What Future for Social Policy?: Welfare Reform: A History Lesson
Gordon, Linda
When people say "welfare" today, they mostly refer to AFDC, the program for single parents and their children. These single parents are mostly mothers, of course, and the current...
...These powerful southern Democrats would not support a program that provided aid for sharecroppers, farm wage laborers, or domestic servants—a program that might threaten such workers' willingness to accept the abysmally low wages they were paid...
...Claiming welfare was a strategy for upward mobility and especially for benefiting one's children, a move away from poverty and resignation...
...The definition of the welfare problem is thus feminized, although this is not always acknowledged...
...The exclusions and inequities of the bill were put there to defend a small number of specific economic and racial interests...
...By creating such great stratification among beneficiaries, Social Security deepened splits among the Democrats' own electoral constituency and undermined the legitimacy of its own welfare system...
...It excluded domestic servants and agricultural workers, by far the largest categories of employment among blacks and Hispanics at the time...
...Today's calls for reform, and the Clinton promise to end welfare-as-weknowit, arise predominantly from conservative impulses, but liberals and welfare clients of all political orientations are equally critical of the system...
...this was eliminated from the bill...
...The welfare system actually contributed to the creation of today's alleged "underclass...
...The Social Security Act authorized federal contributions to older local programs of public assistance (traditionally called "poor relief ") designed to cover those not able to benefit from the superior programs...
...the poorer and more demoralized welfare recipients became, the less political clout they had...
...These were not accidental omissions...
...But then the demand for labor, which had brought so many immigrants and migrants into industrial cities, receded...
...This produced a downward spiral: the more the poor did not vote, the more the Democrats focused their appeals on conservative "swing" voters...
...Conservative and liberal analysts of Democratic party decline often blame an excessively large welfare state...
...The problems created by Social Security, however, are embedded not only in its exclusions but even in its inclusions...
...The inferior welfare programs— AFDC is the most prominent example— became severely stigmatized, which made their recipients politically weak...
...Federal programs were good, state programs were bad...
...first-track programs were not means-tested, public assistance was...
...Eligibility requirements for unemployment compensation left out most seasonal and casual workers, employees of small firms, and other categories particularly common among women and minority men...
...For the first time in history, there is substantial agreement on two issues central to welfare: that there is nothing wrong with mothers being employed...
...The fact that we use "welfare" to refer only to meanstested programs like AFDC misleads the public about how government social spending is allocated (80 percent goes to the nonpoor) and stigmatizes the recipients of these programs, which then makes it more difficult to gather political support for more constructive policies...
...Their gain deepened the stratification of welfare, providing superior health and security for those who were already better off and depriving those who most needed help...
...Each had different terms, each was aimed at different social groups...
...They thought they were being "half-a-loaf girls," as they put it...
...they neither emphasized the importance of a minimum wage and union power nor struggled with the unions to defend women's right to equal wages and equal work...
...Despite the conservative success in defining "welfare reform" to mean cutbacks in benefits, there might be a moment of opportunity now with respect to AFDC...
...The cruelty, barbarism, and violence that would result from refusing to help the poor could destroy our society...
...Roosevelt intended his Social Security legislation as a centerpiece of the New Deal and an anchor for his Democratic coalition...
...They chose to ally instead with the technocratic experts brought in by Roosevelt...
...By the 1970s attacks on women's nontraditional sexual and public behavior became a prominent theme in conservative backlash movements against New Deal and "Great Society" social programs...
...The popularity of welfare in the depression offered a chance to break southern control of the Democratic party...
...Although the welfare system kept some from starvation—and kept some mothers from losing their children—it has also contributed to inequality and misery...
...And poor women had no collective representation powerful enough to create an alliance in which they could defend themselves...
...They even recognized that the family wage was not widely effective—in fact most American husbands and fathers never earned enough to support their families...
...But it was also a sign that minorities and poor white women were challenging their exclusion, insisting on citizenship rights by claiming SUMMER • 1994 • 325 Welfare Reform welfare...
...The group of women reformers who wrote the public-assistance parts of Social Security missed a unique opportunity to install a welfare state in the United States...
...The temporary, emergency public works substituted for a permanent program were heavily weighted toward male labor...
...324 • DISSENT Welfare Welfare Reform But they were locked into historical misunderstandings, and they made the wrong alliances...
