The Promise of Welfare Reform

Political Rhetoric and the Reality of Poverty in the Twenty-First Century

Elizabeth Segal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781136748936
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

Find out howand whylegislation has made economic rights more important than human rightsSince 1996, politicians and public officials in the United States have celebrated the success of welfare reform legislation despite little, if any, evidence to support their claims. The Promise of Welfare Reform: Political

Part I:

The Context of Welfare Reform

Chapter 1

Looking Up the Slippery Slope: Lessons from a Lifetime of Trying to Figure Out and Fight Poverty

Ann Withorn

Learning Begins at Home

As long as I can remember, poverty and its consequences have taught me important lessons.

Born in 1947, my earliest memories are of living in Atlanta, Georgia, in a cramped three-room apartment. My grandmother’s even smaller place was next door. She had raised my mother as well as my aunt and uncle on nothing but unreliable veterans’ benefits. My grandfather had been hospitalized since 1933 with PTSD from World War I. Because of this situation the whole family had a hard life with tough consequences. As a child Mother was taunted when neighbors found out her father was a “crazy man.” Relatives viewed them as “poor city kin with no daddy”—as kids who could neither refuse the raggediest hand-me-downs nor the most demeaning chores when staying with country cousins because Grandmother was herself sick.

Later, when we made our monthly three-hour drive to the VA hospital in Augusta, these country relatives sometimes came along. Their teasing humor was cruel, while my grandfather’s quiet muttering to voices only he could hear seemed gentle. He hated violence and would tear all the war pictures out of magazines in the visitors’ room. An early lesson for me was that even when people acted crazy they might be nicer than a whole lot of normal people.

Mother’s voice remained the constant background noise. The lesson she drew from her lifetime of being poor, moving around to avoid evictions, and living with cruel relatives, was that people would betray you so you shouldn’t trust anybody, especially anybody poor. For me, the lesson was that being poor had hurt Mother, but the fear of being thought poor had messed her up even more. She never connected to other people’s pain; she was too focused on denying and/or projecting her own.

Mother’s big way of proving her personal progress was, whenever we had a little money, to hire a black woman to come into the house to iron for a half day a week. One woman, called “Nancy” (although white women were always Mrs. or Miss to me) clearly didn’t like Mother—which made me appreciate her. Once I went with Daddy to bring the pay to Nancy’s house. No one would answer the door. Daddy said it was because he was “a white man with a hat.” He had me get out of the car, and when she saw me she came out. Driving home I asked again why no one had come, and he said, “Because they thought I was a bill collector.”

So began a lifelong process of learning how it was even harder to be poor and black. All Nancy said about it later was that “you never know who is at your door. You have to be careful.” I knew that some of my poor relatives would have answered the door yelling, with a beer in hand. So it seemed that lots of people were poor, but black poor people had to be careful.

My family also showed me how poverty’s lessons get passed on. Once we were driving through a “bad” part of town. My little sister peered out the window of our old Studebaker and asked, “why don’t Negroes live in nice houses?” My mother answered easily, “Because they don’t know how to save, so they don’t have money for nice things.” My relatives in the country didn’t have nice houses either, but you couldn’t see them from the road. Mother never said they weren’t smart with their money. Or in Charlotte I was injured on Sunday so we had to go to the county’s emergency clinic. Usually we went to our doctor’s nice office, not a clinic that was big, noisy, and had no special painted playroom. Mother said the clinic was mainly for white trash who “didn’t bother to find their own doctors but waited until they were really sick to get free medicine.” The lesson that poor people got what they deserved was one of the many things about my world that never made sense.

