Woman on Welfare
CUNNINGHAM, ANN MARIE
Woman on Welfare A WELFARE MOTHER, by Susan Sheehan. Houghton Mifflin Company. 109 pp, $6.95. ANN MARIE CUNNINGHAM Susan Sheehan's slender book, A Welfare Mother, is a meticulously detailed...
...Santana's profile has fortunately been fleshed out with an introduction by Michael Harrington and an afterword in which Susan Sheehan explains her working methods...
...ANN MARIE CUNNINGHAM Susan Sheehan's slender book, A Welfare Mother, is a meticulously detailed (day-by-day, often hour by hour) account of "Mrs...
...it is not Hispanic or black in origin...
...Santana's anonymity made her less individual and encouraged middle-class readers to think of her as a stereotypical welfare chiseler...
...Santana for two and a half years, long enough to become, as she says, "a fly on the neighborhood wall...
...Santana is lazy, uneconomical, disorganized, generous, and fat: a sloppy housekeeper to whom "tomorrow" can easily mean "next week," a good-natured Puerto Rican woman who has lived with a series of men, who loves to dance and spend money on bright purple clothes and gold furniture...
...And there was the rub: Mrs...
...serial monogamy," as practiced by Mrs...
...Santana's portrait first appeared in The New Yorker—probably the first time that magazine has run a profile of an anonymous person...
...She is also a charming and courageous person with almost no control over her own life and with few resources— personal, economic, or cultural— to prevent her children's and granchildren's lives from following the same discouraging patterns as her own...
...Ann Marie Cunningham is a free-lance writer who lives in New York...
...Carmen Santana's" life, and the way it meshes with those of her numerous children, boyfriends, welfare workers, and neighbors in Brooklyn and on New York's Lower East Side...
...Indeed, Mrs...
...In Sheehan's afterword, it is reassuring to learn that she (a staff writer for The New Yorker) speaks Spanish and that she knew Mrs...
...San-tana and her friends, is "common in all poverty cultures in America...
...As a book, Mrs...
...Harrington, who wrote a book on the poor entitled The Other America, corrects middle class perspectives with some sharp facts about welfare mothers' lives: welfare budgets are so marginal that recipients must cheat to survive...
Vol. 40 • December 1976 • No. 12
