 65 percent have experienced abuse at some point in their lives. 12 “WE WON! RAM Clothing Campaign Spurs Welfare Grant Increase,” The RAM’s Horn, May 1981, Box 1, Folder “RAM Statewide Conference: Participation Material, 1981,” Downtown Welfare Advocacy Center Papers, Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota, p. 4. 13 Sally Helling, Congress, House of Representatives, Subcommittee on Public Assistance and Unemployment Compensation of the Committee on Ways and Means, Hearings on Administration’s Fiscal Year 1983 Legislative Proposals for Unemployment Compensation and Public Assistance, Ninety-seventh Congress, Second Session, April 21, 1982, pp. 390–391 and 398. 14 National Congress of Neighborhood Women to Honorable Miriam Friedlander, January 17, 1984, Box 66, Folder 12, National Congress of Neighborhood Women Papers, Sofia Smith Collection, Smith College, pp. 1–3. 15 Mary Ann Mortorana, Congress, House of Representatives, Subcommittee on Public Assistance and Unemployment Compensation of the Committee on Ways and Means, Hearing on Administration’s Fiscal Year 1983 Legislative Proposals for Unemployment Compensation and Public Assistance, Ninety-seventh Congress, Second Session, April 21, 1982, pp. 390–392 and 398. 16 “Changing Welfare: An Investment in Women and Children in Poverty,” The Proposal of the National Coalition on Women, Work, and Welfare, April 1987, in Linda Arey Papers, Box OA15024, Folder “WOW(2),” Reagan Library. 17 Testimony of Eve Dembaugh, Box 5, Folder “Outreach Welfare-Chicago 7/22/80,” Records of

224 • Notes

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

President’s Commission for National Agenda for the Eighties, General Communication File, Carter Library. Ibid. “Position Paper—Cost of Living,” n.d., Box 1, Folder 6, Minnesota Recipients Alliance Papers, Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Beyond Welfare,” Statement before the Senate Subcommittee on Social Security and Family Policy, January 23, 1987, quoted in Novak et al. (1987: 52). Up From Dependency: A New National Public Assistance Strategy, Report to the President by the Domestic Policy Council Low Income Opportunity Working Group, December 1986, pp. 2 and 4. New York State, Task Force on Poverty and Welfare, A New Social Contract: Rethinking the Nature and Purpose of Public Assistance, Report of the Task Force on Poverty and Welfare, Submitted to Governor Mario Cuomo, December 1986, p. 7. Lupe Anguiano to Ronald Reagan, June 20, 1988, WHORM Subject File, WE010 Poverty Programs, 566577–572984, Reagan Library. Robert Pear, “House Backs Bill Undoing Decades of Welfare Policy,” New York Times, March 25, 1995. Barbara Sparks, “Poor Women’s Education Under Welfare Reform,” 1999 Adult Education Research Conference Proceedings, www.edst.educ.ubc.ca/aerc/1999/99sparks.htm (accessed October 4, 2008). One disturbing trend since 1996 is the increase in non-custodial TANF cases, or child recipients who do not live with a parent recipient. Mothers who simply cannot care for their children and fulfill the requirements of TANF or make it in the low-wage labor market have been forced to surrender their children to other family members or foster care.

REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

Abramovitz, Mimi. 1989. Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from the Colonial Times to the Present. Boston, MA: South End Press. Addams, Jane. 1910 (1961). Twenty Years at Hull House. New York: Signet. Bane, Mary Jo, and David T. Ellwood. 1994. Welfare Realities: From Rhetoric to Reform. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bell, Winifred. 1965. Aid to Dependent Children. New York: Columbia University Press. Berkowitz, Edward. 1995. Mr. Social Security: The Life of Wilbur J. Cohen. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas. Bernstein, Blanche. 1986. Saving a Generation. New York: Priority Press. Bruel, Frank. 1962. “Public Welfare: Safeguard or Free Ride?” University of Chicago Magazine, January: 20–21. Calvert, Mildred. 1972. “Welfare Rights and the Welfare System.” In Milwaukee County Welfare Rights Organization, Welfare Mothers Speak Out: We Ain’t Gonna Shuffle Anymore. New York: Norton. Carson, Clayborne et al., eds. 1991. “A Proposal by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference for the Development of a Nonviolent Action Movement for the Greater Chicago Area.” In Clayborne Carson et al., eds. The Eyes on the Prize: Civil Rights Reader. New York: Penguin. Cauthen, Nancy and Edwin Amenta. 1996. “Not for Widows Only: Institutional Politics and the Formative Years of ADC.” American Sociological Review 61, no. 3: 427–448. Chappell, Marisa. 2009. The War on Welfare: Gender, Family, and the Politics of AFDC in Modern America. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Davies, Gareth. 1996. From Opportunity to Entitlement: The Transformation of Great Society Liberalism. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press. Davis, Dána-Ain. 2006. Battered Black Women and Welfare Reform: Between a Rock and a Hard Place. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Davis, Martha. 1993. Brutal Need, Lawyers and the Welfare Rights Movement, 1960–1973. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Downer, Cassie B. 1972. “Guaranteed Adequate Income Now.” In Milwaukee County Welfare Rights Organization, Welfare Mothers Speak Out: We Ain’t Gonna Shuffle Anymore. New York: Norton. DuBois, W.E.B. 1899 (2007). The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. New York: Oxford University Press.