So I grew up in rebellion, saying out loud what seemed true and getting in trouble for it. I hated the snap judgments, constant cynicism, and petty cruelty that permeated the southern white culture. Now I see it as indoctrination, aimed at making everyone into what I now name as “libertarian fascists.” This world was one where adults teased kids, older kids bullied younger ones, and the weak like my grandfather and eggheads like me were ridiculed. It was a world where bad things were supposed to happen mainly to people who made stupid choices. Somehow I gradually learned to reject the notion that there was no moral vision, and no hope that people could behave better if given other options.¹

Political Lessons

During the mid-1950s I watched Little Rock on the TV, thinking how brave the kids were, and secretly admiring Eisenhower for sending troops. I identified with kids wanting to go to school and saw my relatives and neighbors in the jeering adults. Indeed, TV was my most immediate source for examples of alternative action until I was in college. Much as the local stations tried to hide them, the civil rights struggles and the body counts in Vietnam were national news. And if I didn’t get the message about what was wrong immediately, all I had to do was listen to my parents’ comments and take the other side.

In the fall of 1964, I went to college and volunteered at the Tallahassee Goldwater for President office. I had been a Republican for a long time because Southern Democrats were corrupt. Besides, Goldwater’s proclamation that “extremism in defense of liberty” was “no vice” made sense to me. My relatives said Goldwater couldn’t be trusted because he was really Jewish, so I knew he must be good.

At Goldwater headquarters a man who proclaimed himself the “oldest Leon County White Republican” held forth daily about how bad the United Nations was, among other rants. “Why was working for world peace so bad?” I asked. The OLCWR pointed his knobby tobacco-stained finger at me: “Little girl, supporting the United Nations makes you a liberal, and a liberal is just a cowardly socialist, and a socialist is just a sneaky communist. All of them want a world government to confiscate hard-earned money and give it to lazy poor people. Go read the Communist Manifesto and you’ll see.” At the library, I read the Communist Manifesto even though I had to get special permission to read it in the University Reading Room. It was soon clear. My aged would-be mentor was right. “Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains” made sense. I was a communist all right, not a Republican, so I never went back to Goldwater headquarters.

For the rest of my undergraduate years I was an autodidact communist who hid out in libraries like Marx did. Although I attended some rallies and meetings, went to Washington in the fall of 1967, mourned King and Kennedy in 1968, I was too much the serious student to be a committed activist—mainly I was just a geek who wrote an honors thesis on “how the Gilded Age Robber Barons created wealth and politicians protected it.”

After winning a fellowship to graduate school and then leaving in dismay over Harvard’s profound intellectual elitism, I needed to bring my ideas into action, for the first time since my Goldwater days. Cambridge, Massachusetts, was a great place to do this. I could combine my Marxism with a newfound feminism and help make connections between local and global issues—especially in regard to the problems of poverty, which still haunted me.

Needing my wages as a temporary typist to support political work, I kept trying to find ways to practice my politics personally, as well as in meetings and demonstrations. After being fired from one temporary job for putting up announcements of a meeting to discuss “our issues as women,” this seemed imperative. Soon I learned that by teaching women’s labor history to garment workers and then to other trade unionists through the Catholic Labor Guild and community schools I could make a difference, if not a revolution. There were older Italian women who could still recall the funeral march for Sacco and Vanzetti, along with younger working-class lesbians who had been in the “union business” for a long time—fighting for basic rights within electrical, postal, and communications unions.

It was exciting to learn something that my relatives had tried so hard to deny—that jobs were important to women and that most women were employed despite the barriers. My family had looked down on “mill girls,” with their loose morals, but Grandmother had taken in sewing in her home. She had been ashamed to talk about it, because it wasn’t ladylike and also because she had never told Veterans’ Affairs, who would have cut her benefits for working. It all began to link together.