...An arbitrary time line-two years on AFDC and then out-is a setup for failure or brutality unless it is combined with a higher minimum wage and massive spending on public jobs...
...Divorce, marital separation, and out-of-wedlock births increased the number of single mothers...
...Some of those left out were brought under the umbrella in subsequent amendments, but usually in second-class programs...
...We need to understand this in order to avoid the mistaken assumption that being "on welfare" always connotes dependency and despair...
...For example, AFDC designers were mainly opposed to day care, let alone government subsidies for day care, because they feared it would provide an incentive for mothers to work outside the home...
...328 • DISSENT...
...When people say "welfare" today, they mostly refer to AFDC, the program for single parents and their children...
...These invidious distinctions were drawn along a number of axes: • Social Security excluded most minorities and many white women from superior proSUMMER • 1994 • 323 Welfare Reform grams such as old-age insurance and unemployment compensation...
...Too many things are different: a deindustrializing and globalizing economy, a large national deficit, ghettoization, the decline of hope and escalation of weapons and drugs among the poor, for starters...
...A bit of history may help us understand how we reached the political impasse characterized by such foolish—and sexist—thinking...
...Distant from the poor and retaining an older moral-reform orientation, the New Deal feminists never entirely shed the belief that something more than lack of money was wrong with the poor...
...They were meanstested, requiring applicants to divest themselves of resources (even non-liquid assets such as homes) and to submit to repeated searches for moral turpitude and financial cheating...
...There is desperate need for social-service workers, teachers' aides, day-care workers, community counselors, and so on...
...BUT these must be real jobs in high-quality programs, paying wage on which one can support a family and offering upward mobility-or they will be self-defeating...
...Social Security has fed, clothed, housed, and reassured many millions of Americans...
...Instead, those who worked for large enterprises in stable, full-time jobs began, largely as a result of unionization, to get private medical insurance...
...minority men and women were by no means full citizens and were only just entering jobs in the core of the industrial/commercial economy...
...The stigma and stinginess were not only cruel and unjust but also destructive for the whole society...
...In electoral politics this meant that national Democrats had to target "swing" voters who (erroneously) did not feel dependent on a welfare state...
...But instead of reaching for a new world of economic independence for women and shared housework for men, they sought to shore up the family wage by providing government assistance when men lost their breadwin ning ability...
...Most destructive were those between beneficiaries of the primary programs — upperworkingclass and middle-class men and their families—and those who got "welfare...
...Their short-sightedness came from some good motives: they believed that the family wage was a protection, especially for working-class women, against the exploitation of the double day...
...Despite some improvements in the secondtrack programs such as AFDC, on the whole there has been a downward spiral since the New Deal...
...Politics is always a matter of the allies you choose, although the choices are sometimes constrained...
...This process is almost always described as a bad omen...
...Their more serious mistakes, however, were strategic— trategic — they chose the wrong alliances...
...Its failure to support women workers did not stop women's participation in employment, but helped lock them into the worst conditions both at work and at home...
...they set up two tracks, standard and inferior, and then the workings of government programs themselves further stigmatize the poor...
...Take the concern about teenage pregnancy as an example: the propaganda and the proposed solutions might lead someone who didn't know better to assume that these were immaculate conceptions because only the mothers are discussed...
...Finally, the New Deal feminists separated themselves from the labor movement...
...They were concessions to conservative (particularly southern) congressional leaders that the Roosevelt administration deemed necessary to get the act passed...
...Imagine how different our society might look today if in 1935 we had gotten: • an old age pension for every individual • unemployment compensation for every adult seeking work who could not get it • universal medical insurance • regular public jobs programs • a universal (and hence nonstigmatized) child allowance • publicly funded preschool and afterschool programs...
...A contradictory reaction criticized some women for being breadwinners and other women, "welfare mothers," for not being breadwinners—for demanding "welfare" in order not to "work...
...today, as more and more middle-class women are working for wages and raising children alone, many more people can understand that being a single mother is not the result of a character flaw...
...They were still under the sway of Victorian family-wage ideology—the assumption that women would be and should be economic dependents of men, and that a single male wage would suffice to support a whole family They were convinced not only that this ideal could be made functional but also that it was best for women, who could then devote themselves to unpaid household labor...