226 • References and Further Reading Duncan, Greg J. and Saul D. Hoffman. 1986. “Welfare Dynamics and the Nature of Need.” Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, Cato Journal 6: 31–54. Duncan, Greg J. and Saul D. Hoffman. 1990. “Welfare Benefits, Economic Opportunities, and Out-of-wedlock Births among Black Teenage Girls.” Demography 27: 519–525. Ellwood, David T. 1988. Poor Support: Poverty in the American Family. New York: Basic Books. Farmer, James. 1967. “The Controversial Monynihan Report,” pp. 409–411. In Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey, eds. The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ford Foundation. 1989. The Common Good: Social Welfare and the American Future—Policy Recommendations of the Executive Panel. Ford Foundation Project on Social Welfare and the American Future. New York: Ford Foundation. Fraser, Nancy. 1989. Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Friedman, Milton. 1962. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gilens, Martin. 1999. Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Goodwin, Joanne. 1997. Gender and the Politics of Welfare Reform: Mothers’ Pensions in Chicago, 1911–1929. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Gordon, Linda. ed. 1990. Women, the State and Welfare. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Gordon, Linda. 1994. Pitied but not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare. New York: The Free Press. Hancock, Ange-Marie. 2004. The Politics of Disgust: The Pubic Identity of the Welfare Queen. New York: New York University Press. Handler, Joel and Yeheskel Hasenfeld. 2007. Blame Welfare: Ignore Poverty and Inequality. New York: Cambridge University Press. Harrington, Michael. 1962. The Other America. New York: Macmillan. Hayek, Friedrich. 1944. The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Katz, Michael. 1986. In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America. New York: Basic Books. Katz, Michael. 1989. The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare. New York: Pantheon. Kessler Harris, Alice. 2001. In Pursuit of Equality: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th Century America. Cambridge: Oxford University Press. Knebel, Fletcher. 1961. “Welfare: Has It Become a Scandal?” Look 25 (November 7): 31–33. Kornbluh, Felicia. 2007. The Battle for Welfare Rights: Politics and Poverty in Modern America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Koven, Seth, and Sonya Michel, eds. 1993. Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of the Welfare States. New York: Routledge. Kristol, Irving. 1976. “The Poverty of Equality,” Wall Street Journal ,July 12: 10. Kurz, Demie. 1999. “Women, Welfare, and Domestic Violence,” pp. 132–151. In Gwendolyn Mink, ed. Whose Welfare? Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ladd-Taylor, Molly. 1994. Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890–1930. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Law, Sylvia. 1983. “Women, Work, Welfare, and the Preservation of Patriarchy.” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 131, no. 6: 1249–1339. Levenstein, Lisa. 2000. “From Innocent Child to Unwanted Migrants and Unwed Mothers: Two Chapters in the Public Discourse on Welfare in the United States, 1960–1961.” Journal of Women’s History 11, no. 4: 10–33. Lewis, Oscar. 1959. Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty. New York: Basic Books. Lewis, Oscar. 1966. La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty – San Juan and New York. New York: Random House. Lieberman, Robert. 1998. Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Limoncelli, Stephanie A. 2002. “‘Some of Us are Excellent at Babies’: Paid Work, Mothering, and the Construction of ‘Need’ in a Welfare-to-Work Program.” In Frances Fox Piven, Joan Acker,

References and Further Reading • 227 Margaret Hallock, and Sandra Morgan, eds. Work, Welfare, and Politics: Confronting Poverty in the Wake of Welfare Reform. Eugene, OR: University of Oregon Press. Marchevsky, Alejandra and Jeanne Theoharis. 2006. Not Working: Latina Immigrants, Low Wage Jobs, and the Failure of Welfare Reform. New York: New York University Press. Mead, Lawrence. 1986. Beyond Entitlement: The Social Obligations of Citizenship. New York: Free Press. Michel, Sonya. 1999. Children’s Interests, Mothers’ Rights: The Shaping of America’s Child Care Policy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Mink, Gwendolyn. 1995. The Wages of Motherhood, Inequality in the Welfare State, 1917–1942. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mink, Gwendolyn. 1998. Welfare’s End. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mittelstadt, Jennifer. 2005. From Welfare to Workfare: The Unintended Consequences of Liberal Reform, 1945–1965. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Murray, Charles. 1984. Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980. New York: Basic Books. Nadasen, Premilla. 2005. Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States. New York: Routledge. Naples, Nancy A. 1997. “The ‘New Consensus’ on the Gendered ‘Social Contract’: The 1987–1988 U.S. Congressional Hearings on Welfare Reform.” Signs 22, no. 4: 907–945. Nelson, Barbara. 1990. “The Origins of the Two-Channel Welfare State: Workman’s Compensation and Mothers’ Aid,” pp. 123–151. In Linda Gordon, ed. Women, the State, and Welfare. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Neubeck, Kenneth, and Noel A. Cazenave. 2001. Welfare Racism: Playing the Race Card Against American’s Poor. New York: Routledge. Norton, Eleanor Holmes. 1985. “Restoring the Traditional Black Family.” New York Times Magazine, June 2. Novak, Michael et al. 1987. The New Consensus on Family and Welfare: A Community of SelfReliance. Report of the Working Seminar on Family and American Welfare Policy. Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. O’Connor, Alice. 2001. Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in TwentiethCentury U.S. History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Orleck, Annelise. 2005. Storming Caesar’s Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Patterson, James. 2000. America’s Struggle Against Poverty in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pearce, Diana. 1990. “Welfare is not for Women: Why the War on Poverty Cannot Conquer the Feminization of Poverty,” pp. 265–279. In Linda Gordon, ed. Women, the State and Welfare. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Piven, Frances Fox and Richard Cloward. 1971. Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare. New York: Pantheon. Quadagno, Jill. 1988. Transformation of Old Age Security: Class and Politics in the American Welfare State. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Quadagno, Jill. 1994. The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty. New York: Oxford University Press. Rainwater, Lee and William L. Yancey, eds. 1967. The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Reagan, Ronald. 1971. “Saving the States from Bankruptcy.” Nation’s Business, May: 56–57. Reese, Ellen. 2005. Backlash Against Welfare Mothers Past and Present. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Rogers-Dillon, Robin. 2004. The Welfare Experiments: Politics and Policy Evaluation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rose, Nancy. 1995. Workfare or Fair Work: Women, Welfare, and Government Work Programs. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Roth, Nina. 1993. “The Politics of Federal Family Policy in the U.S., 1965–1988: The American Family as Contested Rhetorical Terrain.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Kansas. Ryan, William. 1971. Blaming the Victim. New York: Pantheon. Schram, Sanford F., Joe Soss, and Richard C. Fording, eds. 2003. Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

