Rethinking the Welfare Rights Movement

Premilla Nadasen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415800853
• eBook ISBN: 9781136490750
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The welfare rights movement was an interracial protest movement of poor women on AFDC who demanded reform of welfare policy, greater respect and dignity, and financial support to properly raise and care for their children. In short, they pushed for a right to welfare. Lasting from the early 1960s to the mid 1970s, the welfare rights movement crossed political boundaries, fighting simultaneously for women's rights, economic justice, and black women's empowerment through welfare assistance. Its members challenged stereotypes, engaged in Congressional debates, and developed a sophisticated political analysis that combined race, class, gender, and culture, and crafted a distinctive, feminist, anti-racist politics rooted in their experiences as poor women of color.

The Welfare Rights Movement provides a short, accessible overview of this important social and political movement, highlighting key events and key figures, the movement's strengths and weaknesses, and how it intersected with other social and political movements of the itme, as well as its lasting effect on the country. It is perfect for anyone wanting to obtain an introduction to the welfare rights movement of the twentieth century.

1

THE ORIGINS OF THE WELFARE RIGHTS MOVEMENT

The 1966 Ohio March was a milestone for the welfare rights movement. Grassroots activists from around the country participated in this historic protest and established networks of solidarity that would sustain the movement over the next nine years. But rather than a starting point, the march was more accurately a turning point. Prior to the march women welfare rights activists had formed neighborhood associations or local support groups to challenge the unfair practices and policies of the welfare system—in some cases a decade before the Ohio March. Their political initiatives reflected the multiple identities and the issues with which recipients were engaged on the ground and were rooted in the women’s day-to-day experiences with welfare.

“Welfare” can refer to any range of government assistance programs, including social security for the elderly or student aid programs or even farm subsidies. But, in most cases, when people talk about welfare they are referring to cash assistance to the poor. Over time “welfare” has become synonymous with AFDC or what is today Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), a specific program for poor single mothers. During the postwar period as more African American women joined the welfare rolls, AFDC became more punitive and officials instituted tougher regulations and eligibility criteria. In many ways, welfare became a program that disciplined poor women rather than supported them. In addition, AFDC achieved unparalleled importance in American political discourse. It was a touchstone for debates about government bureaucracy, single motherhood, and inner-city decline. These issues informed both the unfolding reform efforts in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the political evolution of the welfare rights movement.

Welfare rights activists organized first and foremost against the dehumanizing and surveillance-based components of welfare. The welfare program aimed to regulate the lives of poor women, deciding how they should raise their children, whom they could see, how to spend their money, and when they should enter the labor market. Although initiated to aid poor mothers, in the post-war period race came to dominate the politics of AFDC, as welfare became more punitive and exerted greater control over recipients’ lives. The welfare rights movement emerged in part because of this dramatic transformation in AFDC.

History of AFDC and Support for Single Mothers

When initially established in 1935, AFDC was known as Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) and was part of the Social Security Act, a package of legislation passed in the midst of the Great Depression that sought to create an economic safety net for most Americans. The Social Security Act had two primary components: social insurance and public assistance. Social insurance programs, such as social security and unemployment compensation, were federally run, depended upon payroll contributions from workers, who were more likely to be male and white. Public assistance included ADC, Old Age Assistance for the elderly poor, and Aid to the Disabled. Public assistance was less generous and more restrictive than social insurance and served a greater proportion of women and people of color.¹ Unlike social insurance, which did not have income requirements—so everyone regardless of need could receive benefits if they paid into the program—public assistance was means-tested: recipients had to be poor in order to qualify. The federal government provided oversight and matching funds for public assistance, but states controlled eligibility criteria, determined budgets, and essentially ran the program. Consequently, ADC payments varied widely from state to state, and local politics, to a large degree, shaped the program.²

Through ADC, states granted monthly stipends to poor single mothers. ADC reinforced traditional gender roles of the male breadwinner and female caretaker because it offered assistance to mothers who did not have a husband to support them.³ The rationale was that if the husband or father could not financially support the family, the state should step into that role, so mothers could care for their children. And, although the idea that single mothers should be encouraged in their work as mothers prevailed in the political discourse, in practice, most ADC recipients worked or supplemented their monthly allowance, which was simply too little to support their children. Local welfare departments often expected recipients to work even though they saw them primarily as mothers.⁴ To deflect potential criticism, caseworkers made assistance available only to recipients they believed were blameless for their current situation, morally pure, and properly disciplining and caring for their children. Beginning in the 1940s and continuing into the 1950s local officials passed regulations to limit eligibility.⁵ These included: “suitable home” laws denying aid to mothers who bore children out of wedlock or engaged in other behavior that caseworkers considered immoral or inappropriate; “substitute father” or “man-in-the-house” rules denying aid to women if there was any evidence of a male present in her home; employable mother laws refusing assistance to women physically able to work; and residence laws denying assistance to migrants from outside the state.⁶ Despite the limited benefits and strict eligibility criteria, ADC did provide an allowance to help some mothers raise their children.⁷

