Welfare in the United States A History with Documents, 1935–1996 Edited by Premilla Nadasen,
Jennifer Mittelstadt, Marisa Chappell
Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition (March 8, 2009)
ISBN: 9780415989794
Welfare has been central to a number of significant political debates in modern America:
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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?
In the contemporary US, "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.
Other 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 and subsidies and food
stamps.
Some of these programs aimed to help the poor; but the nation's generous social welfare measures-such as
Social Security, Medicare and veteran's benefits-are available to people regardless of income status.
By 1980s, the federal government was spending twenty times as much for Social Security programs as for
AFDC grants.
Recipients of AFDC are characterized as promiscuous and irresponsible African American women who are
undeserving of assistance.
Due to the 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 the 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.
As industrialized nations go, the US is far behind its counterparts in providing welfare benefits.
"American exceptionalism", which constrains welfare state development and stigmatized AFDC
relative weakness of the US labor movement Racial divisions within the working class 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.
Deep Puritan work ethic
The sanctity of the free market
Individual responsibility
Other factors:
The particular structure of the New Deal welfare state Nation's shifting attitudes about race and gender
Increased political power of corporate America
Welfare 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
(impoverished through no fault of their own), but not for the "idle poor" (deemed idle or lacking work ethic)
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AFDC also has been used to shape and even control their behavior:
Denial of government aid has been used to push needed workers into low wage labor.
Its provision was contingent on monitoring and "correcting" the behaviors of recipients especially on sexual
activity and parenting.
New Deal welfare policies inscribed social inequality into its institutional structure. The vast majority of
African American workers did not 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 welfare state's less generous, more restrictive public
assistance programs designed for the poor such as food stamps, public housing and AFDC.
Aid to Dependent Children, as it was known before 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 60s, the goals of the program
shifted from supporting women in their work as mothers to requiring their to take paid employment outside
their home.
Longstanding cultural stereotypes of black women as Jezebels -sexually promiscuous seductressescompromised their claim to full time motherhood and deemed unworthy of public assistance.
"welfare queens"
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 strength in postwar period.
Benefits are far from generous and AFDC almost never brought families out of poverty.
African American women have always been a minority of recipients.
Strict eligibility criteria excluded many needy mothers and children from these benefits.
Most of them are 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.
Nonetheless, the myths and stereotypes about welfare exists.
Powerful political tool, AFDC and its recipients were scapegoats for crumbling urban infrastructure Anxiety
about family and community transitions Economic uncertainty
Welfare recipients are hard-working Americans occasionally but find themselves in need of a safety net
Conservative politicians routinely labeled their liberal counterparts as big spenders who supports a welfare
population that cheats the government and undermines the America's core value: the traditional family and
work ethic.
Discussions of poverty have centered on dysfunctional families, teenage pregnancy and welfare fraud.
What about more fundamental issues like low wages, the lack of affordable child care, inadequate public
transportation systems, failing schools, shuttered factories, the growing number of multinational
corporations, decline of organized labor, deindustrialization and outsourcing and the erosion of social
responsibility for citizens' well-being?
Rather than raising women workers' status or easing the burdens of combining work and parenthood,
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 a small cash payments from the government-the program would
enable single mothers to forgo paid work and attend to children in their own home...by 1917, 35 states had
passed some form of "mother's pension" (14)
During the beginning of the Great Depression, 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. It provided over 3 billion dollars for public assistance regardless of
their family status. However, the federal government worried that the widespread extension of relief
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measures would produce "welfarism," pauperizing the poor and discouraging independence and initiative.
The Committee on Economic Security thus decided to create what's eventually known as the Social Security
Act of 1935. It enshrines a "two-channel" welfare state. One channel provided generous, respectable
entitlements for primarily white male workers, while the other provided public assistance for specific
categories of needy Americans.
Historian Barbara Nelson (1990)
(14-17)
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. They also excludes temporary, part-time and
seasonal workers
Aid to dependent children, while a federal program, the federal government did not fully fund it, but
reimbursed to the states a proportion of their spending. It did not financially support the "caretaker" - miserly
average amount of $13 a month per child in 1930s. Many single women taking care of dependent children
still had to work outside the home to make ends meet. States not only determined the size of the ADC, but
they also had maximum leeway to design eligibility criteria as long as they did not contradict federal rules.
(17-19)
1940s, 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."
Legislation proposed in 1943 and 1945 aimed to expand social insurance programs by allowing far more
American access to old age and unemployment insurance, an unified, nationally administered public
assistance program. If passed, this kind of public assistance program would have 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 of needy Americans entitled to federal government assistance. They would not
have been as easily singled out or cast as socially marginal.
However, as the US entered into the Cold War, the era's anticommunist rhetoric to expanded social welfare
proposals as anti-capitalist and undemocratic.