...Their empirical mistakes, such as their faith in the family wage, were part of the limited vision of their time, their race, and their class...
...They stratify citizenship itself, whereas the goal of welfare should be democratic equality...
...that single motherhood will not go away anytime soon...
...These exclusions reflected, equally, some unarticulated 1930s assumptions about who were the citizens a welfare state aimed to support...
...They actually make it more difficult to include the excluded...
...This remarkable consensus can be explained by the mistakes and defects of that legislation as well as more recent economic changes—because Social Security was inadequate even when it was passed...
...old-age insurance and unemployment compensation became considered entitlements, AFDC and the other public assistance programs not so...
...One of the many ways in which "the 1960s" began in the 1950s, welfare-claiming was a part of the civil rights movement...
...Today "Social Security" means old-age insurance—but that program is just one of eleven titles in the Social Security Act, which also established Aid to Dependent Children (today known as AFDC), old-age assistance (today known as SSI), various programs of aid to the disabled, and unemployment compensation...
...Popular language expresses and perpetuates that stratification...
...the neglected and maligned poor who did support welfare were 326 • DISSENT Welfare Reform increasingly disenfranchised through exclusionary voter-registration policies, then by their own skepticism about the value of voting...
...We cannot afford to increase the number of programs only for the poor, which serve to keep them poor...
...As taxes increased, recipients of the secondary programs became scapegoats...
...Consider the continuing conflict about public funding for abortion...
...Means-tested programs set up downward spirals, making things worse for recipients and generating taxpayer resentment...
...wives—wives of covered men—a second-class set of old-age-pension entitlements through their husbands...
...There is a debate within the women's movement as to whether "choice" must be a reality for poor women or whether we can work for reproductive rights in stages...
...Medical insurance—originally part of Roosevelt's New Deal welfare program—was also eliminated from Social Security...
...Meanwhile, extraordinary changes in the role of women in the forties, fifties, and sixties made the New Deal welfare structure even more destructive...
...The gender inequities in this system were not created by a conspiracy to make women suffer...
...These single parents are mostly mothers, of course, and the current vilification of welfare recipients and their "dependency" is directed primarily at women...
...Social Security set up a stratified, inequitable welfare system, operating along several tracks, particularly along gender but also along racial and class lines...
...So they were convinced that the poor needed casework—counseling and rehabilitation— and they designed AFDC to regulate moral and housekeeping standards as well as to feed poor children...
...One condition for the escalated hostility to welfare was that a middle-class-dominated women's movement tended to ignore the needs of poor women...
...African-American women had created strong organizations, even national ones such as the National Association of Colored Women, but the New Deal white feminists chose not to make common cause with them...
...Social Security forced single mothers* and minorities into stingy, personally invasive, and stigmatized programs...
...Not even individuals, much less families, can live on the low-wage jobs that are often the only ones available to the poor...
...A law that united all waged and salaried workers through universal entitlements to social citizenship— especially if combined with an antilynching law and black voter registration— might have solidified enough support so that Roosevelt could have dumped the southern political magnates on whom he had depended...
...But in practice, Social Security nourished divisions among Roosevelt's potential supporters...
...The cutoff will be difficult to enforce because, I trust, there are too many humane people among us, but it will deepen still further the stigma and therefore the hopelessness of the poor...
...And perhaps the greatest value to recipients of the superior programs is that they are not stigmatized, often not even recognized as what they are—recipients of government provision...
...The two tracks had several intersecting dimensions that established the contemporary meanings of "welfare...
...The new migrants whose urbanization had represented some upward mobility were the last hired and the first fired...
...Our most pernicious and difficult welfare problem is not poverty alone but inequality and the resentment and violence it creates...
...Rather than bringing one group after another under the protection of federal security programs, they set in motion a process of fragmentation that weakened the political force of those who believed in a welfare state...
...The public assistance programs it created have been denounced for decades, from virtually every political perspective...
...We can use this limited agreement to improve the system...
...The rise of private health insurance and pensions further lessened middle-class support for a shared social citizenship...
...Social Security then offered some house* "Single mother" here refers to all categories of women raising children on their own—divorced, separated, unmarried...
...These jobs policies contributed to maintaining women's invisibility as workers and fixing them further as dependents...