Patterns of discrimination in the program were widespread. Racial, cultural, and class biases shaped social workers’ views of who was a worthy and unworthy recipient. White women, most of whom were widows or deserted by their husbands, overwhelmingly populated the welfare rolls in the late 1930s.⁸ Caseworkers expected poor single mothers receiving assistance to conform to white middle-class notions of proper motherhood and used noncompliance as grounds to deny assistance. Countless needy African American women never received aid, especially in the South and other areas where large numbers of African Americans lived. Although laws restricting eligibility were not race-specific, they were applied disproportionately to African American women. In 1943 the state of Louisiana refused assistance to women during cotton-picking season. Georgia passed an employable mother rule in 1952. Michigan and Florida passed suitable home laws in 1953 and 1959, respectively.⁹

Employable mother laws, in particular, were often designed to ensure an adequate supply of laborers to the workforce. They were directed primarily at African American women, who had a long history of employment outside the household. A field supervisor in a southern state explicitly made this connection:

The number of Negro [welfare] cases is few due to the unanimous feeling on the part of the staff and board that there are more work opportunities for Negro women and to their intense desire not to interfere with local labor conditions. The attitude that “they have always gotten along,” and that “all they’ll do is have more children” is definite … [They see no] reason why the employable Negro mother should not continue her usually sketchy seasonal labor or indefinite domestic service rather than receive a public assistance grant.¹⁰

Consequently, southern officials routinely tightened eligibility and forced recipients into the labor market during periods of labor shortage.¹¹ Thus, black women’s status as welfare recipients was bound up with their relationship to the labor market. Black women, more often seen as laborers than as mothers, were considered less deserving of public assistance than other women.¹²

Black Women’s Entry onto the Welfare Rolls

Between 1950 and 1960 there were increasing attacks on and criticism of AFDC. Some of this had to do with the expansion of the rolls. The number of families on welfare grew from 652,000 in 1950 to 806,000 in 1960.¹³ While a substantial increase, this alone does not explain the outcry. Public concern about welfare centered more on the particular welfare recipients joining the welfare rolls. By 1960, women of color, divorced and never-married women were a larger portion of those receiving welfare. The 1939 Amendments to the Social Security Act encouraged this trend by extending social security insurance coverage to widows and their children. The Amendments moved “deserving” women and children, whose husbands and fathers had died, from the ADC rolls into the more respectable social security program, leaving ADC with a larger percentage of divorced and unmarried mothers. In 1961, widows made up only 7.7 percent of the ADC caseload, down from 43 percent in 1937.¹⁴

The percentage of African Americans on ADC rose from 31 percent in 1950 to 48 percent in 1961.¹⁵ This can be attributed in part to growing migration to the North. African Americans fled both Jim Crow racism and declining job opportunities in the South. Mechanization and other changes in agricultural production in the postwar South left many African Americans without work. Between 1940 and 1960, more than three million African Americans made their way from the South to northern cities in search of employment. Although many found work, deindustrialization in conjunction with widespread race and gender employment discrimination led to a disproportionately large number of unemployed or underemployed African Americans. In 1960, the official unemployment rate was 4.9 percent for whites and 10.2 percent for nonwhites.¹⁶ Those arriving in the North may have turned to welfare departments for economic support as a last resort.

In addition, nonwhite and African American women were disproportionately single mothers. In 1960 the official non-marital birth rate for whites was 23 out of 1,000 births. For nonwhites it was 216.¹⁷ Although single motherhood increased for all racial groups after World War II, white women becoming pregnant were well hidden from the public eye. They were sent off to birthing homes and their babies quietly put up for adoption. Black women had fewer institutional resources available. The lack of avenues for adoption, in addition to community values discouraging mothers from giving up their children, meant that unmarried black women kept their children and raised them at a far higher rate than unmarried white women.¹⁸ This higher rate of black single motherhood coupled with higher poverty rates translated into a higher ADC rate for African American women. Taking into account their poverty and non-marital birth rates, black women were actually underrepresented on ADC.