228 • References and Further Reading Sheared, Vanessa. 1998. Race, Gender, and Welfare Reform: The Elusive Quest for Self-Determination. New York: Garland. Skocpol, Theda. 1995. Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Origins of Social Policy in the United States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Smith, Anna Marie. 2007. Welfare Reform and Sexual Regulation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Solinger, Rickie. 1994. Wake up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe v. Wade. New York: Routledge. Stack, Carol. 1974. All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community. New York: Harper and Row. Tait, Vanessa. 2005. Poor Workers’ Unions: Rebuilding Labor From Below. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Teles, Stephen Michael. 1996. Whose Welfare? AFDC and Elite Politics. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press. Theobald, Robert. 1966. The Guaranteed Income: Next Step in Economic Evolution? New York: Doubleday. Tillmon, Johnnie. 1972. “Welfare is a Women’s Issue.” Ms. magazine 1: 111–116. Tilly, Chris and Randy Albelda. 1999. “Toward a Strategy for Women’s Economic Equality.” New Politics 7, no. 3. Available at www.wpunj.edu/newpol/issue27/tilly27.htm (accessed October 4, 2008). Tomlinson, Kenneth Y. 1980. “We Can Clean Up the Welfare Mess.” Reader’s Digest, April: 83–92. Trattner, Walter. 1995. From Poor Law to Welfare State: A History of Social Welfare in America. Fifth Edition. New York: The Free Press. Welsh, James. 1973. “Welfare Reform: Born Aug. 8, 1969; died Oct. 4, 1972: A Sad Case Study of the American Political Process.” New York Times Magazine, January 7. White, Deborah Gray. 2000. Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994. New York: W.W. Norton. White, Lucie. 1990. “Substantive versus Procedural Rights: Goldberg v. Kelley.” Brooklyn Law Review 56. Williams, Lucy A. 1995. “Race, Rat Bites, and Unfit Mothers: How Media Discourse Informs Welfare Legislation Debate.” Fordham Law Journal 23: 1159–1196. Williams, Rhonda Y. 2005. The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles Against Urban Inequality. Cambridge: Oxford University Press. Wilson, William Julius. 1987. The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Young, Whitney. 1964. To Be Equal. New York: McGraw-Hill.

PERMISSION ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Every effort has been made to cite completely the original source material for each document and article used in this collection. In the event that something has been inadvertently used or cited incorrectly, every effort will be made in subsequent editions to rectify the error. We offer our sincere thanks to all of the sources that were courteous enough to help us reproduce the contents of this volume.

DOCUMENT 1 US Children’s Bureau, “Mother’s Aid, 1931.” Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1933.

DOCUMENT 2 US Congress, House of Representatives, “The Social Security Act,” Seventy-fourth Congress, First Session [H.R. 7260]. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1935.

DOCUMENT 3 Bonita Golda Harrison, “Social Security: What Does it Mean for the Negro?” Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life (1936), 14, no. 6: 171–173. Reprinted by permission of the National Urban League.

DOCUMENT 4 Works Progress Administration, “Aid to Dependent Children Keeps Families Together,” ca. 1936–1943.

DOCUMENT 5 Social Security Board, “To Aid Dependent Children,” 1940.

DOCUMENT 6 Charles Stevenson, “When It Pays to Play Pauper.” Nation’s Business (1950), 38, no. 9: 29. Reprinted by permission of the US Chamber of Commerce.

230 • Permission Acknowledgments

DOCUMENT 7 Alice E. Mertz, “Working Mothers in the Aid to Dependent Children Program.” Public Welfare (1952) 10, no. 3: 64–68. Reprinted by permission of the American Public Human Services Association.

DOCUMENT 8 Frank P. Higgins, “Maid to Order.” Public Welfare (1953), 11, no. 3: 88–91. Reprinted by permission of the American Public Human Services Association.

DOCUMENT 9 Winifred Bell, “Casework with Chronically Dependent Families.” March 1957, Folder 8, Box 1, Elizabeth Wickenden Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society. Reprinted by permission of the Wisconsin Historical Society.

DOCUMENT 10 Memorandum to National Agencies, American Leaders, Local Urban Leagues, from the National Urban League, September 19, 1960, Folder ADC, 1960–1961, Container 1, National Urban League Collection, Library of Congress, Part II, Series IIA. Reprinted by permission of the National Urban League.

DOCUMENT 11 Minutes of the City Council of Newburgh, New York, June 19, 1961, 141–142. Courtesy of the Local History Collection of the Newburgh Free Library.

DOCUMENT 12 Young Americans for Freedom Marches in Support of Joseph Mitchell’s Hard Line on Welfare (1961). Photograph courtesy of the Middletown Times Herald-Record.

DOCUMENT 13 Cartoon, “But I’m Just Trying to Clean Up the Mess!” (1961). Courtesy of the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle.

DOCUMENT 14 Frank H. Weir, “The ABCs of Relief: Image of Recipients Wrong.” Philadelphia Inquirer, September 14, 1961: 51. Reprinted by permission of the Philadelphia Inquirer.

DOCUMENT 15 US Department of Health, Education and Welfare, “Regional and Field Letter,” 453, December 11, 1961: 1–2.

DOCUMENT 16 Elizabeth Wickenden, “Poverty and the Law.” Memorandum for the National Social Welfare Assembly, February 25, 1963, Folder 7, Box 2, Elizabeth Wickenden Collection, Wisconsin Historical Society. Reprinted by permission of the Wisconsin Historical Society.

DOCUMENT 17 The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, Office of Policy Planning and Research, US Department of Labor, 1965.

DOCUMENT 18 Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, “A Strategy to End Poverty.” The Nation, May 2, 1966: 510–517. Reprinted by permission of The Nation.

Permission Acknowledgments • 231

DOCUMENT 19 Congress, Senate, Committee on Finance, Hearings on H.R. 12080: Social Security Amendments of 1967, Ninetieth Congress, First Session, August 29, 1967.

DOCUMENT 20 Kenwood Oakland Community Organization, “Your Welfare Rights,” n.d. (1960s), NWRO Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, DC. Reprinted by permission of Moorland-Spingarn Research Center.

DOCUMENT 21 Congress, Subcommittee on Fiscal Policy of the Joint Economic Committee, Hearing on Income Maintenance, Ninetieth Congress, Second Session, June 12, 1968.

DOCUMENT 22 NWRO, NWRO’S Guaranteed Adequate Income Plan, 1969, George Wiley Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin. Reprinted with permission.

DOCUMENT 23 Richard M. Nixon, “Special Message to the Congress on Reform of the Nation’s Welfare System,” August 11, 1969.

DOCUMENT 24 “Welfare Cadillac,” written and performed by Guy Drake (1970).

DOCUMENT 25 “Welfare Out of Control—Story of Financial Crisis Cities Face.” U.S. News and World Report, February 8, 1971: 30–34. Reprinted by permission of U.S. News and World Report.

DOCUMENT 26 Archie K. Davis, “Welfare Reform: Time to Do It Right,” Speech to annual meeting of West Virginia Chamber of Commerce, White Sulpher Springs, West Virginia, September 3, 1971, Series I, Box 27, Chamber of Commerce Papers, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Delaware. Reprinted by permission of the Chamber of Commerce of the United States.

DOCUMENT 27 Johnnie Tillmon, “Welfare is a Women’s Issue,” Ms. magazine (1972) 1, no. 1: 111–116. Reprinted with permission.

DOCUMENT 28 Merrillee A. Dolan, “Moynihan, Poverty Programs, and Women—A Female Viewpoint,” n.d. (1972), Carton 48, Folder 35, National Organization for Women Papers, Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Reprinted by permission of the National Organization for Women (NOW).

DOCUMENT 29 “Why work if you can live better on welfare?” (1973). Reprinted by permission of Ray Doty.

DOCUMENT 30 Congress, House of Representatives, Subcommittee on Welfare Reform of the Committee on Agriculture, Hearings on H.R. 9030: The Administration’s Welfare Reform Proposal, Ninety-fifth Congress, First Session, October 31, 1977.

232 • Permission Acknowledgments

DOCUMENT 31 “Welfare Queen” Becomes Issue in Reagan Campaign, New York Times, February 15, 1976: 51. Reprinted by permission of the New York Times.

DOCUMENT 32 DWAC, “Narrative Report, 1982,” Box 1, Folder 2, “DWAC/RAM Annual Reports, 1978–9,” DWAC Papers, Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota. Reprinted by permission of the University of Minnesota.

DOCUMENT 33 RAM Flyer, “Budget Cuts: Stop the Real Welfare Cheats,” 1981, Box 1, Folder 6, “DWAC Staff Meetings—1981–1982,” DWAC Papers, Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota. Reprinted by permission of the University of Minnesota.

DOCUMENT 34 Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980. New York: Basic Books, 1984. Excerpted by permission of Basic Books, Inc.

DOCUMENT 35 Barbara Omolade, It’s a Family Affair: The Real Lives of Black Single Mothers. New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press, 1986. Reprinted with permission.

DOCUMENT 36 “Why every woman in America should beware of welfare cuts” (1995). Reprinted by permission of Women’s Committee of One Hundred.

DOCUMENT 37 “Wisconsin Works (W-2): A Brief Description,” Wisconsin Legislative Reference Bureau, May 1996.

DOCUMENT 38 US Congress, House of Representatives, One hundred and fourth Congress, First Session, “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996”, Public Law 104–193 [H.R. 3734].

DOCUMENT 39 Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign, Mission Statement and Vision Statement, www.economichumanrights.org/about/mission.html (accessed October 4, 2008). Reprinted by permission of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union.

DOCUMENT 40 The White House, “Working Toward Independence,” February 26, 2002, www.whitehouse.gov/ news/releases/2002/02/welfare-reform-announcement-book-all.html (accessed October 4, 2008).

INDEX

Abbot, Grace 17 ABCs of Relief: Image of Recipients Wrong 130–1 abortion 181 abuse, welfare 69, 172; cartoon depicting fraud and 129; ‘welfare queens’ 6, 68–9, 189–91; When It Pays to Play Pauper 109–12 Addams, Jane 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 21 Adequate Income Act 53 African Americans: assessment of the Social Security Act 1935 for 104–6; blamed for rising AFDC rolls 43; culture of poverty among 44–5; difficulties in finding employment for women on ADC 120–1; education in Alabama 105; excluded from social insurance programs 6, 18, 25, 104–5; exclusionary tactics of ADC impacting on 28–30; family breakdown 47, 72, 138–42, 182; female-headed households 138, 139, 140, 141, 201–7; in low-wage jobs 11, 12, 13, 24, 55–6, 65, 105, 140; middle-class 12, 13, 140; military service for 142; moves towards equality with Great Society Reform package 41; numbers of women in the workforce 12, 140; numbers on ADC 20; poverty and reliance on ADC 20, 23–4, 24–5; problems facing the men 139–42; real

lives of single mothers 201–7; in receipt of mothers’ pensions 15–16; stereotypes of welfare recipients 27, 47, 69; unemployment 16, 105, 140; unequal treatment under the GI Bill 1944 21; women’s organizations 13, 49, 201, 205 agricultural workers: African Americans 13, 24, 105; under the ‘employable mother’ rule 28–9; excluded from social insurance benefits 6, 18, 19, 105; poverty amongst 10, 23 Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) 17–22, 100–3; African American reliance on 20, 24–5; attacks on 26–32; changing clientele 19–20, 24–5, 33–4; changing the name 36; difficulties for African American women in finding employment 120–1; distinguishing rumor from fact 130–1; Domestic Worker Training Program 34–5, 116–19; ‘employable mother’ rule 28–9, 42; encouraging mothers to work outside the home 34–5, 36, 113–15, 116–19, 120–1; federal policy to improve and expand 25, 32–7; funding for 18, 26–7, 28; growing hostility to 26–32; inadequate grants 26–7; inclusion of married men 35–6; lack of uniformity across the states 18–19; ‘man in the house’ rules 30,