Unprecedented prosperity of the postwar years obscured the economic problems of the working-class and
poor people.
The country is preoccupied new class of "needy" people-the soldiers returning from war. Result: GI Bill of
1944.
Post war, there's a growth in all of the federal welfare programs created by the New Deal. By 1960, with over
3 million clients, ADC was the largest and most costly federal public assistance program.
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.
Old stereotypes and new myths were used to demonize poverty stricken single mothers.
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Cracking down on "welfare chiselers".
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Lazy immoral cheaters.
Increasing attack from the press and states' new restrictive rules.
"it pays to play pauper"
Negative press coverage
Over-hyped, unscientific studies exaggerated rates of frauds in the ADC program.
States' Exclusionary laws flourish from the 1940s to the 1960s
1943 Louisiana passed "employable mother" rule. All capable women with children over the age of 7 who
received public aid could be denied assistance when agricultural work was available
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"suitable home" laws, in the 1950s, nearly half of all states redefined the meaning of a "suitable
home" in order to exclude unwed mothers from the program.
"nonstable, nonlegal union"
Non-marital childbearing
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"man in the house" rules Evidence of men could render the home "unsuitable"
There was also national reform effort.
Newburgh, New York: Joseph Mitchell launched a "war on the welfare state", propelled ADC onto the
national political agenda and fostered widespread public concern about welfare spending.
"Rehabilitation": changing the original purpose of welfare
1950s, 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. They view the new clients were afflicted with
"social disabilities" that they were "immature", "dependent"
Their solution: "rehabilitation"--utilize social services and counseling-aim to improve family life and
encourage self-support
ADC officially sought to monitor the clients' mothering and encourage them to take paid employment outside
the home.
ADC, 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"
1962-changed the name of the program to Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC); increasing the
focus on the adults in the family, rather than the children.
"Bread, Justice, Dignity and Adequate Income" was the rally cry of a powerful welfare rights advocacy group
in 1960s.
War on Poverty
The Welfare Crisis
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.
Proponents of the "culture of poverty" (coined by anthropologist Oscar Lewis) theories that had emerged in
the postwar period and flourished in 1960s. They believed that the problem of poverty lay within individual
poor people themselves (poverty is a way of life) rather than broader structural barriers to economic mobility
1967 social security amendments not only required the 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.
These reforms emphasized work, though 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
Welfare rights movement
organized for a right to welfare and countered efforts to restrict AFDC and transform it into workfare
The guaranteed income campaign
Basic economic security; guaranteed by the federal government, an "absolute constitutional right"
Negative Income Tax
AFDC rolls rose gradually during the 1970s and remained fairly steady during the 1980s despite growing
numbers of single mother households. Also, the real value of benefits declined steadily during the 1970s.
AFDC, unlike other benefits, are not inflation-proof.
The End of Welfare as We Knew It
Bill Clinton, the was the Arkansas governor, denounced in 1991: "the idea abroad in the land that if you
abandon your children the government will raise them." and the poor parents must be asked to "assume
their responsibilities and force to do it if they refuse"
1970s: Stagflation
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1980s: increasing global competition, intensifying racial disparities (minorities were shut out of more
lucrative jobs.)
Conservative economists argued that high tax rates, cumbersome federal regulations 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 one percent of the federal
spending.
Reagan put conservative economic theories into actions with significant tax cuts for corporations and
wealthy Americans and cuts in social spending for the poor.
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.
"Welfare Queens"
"The American Underclass" (hopeless impoverished urban blacks) Reagan made an attack on welfare
recipients a cornerstone of his political strategies and his domestic policy.
He charged the program is riddled with fraud, and employed racial and gendered stereotypes. His top
advisors lamented that an "ethic of work has been replaced by an ethic of dependence"
Discussions of the "The American Underclass" blamed poverty on the intergenerational transmission of
destructive values and behaviors (instead of structural inequalities like social discrimination, segregation and
economic deprivation)
Politicians continue to condemn 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)
The Family Support Act (FSA) of 1988, required states to enroll recipients with children as young as three
into Job Opportunities and Basic Skills (JOBS) 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"
In 1996, Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA)
Replaced AFDC with Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF), a block grant to states. TANF did not
require states to provide any assistance, and in fact, it prohibited states from providing too much.
Strict Federal guidelines: maximum of two years of continuous assistance, mandatory work requirements, a
five year lifetime cap on benefits Excluded recent immigrants (those who had been in the US for less than
five years) from receiving TANF, food stamps and other federal welfare benefits) Emphasized the "family
values" agenda: free market, tax reductions and social spending cuts and reviving" traditional American
family.
See attached (from the book): 108, 109-112, 129, 130-1, 143-9, 166-8, 169-173, 184, 214-6 (Please ask
Lokki if you need these pages)
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