Western Welfare in Decline

Globalization and Women's Poverty

Catherine Kingfisher

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780812218121
• eBook ISBN: 9780812202472
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The feminization of poverty is increasingly recognized as a global phenomenon, affecting women not only in third world countries but also in the West. Taking globalization as its starting point, Western Welfare in Decline explores the plight of poor single mothers in five English-speaking nations that have implemented welfare restructuring: the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand. This restructuring is analyzed in relation to the emergence of neoliberalism, which valorizes the free market, individualism, and a circumscribed role for the state.Contributors to Western Welfare in Decline creatively combine theoretical and empirical analysis, emphasizing the economic and social goals of welfare reforms and the discourses of labor, gendered subjectivity, and the separation of public and private spheres. They document how the neoliberal project of welfare reform interacts with local cultures to create both similar and divergent new cultural formations and identify opportunities for asserting the social rights of poor single mothers who are being denied these rights at the level of the nation-state.

Part I
The Big Picture

GLOBALIZATION, NEOLIBERALISM,
AND THE FEMINIZATION
OF POVERTY

Chapter 1

Introduction

The Global Feminization of Poverty

Catherine Kingfisher

The 1992 World Bank Report argued that “Women must not be regarded as mere recipients of public support. They are, first and foremost, economic agents” (IBRD 1992:60). This claim captures a key discursive shift in the currently unfolding transformation from Keynesian and developmental to neoliberal forms of governance. In this transformation, which is witnessing exponential growth in the feminization of poverty,¹ low-income and poor women in both developed and developing countries are being reconstituted in new political discourses and practices as already or potentially able-bodied workers and entrepreneurs, while other identities, in particular, those of mother and dependent housewife, take on increasingly negative salience.² While skyrocketing poverty rates among women in the South can be said to result from structural adjustment programs initiated by external agents such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund,³ similar increases in poverty rates among women in advanced welfare state societies may be interpreted in relation to an analogous, internally initiated restructuring, usually entailing cuts in social provisioning. In both cases, public services are put under threat, and in both cases it is poor women who disproportionately shoulder the burden of service reductions while they struggle to fill in the gaps left by a retreating state. These parallels may in turn be situated in the larger context of the global spread of neoliberal approaches to economic, social, and state organization.

Although situated in the context of a global feminization of poverty, the focus of this book is on restructuring and women’s poverty in western welfare states, with particular emphasis on the situation of poor single mothers.⁴ While there is a significant literature on poverty, gender, and structural adjustment in the Third World (e.g., Afshar and Dennis 1992; Beneria and Feldman 1992; Elson 1995; Thomas-Emeagwali 1995), only recently has a literature begun to develop on the comparative analysis of gender and the western welfare state (see especially Orloff 1993; Casper, McLanahan, and Garfinkel 1994); and, more importantly for the purposes of this collection, on the comparative analysis of gender and welfare state restructuring (see especially Bakker 1994b, 1996; O’Connor, Orloff, and Shaver 1999; Sainsbury 1996).

This collection contributes to this groundbreaking and now burgeoning literature on women’s well being in restructuring welfare states in two ways. First, it takes what I refer to as the culture of neoliberalism as a particular focus of investigation, both theoretically and practically: theoretically, by exploring the gendered nature of the basic tenets of neoliberalism, and practically, by documenting how neoliberalism articulates with local/national cultures in specific relation to poverty policy. Secondly, the book works to situate the analysis of neoliberal culture in the context of economic and cultural globalization; in other words, globalization, frequently mentioned in passing in the literature on welfare reform, becomes, like neoliberalism, a focus of investigation in itself. The general argument that neoliberalism and globalization are inextricably tied is maintained throughout the book. Briefly, the argument claims that a key feature of economic and cultural globalization is the spread of specifically neoliberal forms of governance (Gill 1995; Mishra 1999; Teeple 1995), characterized by an international shift in the direction of increasing marketization, a redrawing of the public/private distinction, valorization of possessive individualism, and shifts in state expenditure (often accompanied by increasing state interference) in social arenas. An understanding of the global feminization of poverty thus requires an analysis of neoliberalism: analysis of neoliberalism as a cultural system, analyses both of neoliberalism as a movement and of the movement of neoliberalism across cultural space (globalization), and an analysis of its contradictions and disjunctures that provide entry points for intervention and resistance.

With reference to their situatedness in a specifically global terrain, then, this book explores the discourses and practices of welfare state restructuring in relation to poor single mothers in the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand.⁵ The goal is to provide a comparative analysis of welfare reform programs currently being instituted in these countries, with particular emphasis on their economic and social goals, and on the discourses of labor, gendered subjectivity, and public versus private which inform them and which they attempt to deploy. Such a comparative focus serves to generate insight into the convergences and divergences among and between welfare state reforms of provisioning for single mothers in light of the globalization of neoliberalism across historically and culturally unique national set tings. Again, it is important to underscore that the analysis here is situated in terms not just of comparison, but also specifically of globalization. While comparative frameworks endeavor to uncover similarities and differences, they do not tend, in general, to situate these relationships in terms of transnational patterns (although see Esping-Andersen 1996; Mishra 1999). Theories of globalization—of increasing and accelerated transnational interdependencies and cross-fertilizations of politics, culture, and economics—provide this situatedness and also create a space for theorizing the underpinnings of the similarities and differences that comprise the focus of the comparative project.

It is also crucial to point out that policy, as analyzed here, is theorized as inherently cultural, insofar as it is based on culturally and historically specific discourses of gender, the division of labor, public and private, and whatever other phenomena happen to be locally relevant. Identities, roles, needs, and dependencies—and the various approaches taken to encourage, support, or ameliorate them—must be recognized as cultural constructions, reflecting and instantiating locally received and contested views that are always already reflective of and in conversation with other (perhaps globalizing) constructions. This collection is thus one response to the call for an anthropology of welfare (Russell and Edgar 1998); that is, for an approach that emphasizes the construction, negotiation, and contestation of meanings that underlie, inform, and reflect the material realities of welfare systems—which are, after all, “a product of, and … response to, power relationships in society” (Russell and Edgar 1998:2).

Restructuring Is to the “West” What Structural Adjustment Is to the “Rest”

Marshall Sahlins (1972) uses a “west/rest” binary to distinguish between the role of money in the west and kinship in “the rest.” This formulation may be used here to refer to gross parallels in processes of structural adjustment (the rest) and welfare state restructuring (the west). This is not to claim that either the west or the rest is homogeneous. Indeed, there is enough heterogeneity within each category to render the categories themselves useless except as limited heuristic devices; and a key goal of this collection is, in fact, to explore precisely the heterogeneity within and among western welfare states. However, just as a west/rest binary is of limited value, so a homogeneity/heterogeneity opposition can lead to an unfortunate partiality that fails to capture complexity and nuance. On the other hand, it remains the case that west/rest and homogeneity/heterogeneity binaries can serve as useful points of entry or departure. My intent here is to do both: to capture both similarities and differences, to explore both generalities and specificities, rather than only one or the other. This requires a willingness to live with a fundamentally unresolvable but hopefully illuminating tension.

I begin with the overall patterns of similarity that have allowed analysts to make the general claim that it is women, specifically, who “have borne the brunt of restructuring—economically, socially, physically” (Sparr 1995:18). First, feminists early recognized that women were suffering in the development process in the Third World to the extent that they were being excluded from development programs that constructed men as heads of households and thus as the main contributors to economic development, particularly in rural areas (e.g., Boserup 1970; Rogers 1980; Tinker 1976, 1982; see Kabeer 1994 for a comprehensive review). Women’s contributions to economic activity were construed as secondary to those of (often absent or nonexistent) male heads of household; and their roles as “housewives” (Mies 1986) were accentuated while their reproductive work paradoxically remained hidden. A specifically middle-class, western, and idealized view of the gender division of labor (male breadwinner, dependent wife) permeated the development theory that was exported to the Third World, materially manifesting itself in the differential targeting of development aid among women and men.

More recently, scholars and commentators have noted the gendered nature of structural adjustment programs (e.g., Afshar and Dennis 1992; Beneria and Feldman 1992; Elson 1992; Thomas-Emeagwali 1995). In her discussion of women and poverty in Africa, for instance, Daphne Topouzis (1990) argues that austerity measures increase poor women’s work and caring burdens by decreasing their access to health, education, and employment services and opportunities. In reducing or eliminating public services, structural adjustment programs work to “privatize” or “rationalize” responsibility for protection and care by devolving it to the level of the community, household, or individual. This devolution presumes and valorizes women’s “efficiency,” “entrepreneurship,” and “infinite elasticity” (Elson 1995).

The situation in western welfare states is characterized by similar valorizations and elisions. Economic globalization, such as that represented by the World Trade Organization (WTO) has been coupled in the west with shifts to a market-oriented neoliberalism at the domestic level, characterized by, among other things, attacks on the welfare state. These assaults are justified on two grounds. First is the claim that public relief is too expensive along a number of dimensions, including national debt and “the extra costs of reducing inequality,” such as the higher tax rates needed to finance redistribution (Hum 1993:107). Coupled with this economic justification is a moral argument which claims that the receipt of welfare disempowers the poor, sapping their motivation to achieve self-reliance and undermining their self-respect (e.g., Green 1996; Mead 1986; Murray 1984; Plant 1993; see also Kingfisher 1999). The argument of this book is that such attacks, though seemingly gender neutral, are in fact gendered in nature and have particularly negative consequences for the well being of poor single mothers and their children.