Nevertheless, the increase in the number of black single mothers on welfare caused public alarm.¹⁹ Using hyperbole and inflammatory rhetoric, politicians and the press hammered away at the apparent overrepresentation of black women on ADC. Increasingly, the politics of welfare converged on the stereotypical image of a black unmarried welfare mother who was lazy and dishonest. This image, more than any other, fed the fires of the welfare controversy.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s a welfare backlash by local politicians, the conservative press, and many ordinary white Americans exposed purported welfare fraud. Special investigative committees documented and ferreted out recipients allegedly unworthy of support. They charged that women recipients had several children outside of marriage, fathers took no responsibility for raising their children, and parents simply did not want to work. In most cases, the stereotypical welfare recipient was an African American woman. Further investigations into these claims, however, rarely revealed widespread fraud and found little abuse in the system. In Detroit, for example, a 1948 study revealed only two cases of fraud and in neither case was the recipient convicted of criminal wrongdoing.²⁰ Nevertheless, the investigations aroused public passion about welfare and planted in the minds of many Americans inextricable associations between receipt of ADC, race, immorality, and disdain for employment.

The press also highlighted the problems of cultural pathologies and sexual immorality. One investigator reported that 93 percent of ADC recipients in Washington, D.C. in 1962 were African American and that “Women with several illegitimate children, by several different fathers, were often found living with men who were bringing home regular paychecks.”²¹ Unlike when ADC was first established and financial assistance was deemed necessary for single mothers to raise healthy and well-adjusted children, by the early 1960s welfare for single mothers was considered detrimental. In 1963, an author for the Saturday Evening Post commented: “Today’s welfare child, raised in hopelessness and dependency, becomes tomorrow’s welfare adult, pauperized and helpless.”²² US News and World Report reported in 1965 that the rise in welfare rolls was due to the “mass migrations of unskilled Negroes from the South” and their “high rate of illegitimacy.” The increasing number of “welfare babies” would “breed more criminals, more mental defectives, more unemployables of almost every type.” The paper profiled the typical ADC recipient in Chicago: “A poor Negro girl: … She is insecure, uneducated, unsophisticated, frightened.”²³ One official referred to children on welfare as the “children of illegitimate parents.”²⁴ Clearly the target in the welfare debate had become African American men and women who were characterized as not wanting to work, unable to properly raise their children, and perpetuators of social and cultural pathologies.

“Illegitimacy,” in particular, had become the catchword for evidence of the “degeneracy” of the black population and was justification for denying welfare to African American women. Popular and social welfare journals gave undue attention to the rise in non-marital births among women on AFDC and attributed this to male unemployment and female promiscuity.²⁵ In 1965, US News and World Report explained that as a result of migration, black men, unable to get jobs, abandoned their families: “Deserted wives, sometimes turning to any man who comes along, add to the high rate of illegitimacy in the self-perpetuating breeding grounds of city slums.”²⁶ Thus, the concern about ADC was shaped and sold to the public in large part by racial ideology. Promiscuity and laziness became synonymous with black women on welfare. “Illegitimacy” became a code word for black single mothers on ADC and came to signify bankrupt moral values and community disintegration. White racism, gender norms, and assumptions about the moral dangers of “dependency” converged on ADC.²⁷

By the late 1950s the discourse about welfare, particularly among politicians and some sectors of the public, interwove race, sex, class, and morality. Local welfare officials and legislators responded by attempting to uncover alleged welfare fraud and corruption, limiting eligibility, reducing welfare payments, and putting welfare recipients to work.²⁸ A number of cities, counties, and states, including Washington, D.C., Milwaukee, WI, Los Angeles, CA, Cuyahoga County, OH, Wayne County, MI, and the states of Illinois, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania formed special units within the welfare department to investigate whether a substitute parent, or potential breadwinner, resided in the house.²⁹ Caseworkers routinely checked up on recipients, sometimes conducting “midnight raids” to ensure that a recipient was not involved in a relationship with a man. These unannounced searches of recipients’ homes violated their privacy and stripped them of their dignity. Caseworkers applied stringent and humiliating eligibility criteria to prevent women with alternate sources of support from receiving assistance. Under constant scrutiny, recipients had to prove the soundness of their character, their destitution, and, increasingly, their willingness but inabilit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Editor’s Series Introduction
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. The Origins of the Welfare Rights Movement
• 2. Forming a National Organization
• 3. Motherhood and the Making of Welfare Policy
• 4. We Demand a Right to Welfare
• 5. The Fight for a Guaranteed Annual Income
• 6. Reckoning with Internal Tensions
• 7. Resisting External Backlash
• 8. A Radical Black Feminist Movement
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index