234 • Index 136, 178; mothers forced to give details of deserting fathers 30–1; mothers made direct beneficiaries 33; photograph of a ‘typical family’ 107; plan to cut welfare in Newburgh 31–2, 36, 126–7, 128, 129; rehabilitation programs 32–7; Social Security Board poster promoting 108; ‘SPIRIT’ plan a response to increasing controversy over 132–4; stereotyping of recipients 25, 27, 29; ‘suitable homes’ rule 29–30, 122–5; welfare rights handbook 150–3 Aid to Dependent Children – Unemployed Parent Provision (ADC-UP) 35–6 Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC): absent fathers 46, 171, 178; blamed for nation’s economic problems 64, 65; a business leader’s view on the problem with 175–6; cartoon depicting mothers on 184; changing attitudes to recipients 37; creating cultural pathologies 46, 64, 70, 72; a critical safety net for women 75–6; debates on reform in the 1960s and 70s 39–40; democratic senators offer solutions to rising rolls 147–9; denounced as an anachronism 68, 76; ending of 76–84, 208–9, 214; freeze on funds for children of unwed mothers or deserting fathers 43–4; grants 61–2; inclusion of fathers 36, 43, 46; intergenerational transmission of values on 69, 74; lengths of time recipients claim the benefit 72, 74; Murray’s proposal to withdraw aid completely 70–1, 197–200; opposition to child support enforcement 59; part of a dangerous trend amongst African Americans 138–42; rolls 42–3, 52, 61, 74, 78, 164, 171, 175; targetted by conservative economists 66–8, 69; voices of recipients 4, 86; Wisconsin Works (W-2) reform 78, 210–13 Aid to Families with Dependent Children Unemployed Parent Provision (AFDC)-UP 36, 43, 46 Alabama 105 Albelda, Randy 82 Altmeyer, Arthur 37 American Enterprise Institute 66, 69

American Public Welfare Association 113, 116, 132 American Red Cross 30, 124 ANC Mothers Anonymous 49 Anguiano, Lupe 77, 185 Armed Forces Qualification Test 142 autonomy, women’s 57–8 Bane, Mary Jo 72 behavior: affecting changes through abolishing welfare 44, 199–200; as an explanation for poverty 6, 15, 44; pathological patterns encouraged by welfare 70–1, 73, 197–200; using welfare to enforce certain 4, 15, 29, 30, 71, 78, 178 Bell, Winifred 29, 120 Berkowitz, Edward 37 Bernstein, Blanche 76 Beyond Entitlement: The Social Obligations of Citizenship 71 birth control 181 Black Power 52, 57 Black Women for Wages for Housework 77 blind, assistance for the 17, 18, 27, 56, 127, 171, 172, 175 Blood, Robert O. 141 Booth, Arch 174 Bruel, Frank 32 Buckley, William F. 32, 128 ‘Bundles from Britain’ 124 Bureau of Labor Statistics 54, 158, 161 Burrell, Alversa 28 Busby, Daphne 205 Bush, George W. 82, 219 Business Week 184 Byrd, Robert 26 Calvert, Mildred 50 Canada 3 caregiving labor 13, 36, 49, 64, 77, 83, 155 Carson, Clayborne 46 Carter, Jimmy 60–1, 66, 185 cartoons 129, 184 Casework with Chronically Dependent Families 120–1 CBS Reports 72 Center on Social Welfare Policy and Law 52 charities 5, 30, 124 Chicago: female-headed households 10;

Index • 235 migration in the early 20th century 9–10; a welfare rights handbook 150–3 child labor 28 child neglect 11, 137 child poverty 3, 81–2, 220 child support enforcement 30–1, 59, 77, 171, 215, 220 childcare: founding of National Federation of Day Nurseries 13; problems obtaining 35, 46, 121, 156, 182–3; reduced funding for 68; subsidies 77, 81, 82, 165, 188; under the W-2 plan 212 childhood, new ideas on the importance of 14 Children’s Bureau 15, 17; help to create ADP program 100; study of mothers’ pensions programs 1931 87–99 City College Center for Worker Education 203 Citywide Coordinating Committee of Welfare Rights Groups, New York 50 Civil Rights Act 1968 41, 44–5 civil rights movement 25, 27, 30, 42, 79; addressing poverty and unemployment 48–9; parting of the ways with welfare rights movement 49 civil service tests 121 Cleveland Mothers 28 Clinton, Bill 63, 77, 78, 79 Cloward, Richard 53, 143, 193 Cohen, Wilbur 37 Committee on Economic Security 17, 100 conservative shift in politics: and the ending of AFDC 76–84; and impact on welfare 64–8; and targetting of AFDC by economists 66–8, 69; and welfare rights activists 74–6 constitutional rights of welfare recipients 135–7 corporate responsibility 193 Craig, Lillian 49 credit for poor people 50–1 culture of poverty 6, 44–5, 46–7, 49, 69, 70 Cuomo, Mario 72 Davis, James H. 74, 123 Davis, Jimmie 29 deindustrialization 23, 24, 27, 42, 56, 65 Dembaugh, Eve 76

Democratic Leadership Council 66, 78 Democratic Party: abandoning commitment to antipoverty policies 60, 62, 63, 66–7, 72, 73, 79, 80, 82; funding of the 66; opposition to FAP 54, 55 Department of Agriculture (USDA) 159–60 Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) 27, 30, 33, 71, 124, 172; Field Letter December 1961 132–4 Department of Labor 138, 158 devolving authority to the states: and the crisis in Louisiana 29–30, 122–5; expansion of the waiver system under the FSA 77–8; to implement workfare programs under OBRA 68; implementation of ADC 18–19, 25, 27–8, 29–30, 33, 34, 36, 122–5; implementation of ADC-UP 35–6; plan to cut welfare in Newburgh 31–2, 36, 126–7, 128, 129; under PRWORA 80–1, 219–20, 221; under the waiver system 77–8; Wisconsin Works (W-2) 210–13 disability assistance 1, 17, 24, 33, 64, 171, 172 discrimination: racial 5, 10, 11, 12, 20, 21, 24, 27, 45, 70, 104–6, 121, 141, 183, 202, 203, 206; against women 16, 37, 121, 180–1, 203, 204, 206 divorce 20, 24, 43, 59, 73, 139, 181 Dodge, Josephine 13 Dolan, Merrillee A. 180 domestic workers 24, 55, 156; African American 6, 11, 13, 55–6, 105; Domestic Worker Training Program 34–5, 116–19; exclusion from social insurance benefits 18, 19, 105 Downer, Cassie 53 Downtown Welfare Advocacy Center (DWAC) 58, 74, 192–4, 195–6 Drake, Guy 166 Du Bois, W.E.B. 45 Duncan, Ruby 26 Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) 60, 66, 78, 81, 220 Ebony 46 Economic Opportunity Act 1964 41, 46 economic security as a right 53, 217–18

