Our political and economic landscape is dominated by what Matthew Desmond has described as the “unrelenting exploitation of the poor.” Public services are woefully underfunded and the poor are exploited as low-wage workers, tenants, and consumers whose labor, rental, borrowing, and consumption choices are extremely limited. In Poverty, By America, Matthew Desmond argues that a major reason for the contemporary exploitation of the poor in the United States has been the role racism has played in reducing support for social welfare policies and programs serving the public good in general. However, the exploitation that Desmond identifies cannot be fully understood without examining the way race, class, and gender intersect in the design of social welfare programs. To confront the complicity of social welfare policies in this exploitation, we must understand how the social welfare recipient has been feminized.
The iterations of cash assistance programs over the last century all have in common the use of policy to regulate the lives of women. Two programs have provided federal cash assistance over the last century. The first, Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) was instituted in 1935 as part of the Social Security Act. It was renamed Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) in 1962. The second, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) replaced AFDC in 1996 with the signing of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). All these programs have been haunted by anxieties about women’s changing roles in society and sought to sort women into categories of deservingness.
The policy choices made in the construction of cash-assistance social welfare policies have channeled women, particularly single mothers, into the low-wage workforce and made them vulnerable to exploitation.
Who Deserves Aid?
ADC/AFDC defined “deservingness” along racial lines. ADC was started to provide cash assistance to the children of white women widows.
Black women were not often deemed deserving of aid by state agencies and were expected to continue working in exploitative low-wage conditions, often as domestic or agricultural laborers.
The few Black women who did gain access to ADC/AFDC were subject to work requirements since the policy’s inception. For example, some southern states had “farm policies” that cut off access to public assistance to Black women’s children during harvest times, coercing recipient mothers and their children to work in the fields.
Public assistance programs also sought to incentivize and reward white heteronormative nuclear families and punish other family structures. From the earliest iterations of the state-run Mother’s Pensions that became the model for the federal ADC, reformers, and politicians feared that these programs might encourage unwed motherhood or encourage desertion. As a result, after much political contestation and several amendments, the version of ADC that emerged through the New Deal legislation was inadequate to meet the needs of those who were deemed worthy. The ADC gave states the freedom to restrict access—resulting, for example, in “man-in-the house” rules which were used to exempt children from aid. By constructing the poor racialized unwed mother as a deviant, one of welfare policy’s discursive effects was to demonstrate to all women that the only acceptable way to live and work was from inside the heteronormative nuclear family structure. Social welfare policies—in their restrictions and moralizing discourses—justified gender segregation in the labor market and rationalized low wages for work predominantly performed by women. In other words, a byproduct of the moralizing discourse linking poverty, women, and welfare is the implicit view that a virtuous woman would only be working to supplement her husband’s income or survivor’s benefits and therefore would not need to sustain a family on her income alone; making it justifiable to pay her less.
An unvirtuous woman, a woman who is not linked to a male breadwinner, was deemed undeserving of aid, and therefore deserving of the hardships—or exploitations—she might encounter.
Resistance and Backlash
Racial and gendered exploitation did not go unnoticed. The long-standing practice of denying cash assistance to women of color was met with resistance during the 1960s civil rights movement with the formation of the National Welfare Rights Organization and its local iterations. The welfare rights movement was comprised of groups led by Black single mothers, and they successfully fought to have certain exclusionary practices, such as the “man-in-the-house” rules and “farm policies” deemed unconstitutional.
The increased access to welfare for single mothers of color was met with backlash from conservative policymakers. Congress amended the Social Security Act to include work requirements in 1971. In the 1980s, President Reagan and other policymakers deployed the trope of the “welfare queen”—imagined to be a Black woman lazily living a life of luxury off welfare checks. These policies and narratives stoked preexisting public anxieties about “deservingness,” while ignoring the reality that Black women have always worked, perhaps more than any other group in American history.
When President Clinton signed PRWORA in 1996, PRWORA used social science data correlating poverty to diminished rates of marriage to argue that single mothers were poor because of their choice to reproduce and that they lacked “personal responsibility.” As with the formation of ADC, a failure to adhere to the normative family model coded welfare recipients as undeserving, although in PRWORA the entire bloc of welfare recipients was coded as undeserving. The number one thing that could be done to combat their poverty, PRWORA sponsors claimed, was to replace the cash assistance provided by AFDC with marriage and work promotion programs. By placing time limits on cash assistance, PRWORA—much like the “farm policies” of AFDC—channeled low-income women with limited choices into a low-wage workforce for the benefit of companies who failed to pay a living wage.
Reimagining Social Welfare
To change the gender and racial exploitation built into social welfare policies, we must begin by reimagining our vision of what counts as welfare and who is a welfare recipient.
As Matthew Desmond argues, tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans are a form of government assistance.
Not only that but throughout the 20th century, white, heteronormative families received federal assistance in the form of Federal Housing Administration loans, another vestige—along with the now-defunct AFDC—of President Roosevelt’s New Deal Legislation. These families are collecting more government aid in the form of subsidies than amounts received by welfare recipients. Policymakers need a public relations campaign that explains how federal assistance has subsidized suburban white wealth growth.
It is not enough to revive efforts to fund cash-assistance welfare. Ultimately, the old cash-assistance policies, to the extent that they entrench gender and racial inequalities and relegate women to subjugated positions–won’t do as models. A more inclusive view of our civic commitments, like the kind imagined and created by Black feminisms, shines a way forward if the future we hope to build is truly less exploitative. In a world where humans have a mutual responsibility to care for one another, the effort to sort aid recipients, and women more broadly, into categories of deservingness would become unthinkable.