...The historical evidence suggests that "stages" are dangerous because they create downward, not upward, staircases...
...Had they done so, they would have encountered a useful skepticism about the family wage ideal, because women's employment was not only more common but also more respected among blacks...
...The goal of welfare reform is not to end welfare claims but to reduce poverty...
...Clinton's defeated public jobs proposal remained, like the New Deal, biased toward male jobs...
...The 1960s welfare rights movement was also a women's movement...
...By contrast, an Old Age Insurance recipient could be a millionaire, a drug addict, a child molester without losing his pension, and could spend his money on anything he chose...
...It excluded other millions...
...We should, whenever possible, design universal programs that will command broad support...
...In fact, women's employment was propelled by need, which then interacted with their growing economic independence and self-confidence, contributing to raising the divorce rate and thus the numbers of single mothers...
...White women were not considered regular workers or employees...
...The problem is not, of course, a welfare system per se, as some conservatives claim...
...In fact, the limitations and fragmentation of government provision may be more culpable...
...The problem is the design of the welfare system, which does contribute to inferior citizenship, lack of opportunity, and a spirit of defeatism...
...Welfare programs could recognize that most women will have to be wage earners for most of their lives, and that they have to combine wage work with unpaid domestic work to a much greater extent than men...
...Welfare reform could acknowledge both that the private sector cannot create enough jobs and that we need public jobs for women as well as men...
...But in fact rather than getting something now and something more later, they got a welfare system that grew worse over the decades, increasingly inadequate, and increasingly unequal...
...We cannot reconstruct the 1935 opportunity today...
...Virtually all the "welfare" we have today comes from the Social Security Act of 1935...
...But understanding the history of the Social Security system does provide some useful suggestions for today's welfare discussion: We can try to change our language...
...Today "welfare" means the inferior programs...
...Social Security's unemployment compensation plan originally included a public-works program that automatically kicked in whenever unemployment reached a dangerous level...
...depressionera polls suggest that, had a more universal welfare bill been put to a referendum in 1935, it would probably have won...
...Hostility to "welfare" was nourished by a new kind of conservative coalition, which drew on objections to feminism and sexual "permissiveness," as well as to taxes and the increasing militance among the minority poor...
...Historically, the stigma of "welfare" has been as damaging as its financial inequality...
...These limitations were not required by popular opinion...
...The New Deal system of social citizenship created first- and second-class citizens...
...These programs exclusively for the poor could not gather the support necessary to keep up with inflation...
...Indeed, early drafts of the Clinton administration's welfare reform proposal cite teen pregnancy as creating the very need for welfare—as if by remaining chaste or using birth control these girls could end poverty in the United States...
...And marriage and family patterns changed...
...To help the poor requires offering hope and respect as well as a little food...
...Welfare could include both measures to help women carry out their domestic labor— such as AFDC—and measures to help women establish themselves as workers supported by wages—such as SUMMER • 1994 • 327 day-care centers, medical insurance with universal coverage, and decent wages...
...The hopelessness and poverty it engendered locked people into more hopelessness and poverty...
...On the contrary, for many, especially women, going to the welfare office was a step toward citizenship, often the first entrance into a relationship with government...
...Works Project Administration (WPA) projects were mainly in heavy construction (dams, bridges, roads), while the smaller number of women admitted to the public jobs programs were concentrated in lower paying, humiliating "sewing rooms...
...But in its long-term effects, Social Security helped unravel that coalition...
...Social Security was shaped by racist conspiracy— conspiracy to maintain the supply of low-wage labor, especially for southern interests, by keeping Social Security entitlements from minorities...
...These included Aid to Dependent Children and Old Age Assistance, and they were structured completely differently...
...The first signs of the inadequacy of the New Deal system were readable in the 1950s as the welfare caseload increased...
...On the contrary, AFDC was designed by women who might today be called feminists...
...Those who, for example, most need old-age and unemployment compensation— that is, those least likely to get private pensions and most likely to be laid off—are excluded...
...Ultimately that racism harmed many whites as well: not only were minorities excluded from first-track programs, but secondtrack programs were made inferior with minorities in mind, and as a result we got stingy and mean-spirited provision for all the poor, white and minority...
...The women's movement could exercise leadership on the question of welfare reform, and choose its alliances carefully...
Vol. 41 • July 1994 • No. 3