236 • Index Ellwood, David T. 72, 78 ‘employable mother’ rule 28–9, 42 employment: Congressional hearing on work-based solutions to poverty 185–8; difficulties in women obtaining economic independence through 34–5, 36, 37, 59–60, 75, 82, 155–6, 182; encouraging single mothers on ADC to work outside the home 34–5, 36, 113–15, 116–19, 120–1; gender segregation in 24, 35, 81; increase in mothers in the workforce 56, 68, 76; men given priority 5, 16, 147, 155, 180, 206; numbers of African American women in the workforce 12, 140; problem of finding employment for African American women on ADC 120–1; see also low-wage jobs; work requirements fair hearings on terminations of welfare 50, 51, 145, 159, 161 Fair Housing Act 1968 41 Family Assistance Plan (FAP) 54–5, 61, 181; estimated costs of 172–3; Nixon’s special message to Congress on the 163–5, 172; West Virginia Chamber of Commerce opposition to 175–6 family breakdown: African American 47, 72, 138–42, 182; belief in welfare as an encouragement to 35, 76, 147, 148, 149, 163, 164; concerns over 37, 45, 49, 53; research on welfare’s role in 71 ‘family cap’ 78, 80 Family Support Act (FSA) 77–8 family values 7, 39, 65, 79 Farmer, James 45 fathers: leaving home to allow mothers to claim welfare 35–6, 46, 47, 171, 178; status in families receiving mothers’ aid 1931 95–7; tracking down absent 30–1, 59, 77, 171, 215, 220 Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) 16 ‘Feed the Babies’ campaign 30 female-headed households: amongst African Americans 138, 139, 140, 141, 201–7; changes in perception of 21–2; growth in 10, 24, 59, 63, 71, 73; lesbian 204; Moynihan’s critique of African American 45, 138–42; other

women’s support for 11–12; trapped in a cycle of poverty 49, 186, 203 feminism and welfare 57–62, 75; Welfare is a Women’s Issue (1972) 57, 177–9 feminization of poverty 59, 75 Flemming, Arthur 30, 124 Ford Foundation 72 Ford, Gerald 63 Fortas, Abe 135–6 fraud, welfare 26, 172; cartoon depicting abuse and 129; welfare queens 6, 68–9, 189–91; When It Pays to Play Pauper 109–12 Frazier, E. Franklin 141 Friedman, Milton 53 Funiciello, Theresa 58 GAI: see guaranteed adequate income (GAI) campaign General Federation of Women’s Clubs 13, 14 Gilder, George 70 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 15 Gingrich, Newt 78 Goldberg v. Kelley (1970) 51–2 Goldwater, Barry 32 Goodwin, Joanne 10 Gordon, Linda 16 Great Society reforms 41, 65, 171 Green, Edith 46 Griffiths, Martha 154, 155, 156, 157 guaranteed adequate income (GAI) campaign 40, 52–7, 60, 179; NWRO’s proposal for 53–4, 158–62, 179 Guaranteed Income: Next Step in Economic Evolution? 52 Hancock, Ange-Marie 69 Harrington, Michael 41 Harrison, Bonita Golda 104 Hayek, Friedrich 32 Helling, Sally 75 Heritage Foundation 66, 69 Higgins, Frank P. 116 higher education programs 203 Hill, Robert 202 Hinds County Welfare Rights Movement 50 Hull House, Chicago 9 Human Resources Administration, New York City 203 human rights 217–18

Index • 237 Hunter College 128 illegitimacy: see out-of-wedlock births immigrants, benefits for legal 79, 221 Income Support Tier 61 industrial accidents 10 inflation 28, 56, 60, 160 International Ladies Garment Workers Union 12 It’s A Family Affair: The Real Lives of Black Single Mothers 201–7 Job Corps 41 Job Opportunities and Basic Skills (JOBS) 77, 212 Johnson, Lyndon B. 40, 41, 44, 70 Jordan, Vernon 72 Kennedy, John F. 35, 41, 132 Kennedy, Robert 147, 148, 149 Kensington Welfare Rights Union 82, 217 King, Martin Luther 45, 46, 48, 53 King v. Smith (1968) 51 Kitchen Table Press 201 Knebel, Fletcher 32 Kristol, Irving 70 Kurz, Demie 74 Ladd-Taylor, Molly 15 Law, The 135 laws and poverty 135–7 League of Women Voters 44, 53, 61 legal challenges: battles to establish a right to assistance 51–2; proceedings to test assistance policies 137; right to fair hearings upon the termination of welfare 51, 145 Lenroot, Katherine 17 lesbian mothers 204 Lewis, Oscar 44 Lindsay, John V. 170 Lockheed Martin 81 Long, Russell 47, 55, 147, 148, 149 Look 32 Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–80 70–1, 197–200 Louisiana 28, 29, 110; ADC crisis in 29–30, 122–5 Low-Income Women Project 60 low-wage jobs: African Americans in 11, 12, 13, 24, 55–6, 65, 105, 140; as Nurses’ aids 187; stagnation of real

wages in 65; trapped in poverty with 52, 56, 60, 76, 80, 81, 164–5; welfare supplement for 67, 68, 165, 172, 175, 178–9, 202–3; see also agricultural workers; domestic workers Maid to Order 34–5, 116–19 male breadwinner ideology 15, 17, 45, 47, 55, 77 ‘man in the house’ rules 30, 136, 178 Manhattan Institute 69 marriage: government promotion of 56, 71, 78, 80, 82, 214, 216, 219, 220; welfare a disincentive to 70; welfare compared to 178 Mason, Margaret 58 maternalism 13–14, 15, 49 Mead, Lawrence 71, 78 Mead, Margaret 139–40 Medicaid 1, 41, 67, 77, 79, 81, 199, 221 Medicare 41, 126 Mertz, Alice E. 113 Meyers, Sam 193 Mica, John 78 Michel, Sonya 13, 68 Mink, Gwendolyn 15 Minnesota Recipients Alliance 76 Mitchell, Joseph 31–2, 40, 126; support for 128, 129 Mobil Oil International 193 Morton, Thurston, B. 148, 149 Mortorana, Mary Ann 75 motherhood 15, 21, 23, 34, 47, 50, 58, 83 Mothers’ Campaign for Welfare 28 Mothers for Adequate Welfare 28, 50 mothers’ pensions 14–16, 19; Children’s Bureau study 1931 87–99; families aided per 10,000 population 93–4; monthly grants by state 92–3; race of mothers’ receiving 98–9; status of fathers in families receiving 95–7 Moyers, Bill 72–3 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick 44, 46, 60, 76, 181, 202; critique of 180–3; report on The Negro Family: The Case for National Action 45, 47, 138–42 Moynihan, Poverty Programs and Women – A Female Viewpoint 180–3 Ms. 57, 177 Murray, Charles 70–1, 197 Naples, Nancy 77

238 • Index National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) 31 National Coalition on Women, Work and Welfare 75 National Congress of Mothers 14 National Congress of Neighborhood Women 75 National Council of Churches of Christ 44, 53 National Council on Women, Work and Welfare 58 National Federation of Day Nurseries 13 National Organization for Women (NOW) 57, 59, 61, 75 National Social Welfare Assembly 135 National Urban League 29–30, 46, 49, 53, 72, 104; memorandum on ADC crisis in Louisiana 122–5 National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) 39, 49, 52, 58, 161, 182; proposal for a guaranteed adequate income 53–4, 158–62, 179 National Women’s Political Caucus 75, 185–8 Nation’s Business 28–9, 109 Negative Income Tax 49, 52, 53, 55, 60 Negro Family: The Case for National Action 138–42; critique of 181–3 Nelson, Barbara 18 ‘new consensus’ on welfare 71–3 New Deal welfare policies 3, 5–6, 19, 24, 65, 200 New York City 80, 170, 191, 203; survey showing women on welfare want to work 155, 182; welfare rights groups 49, 50, 75 New York Times 31, 208, 209 Newburgh, New York 31–2, 36, 128, 129; Minutes of the City Council 1961 126–7 Nichol, Robert 191 Nixon, Richard M. 54, 170, 172; special message to Congress on reform of the nation’s welfare system 163–5, 172 Norton, Eleanor Holmes 72 Notice to Law Enforcement Officials 30 Novak, Michael 72 O’Connor, Alice 73 Old Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) 19, 33; excluded groups 20 Old Age Assistance 6, 17, 18, 24

old age insurance 64, 111, 171, 172; abuse of 109–10 Old Age Insurance program 18, 19; excluded groups 18, 105; need to establish proof of age 105 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (OBRA) 67–8 Omolade, Barbara 201 Opportunity 104 Orleck, Annelise 26, 28 Other America,The 41 out-of-wedlock births: applying different standards of law to 136; attempts to curb 43, 80; belief in welfare as an encouragement to 27, 71, 76, 147, 149, 171, 175; concept of ‘illegitimacy’ 181–2; plans to cut welfare in Newburgh for 31, 126; rising numbers 39, 43, 63, 73, 74, 215–16; and ‘suitable home rule’ crisis in Louisiana 29–30, 122–5; supplying welfare for 26, 31, 56, 71, 77 patriarchal ideal 20, 181, 183, 202, 206 Patterson, James 26, 29 Pearce, Diana 59 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) 4–5, 79–81, 214–16; Bush’s assessment and recommendations 82, 219–21 Philadelphia Inquirer 130 Philadelphia Negro, The 45 Phillips, Ruby 28–9 Piven, Frances Fox 53, 143, 193 ‘Poor People’s Campaign’ 48 Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign 217–18 poverty: between 1900 and 1930 10; of African Americans in the 1950s 23–4; amongst agricultural workers 10, 23; behavior as an explanation for 6, 15, 44, 69; child 3, 81–2, 220; critique of federal antipoverty policies 180–3; culture of 6, 44–5, 46, 49, 69, 70; distinction between worthy and unworthy poor 3–4; of families in receipt of ADC 24–5, 26–7; femaleheaded households in a cycle of 49, 86, 203; feminist attention to issues of 58–9; feminization of 59, 75; and intergenerational transmission of

Index • 239 values 69, 74; low-wage jobs trapping people in 52, 56, 60, 76, 80, 81, 164–5; Poverty and the Law 135–7; in the shift to a new service economy 56, 66; A Strategy to End Poverty 143–6; War on Poverty 37, 40–2, 44 ‘poverty line’ 54, 72, 159–60, 163, 203; welfare below the 26, 61, 68 private charities 5, 30, 124 private sector 2, 11, 46; welfare-to-work programs 81 Program for Better Jobs and Income (PBJI) 61, 185–8 Public Welfare Amendments 1962 36; ‘SPIRIT’ plan outlines for 132–4 race: attitudes to gender and 3, 5, 6, 55, 58; divisions in the working-class 3; entwined with welfare 67; of mothers receiving mothers’ pensions in 1931 98–9 Reader’s Digest 69 Reagan, Ronald 63, 67, 70, 71, 76, 170, 172, 178; criticizes ‘welfare queens’ 68–9, 189–91 Record 128 Redistribute America Movement (RAM) 192–4; flyer 195–6 ‘rehabilitation’ 32–7, 41–2 reproductive rights 57–8, 178, 181 Ribicoff, Abraham 37, 132–4 ‘right to live’ 40, 50, 52, 60, 64, 158 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 16, 17, 19 Rosado v. Wyman (1970) 52 Roth, Nina 71 Rustin, Bayard 45 Ryan, William 45 San Antonio Housing Projects 186 Sanders, Beulah 154, 156, 157 Saturday Evening Post 26 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act 1944 (GI Bill) 1, 21 Shapiro v. Thompson (1969) 51 single-parent families: see female-headed households Sisterhood of Black Single Mothers 201, 205 social insurance 16–21, 25, 27, 33, 100, 104; exclusions 6, 18, 19, 25 Social Security Act 1935 17–18, 37; assessment of benefit to African