The parallels in reforms being proposed and instituted in western welfare states regarding policy provisions for poor single mothers are remarkable. In 1996, for example, the United States instituted the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), which places lifetime limits on the receipt of assistance and makes rigid stipulations regarding recipients’ participation in work-related activities. Significantly, the act eliminates the federal program Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), implemented with the passage of the 1935 Social Security Act. AFDC has been replaced with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and assistance has been devolved to individual states (Ozawa and Kirk 1997). The Canadian government made similar changes when it replaced the 1966 Canada Assistance Plan Act (CAP), which provided federal dollars to the provinces and set national standards for social programs, with Canada Health and Social Transfer (CHST), introduced in 1995 and effective in 1996. CHST eliminates all but the vaguest national standards, reduces the amount of federal dollars available to the provinces for social programs, and provides whatever funding is available in the form of block grants, which are intended to provide coverage for health and education as well as for poverty related assistance. Provinces may now also institute their own workfare programs (Muscovitch 1996). As a final example, in 1997, as a result of the 1996 Tax Reduction and Social Policy Bill, Aotearoa/New Zealand instituted a series of workfare related reforms, including worktests for recipients of the Domestic Purposes Benefit (DPB) with children over the age of fourteen (Stephens 1999; Higgins 1999). These Canadian, New Zealand, and U.S. reforms, while varying in terms of specific provisions, all entail reductions in state provisioning for the poor. As such, they are one manifestation of a privatization of the public realm.

However, while welfare state restructuring is often described in terms of a “shrinking” or “rolling back” of the state, shifts in levels of state funding and interference are, in fact, selective, and certain sectors, such as the police or the military—or particular arms of the welfare bureaucracy—may, in fact, expand. Restructuring must therefore be conceptualized as a realignment of the public and the private (Brodie 1994), or as a shift in relative focus, rather than as a generalized and evenhanded reduction in the orbit of the state. Even the shrinking of those arms of the state concerned with social welfare may perhaps be best conceived of in terms of transformation, insofar as the “shrinking”—the cutbacks in benefits—may entail a simultaneous increase in bureaucratization and surveillance, with all the expenditures that these require. The concern here is thus with nation-states’ reconceptualizations of the role of the state in the provision of social services in general, and in the provision of financial assistance for single mothers in particular, the latter of whom are increasingly predominant among the ranks of the poor.

This emphasis on nation-states’ reconceptualizations of their roles in relation to those of the market and the individual or family provides the general framework within which the heterogeneity mentioned at the beginning of this section may be situated and explored. Such an emphasis also underscores the need to keep the state clearly in view. The role of the state is often diminished in discussions of globalization that tend to emphasize its demise and/or focus on global/local relations that seem to bypass the national level. The state, however, plays a pivotal role, both in the orchestration of “globalization,” and in the everyday lives of the poor (Maskovsky and Kingfisher 2001; see Chapters 3 and 4, this volume, for further discussion). This is one reason why the case study chapters in Part II are organized by nation-state rather than thematically.

The Feminization of Poverty

In a now classic article published in 1978, Diane Pearce coined the phrase “the feminization of poverty” to refer to the fact that “it is women who account for an increasingly large proportion of the economically disadvantaged” (Pearce 1978:28). Discussion since has continued to focus on occupational segregation and women’s responsibilities for child-care as key contributors to this phenomenon (Casper, McLanahan, and Garfinkel 1994; England et al. 1998). Specifically, it is the combination of various forms of discrimination in the workplace with the fact that women are more likely to have sole custody of dependent children that engenders their greater vulnerability to poverty (England et al. 1998; Starrels, Bould, and Nicholas 1994).⁶

Two claims with regard to the gender division of labor are particularly noteworthy in the context of current welfare state restructuring and women’s poverty. The first is the assertion that the public realm of paid work depends on women’s unpaid work in the private sphere, a claim long made by Marxist feminists (Jaggar 1983; Sargent 1981). The second is that it is women, in particular, who must negotiate the gap between the public and the private; women embody (physiologically and socially) and negotiate the contradictions between market and nonmarket structures by engaging in part-time work, home work, and casualized or illegal labor and by stretching to meet more needs with fewer resources. This provides evidence, perhaps, of Jenny Shaw’s (1995) assertion, based on Claude Lévi-Strauss’s (1969) analysis of the exchange of women and Gregory Bateson’s (1972) discussion of the doublebind, that women seem to be the universal mediators of contradiction.

Restructuring clearly works to heighten the contradictions and tensions between market and nonmarket discourses and domains. Entailing ostensibly neutral macroeconomic changes, restructuring in fact depends on unpaid domestic labor (usually done by women), on the invisibility of this labor, and on women’s ability and willingness to take on more and more work, whether it consists of paid labor or the labor involved in producing more with less. Restructuring in western welfare states, like austerity measures in developing countries, is thus a gendered phenomenon, with specifically gendered impacts on poverty rates. What connects these two seemingly disparate phenomena is their roots in economic and philosophic neoliberalism, the theoretical and situated analyses of which provide the focus of this bo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Part I. The Big Picture: Globalization, Neoliberalism, and the Feminization of Poverty
• Part II. On the Ground: Case Studies in the Articulation of (Gendered) Neoliberalism with (Gendered) Local Culture
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index
• Acknowledgments