From Welfare to Workfare

The Unintended Consequences of Liberal Reform, 1945-1965

Jennifer Mittelstadt

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780807855874, 9780807829226
• eBook ISBN: 9780807876435
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In 1996, Democratic president Bill Clinton and the Republican-controlled Congress “ended welfare as we know it” and trumpeted “workfare” as a dramatic break from the past. But, in fact, workfare was not new. Jennifer Mittelstadt locates the roots of the 1996 welfare reform many decades in the past, arguing that women, work, and welfare were intertwined concerns of the liberal welfare state beginning just after World War II.

Mittelstadt examines the dramatic reform of Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) from the 1940s through the 1960s, demonstrating that in this often misunderstood period, national policy makers did not overlook issues of poverty, race, and women’s role in society. Liberals' public debates and disagreements over welfare, however, caused unintended consequences, she argues, including a shift toward conservatism. Rather than leaving ADC as an income support program for needy mothers, reformers recast it as a social services program aimed at “rehabilitating” women from “dependence” on welfare to “independence,” largely by encouraging them to work. Mittelstadt reconstructs the ideology, implementation, and consequences of rehabilitation, probing beneath its surface to reveal gendered and racialized assumptions about the welfare poor and broader societal concerns about poverty, race, family structure, and women’s employment.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• FROM WELFARE TO WORKFARE
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• ILLUSTRATIONS AND TABLES
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE A New Postwar Paradigm for Welfare
• CHAPTER TWO Strengthening Family Life and Encouraging Independence
• CHAPTER THREE Selling Welfare
• CHAPTER FOUR A “New Spirit” in Welfare
• CHAPTER FIVE Doing Enough for Broken Families
• EPILOGUE From Rehabilitation to Responsibility
• APPENDIX A Major Federal Legislative Developments in Aid to Dependent Children, 1935–1964
• APPENDIX B Major Federal Legislative Developments in Aid to Dependent Children Encouraging or Requiring Employment, 1956–2004
• NOTES
• SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX