Women and Children in the Age of Welfare ‘Reform’—It’s Time to Redefine Our Values!
By Cathy Talbott
CARBONDALE, IL—In her book “Flat Broke with Children: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform,” author and Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies (University of VA) Sharon Hays, writes, “A nation’s laws reflect a nation’s values. Like all laws, the law reforming welfare operates as a mechanism of social control to deter would-be transgressors and to discipline those who are measured as deviant according to its standards.”
Aid to Dependent Children, part of the New Deal legislation in 1935, expanded state laws that earlier provided “mother’s pensions” to widows so they could care for their children at home. Based on the “American family ideal of a breadwinning husband and a domestic wife, if the husband was absent, the state would step in to support the mother and children.” (Hays points out, however, that, “in practice, aid was denied to many women who were understood as not ‘virtuous’ enough to be worthy of the family ideal.”)
With the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (1996) under the Democrat administration of Bill Clinton, poor families were no longer ‘entitled’ to welfare benefits. The new law gutted the welfare system, offering states “more flexibility” to meet targets for moving people off Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and into “gainful employment.” The twin political parties of the corporations claim welfare reform a success. After all, after 16 years, the TANF caseload has declined by 60%.
However, as Michelle Chen points out in “How Reforming Welfare and Gutting Programs for the Poor Became a Bipartisan Platform,” the official poverty rate now exceeds its 1996 level, meaning a much smaller share of poor families receive cash assistance from TANF than prior to reform. While the poorest of the poor are women and children of color, the majority of poor have always been white. The myth of the “Black Welfare Queen” was created to garner support for trashing welfare for us all. Today, it doesn’t matter what your skin color or ethnic background is. If you’re poor, unemployed, underemployed, a single parent or a family struggling to get by, the new “national value” discards the poor altogether, blaming us for the “moral decline” of the nation as we are being thrown onto the trash heap of history by electronic, labor-less production, which destroys our ability to work for wages.
We must not tolerate the further assault on our rights. This is our country. The vision expressed for a new America in the Green Party’s New Deal and the community spirit forged by the recent Chicago Teachers’ strike will continue to create solidarity. There should be no hungry children! Education should be free and universal! The homeless should be housed! Our land, water and air should be held in common, kept clean for future generations. We must continue to gather our forces and educate our sisters and brothers for the final battle: We will have a better world for us and our families!
Cathy Talbott is a former telephone operator, a job lost to automation. She was a homeless mother of two and fights for welfare rights. A former co-host of a weekly community radio program out of Carbondale, IL, “Occupy the Airwaves,” Cathy is the Environmental Desk for the People’s Tribune.