Americans 104–6; establishment of ADC program 100–3; plans to expand the welfare program 20–1 Social Security Act Amendments 1939 19 Social Security Act Amendments 1956 34, 35 Social Security Act Amendments 1967 52, 56; exchange during the Congressional hearings on 147–9; and the ‘welfare crisis’ 42–7 Social Security Administration (SSA) 17, 32, 109, 165 Social Security Board 18, 106, 108 Social Security: What Does It Mean for the Negro? 104–6 social workers: encouraging ADC mothers to work outside the home 35, 113–15; management of mothers’ pensions 15–16; policy of ‘rehabilitation’ 34; support for welfare rights movement 44, 48, 54; views of ADC clients 33–4 Southern Christian Leadership Council 46, 48, 54 ‘SPIRIT’ Plan 132–4 stereotypes of welfare recipients 1–2, 25, 27, 29, 31, 32, 47, 78, 181; newspaper article to dispel rumors about 130–1; Welfare Cadillac 166–8; ‘welfare queens’ 68–9, 189–91 sterilization of welfare recipients 57–8, 178 Stevenson, Charles 109 stigma: of having an ‘illegal’ child 182; of receiving welfare 1–2, 40, 44, 145, 184; of single motherhood 80 Strategy to End Poverty, A 143–6 Students for a Democratic Society 49 ‘substitute father’ rules 30, 42, 51 ‘suitable home’ laws 29–30; and the ensuing crisis in Louisiana 122–5 Survivors Insurance 2, 19, 25, 111 Taino Towers 191 Task Force on Poverty and Welfare 72 Taylor, Linda 189, 190 teenage mothers 6, 73, 80, 198, 205, 206 teenage pregnancies 7, 201, 206, 215; addressing male responsibility for 216 Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF) 79, 80, 81, 82, 214, 215–16 Theobald, Robert 52–3

240 • Index Tillmon, Johnnie 49, 57, 58, 177 Tilly, Chris 82 Time 69 Times-Union 129 Tomlinson, Kenneth 69 ‘traditional family’ 7, 39, 65, 79 training: access for women to federal programs 36, 43, 46, 60, 154, 182–3; ADC mothers for civil service tests 120–1; additional funds proposed under FAP 165; alternative welfare model based on 176; Domestic Worker Training Program 34–5, 116–19; lack of funding under the Family Support Act 77; minimal job training under PRWORA 80; Nurses’ Aid program 187; San Antonio Junior College ‘Cash Register’ course 186–7; in W-2 subsidized placements 211–12; well-paid job training for women 75 Twenty Years at Hull House 9 underclass 63, 69–73, 74, 202 unemployment 2, 16, 105, 140; in the 1970s 56, 65, 76 Unemployment Insurance (UI) program 5, 17, 20, 33, 35, 66; excluded groups 18, 59, 106 unions 10, 12, 13, 65, 82, 193 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 217, 218 University of Michigan School of Social Work 35 Up from Dependency 77 US Congress: Hearing on Income Maintenance 154–7; Hearings on HR 12080: Social Security Amendments of 1967 147–9; Hearings on HR 9030: The Administration’s Welfare Reform Proposal 185–8 U.S. News and World Report 169 Vanishing Family: Crisis in Black America 72–3 Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) 41, 48 Voting Rights Act 1965 41, 45 waiver system 77–8 Wall Street Journal 31 ‘War on Poverty’ 37, 40–2, 44 Washington, Jennette 49

Washington Pension Union 110 Washington Star 189 Weir, Frank H. 130 Welfare Cadillac 166–8 ‘welfare crisis’ 27, 62; article in U.S. News and World Report 169–73; and the Social Security Act Amendments 1967 42–7 Welfare is a Women’s Issue 57, 177–9 Welfare Out of Control – Story of Financial Crisis Cities Face 169–73 ‘welfare queens’ 6, 68–9, 189–91 Welfare Reform: Time to do it Right 174–6 welfare rights handbooks 50, 150–3 welfare rights movement 39–40, 47–52; in the 1980s and 90s 64, 74–6; ad in New York Times opposing the ending of AFDC 208–9; Congressional hearing on income maintenance programs 154–7; DWAC challenges the definition of welfare 195–6; DWAC report on activities 1982 192–4; and feminism 57–62, 177–9; parting ways with the civil rights movement 49; Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign 217–18; prevention of a ‘freeze’ on welfare 44; publishing a welfare rights handbook 150–3; a strategy to end poverty for the 143–6; support for guaranteed income plan 54 welfare rolls: under ADC 122; under AFDC 42, 74, 78, 164, 175; under PRWORA 80; under Reagan 67, 191 Welfare Warriors 82 ‘welfarism’ 17, 32, 174, 175 West Virginia Chamber of Commerce 174 Western Europe 3 Westside Welfare Recipients League 49 When It Pays to Play Pauper 109–12 White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children 1909 14 Wickenden, Elizabeth 135 Wider Opportunities for Women 59 widows 2, 6, 10, 15, 19, 20, 25, 200 Wiley, George 49, 154, 155, 156 Williams, Edward Bennett 135 Wisconsin Works (W-2) 78, 210–13 Wolfe, Donald M. 141 Women’s Bureau 46, 60, 81

Index • 241 Women’s Committee of One Hundred 208 Women’s Job Corps 46 Women’s Lobby 58, 61 women’s organizations 13, 14, 44, 49, 61; African American 13, 49, 201, 205; feminist groups support for AFDC recipients 57, 75, 77; lobbying for employment programs 60, 77 Work Incentive Program (WIN) 43, 77; criticisms of 60, 182–3, 187 work requirements: Congressional hearings on Social Security Act Amendments 1967 147–9; Congressional subcommittee debate over women and 154–7;

denouncement of 49, 59; under the ‘employable mother’ rule 28–9; under the Family Support Act 77; under OBRA 67–8; under PRWORA 80, 220; under Social Security Act Amendments 1967 43, 47, 56; Talmadge Amendments 56; under Wisconsin Works 78, 210–13; without maternity leave 83 workfare programs 5, 68, 77, 78, 80, 170 Working Mothers in the Aid to Dependent Children Program 113–15 Working Toward Independence 219–21 Young Americans for Freedom 32, 128 Young, Whitney 45, 46, 49