Still, teaching labor history raised doubts as well as hopes. Sure, unions helped those who could work at full-time jobs in big industries. But what about single mothers like my grandmother? Or people whose families had problems that prevented them from earning a living wage no matter what, at least some of the time? Labor activists were understandably concerned with workplace problems, but the visible and invisible effects of women’s poverty remained unaddressed.²

Welfare and Welfare Rights: Remembering What We Have Lost and Learned

While trying to find answers in the labor movement, I accidentally discovered the roots for an activism that seemed more grounded—in the Cambridge Welfare Rights office, next door to the SDS antiwar office. Their mimeograph machine worked better than ours, so I was there often. Besides, the “welfare moms” were nicer than the radical men in the SDS office. They were full of earthy wit and every bit as sharp in their analysis of the systems that oppressed them as the Gramsci-quoting men next door. Gradually I spent more and more time helping out in their office and then tutoring some of the kids in the nearby housing projects. It was a politics that made personal sense, connected to issues that both felt right and still were central to real radical change.

In 1971, the parent-controlled board of a local five-town Head Start program hired me as a service coordinator. With amazing luck this everyday paying job offered focus, and a way to be angry and be loving—if I just listened hard and stayed really well connected to the women, several of whom became lifelong mentors and friends. I went with folks to welfare offices, to welfare rights meetings, and to statewide poverty program and legal services briefings—as well as learning deeply about the challenges faced daily in the hidden corners of semi-urban neighborhoods. I reported back at parent meetings where the mothers went from one agenda item dealing with proper bathroom policy to another deciding how to fight for increases in clothing allowances. We saw such “special needs” income supplements as important in themselves and as essential steps in expanding universal benefits.

Significantly, no one I knew then, even those of us most pessimistic about Amerika, thought that “welfare” would ever be taken away as a basic income maintenance right. Our concerns were to expand it—by getting more benefits added, such as child care to cover education and employment time; such as recognition that men should be acknowledged as deserving too rather than hidden away; such as obtaining cost-of-living increases and transportation vouchers. We tried hard to counter stereotypes of “lazy welfare queens.” We also fought against abuse by workers within the system as well as to improve it by allowing more graduated paths out of welfare as people found parttime employment or sought educational advancement.

Sure, some people in the Nixon administration might want work incentive programs that were punitive, or some southern politicians might yell about “accountability” from both recipients and community agencies such as our Head Start. But we simply did not think that we could lose what we saw as a right established in the Social Security Act. Lots of people hated welfare and the people on it, and wanted more punishments in the system, but we did not imagine that within twenty-five years the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program would be ended. It was just impossible to think that in thirty years we would be fighting only to keep the remaining crumbs of programs we then assumed were the baseline, not-good-enough foundation of the underdeveloped American welfare state.

Of course, as we agitated to change the system, we seldom had made a case for why it should remain. When Nixon’s welfare reform—the Family Assistance Program (FAP)—died, we celebrated a victory, because it did not guarantee the higher national income floor and recipient rights of the NWRO plan. We didn’t realize that shifting income guarantees for people with disabilities into an all-federal program (SSI-D) would be the end, not the continuation, of federal welfare rights expansion. By 1975, the talk among policy activists and welfare rights folks shifted to how we would expand Medicaid into national health care—which we saw as the next likely way to expand benefits to poor people. We could come back to federal income guarantees for all later.

Now I see that we should have been paying more attention to the rhetoric of the right-wing congressmen who fought FAP. We failed to recognize their discovery, that “welfare” could serve as a successful code word to use without directly attacking blacks, cities, liberals, and Big Government. If we thought harder we might have paid more attention to those old leftists who warned that our “community-based, participatory” politics were good but not enough—that we should think harder before we glibly chanted about “smashing the state.”

Indeed, now it seems that failing to fight for welfare as part of a responsible state back in the early 1970s was the beginning of the slide down the slippery slope that landed us where we are today.³

Lessons Learned

Building on this early base, and despite such a fundamental miscue, I have learned a lot as we slid down to what I hope is the bottom of the slippery slope of the past quarter century. Continuing my welfare activism (with ebbs and flows due to family obligations), I began to grasp the complexities of organizing and agitating about poverty. Writing and speaking about poverty have humbled me regarding the profound limits of information and theory and yet forced me to see the necessity of continued effort. And twenty-five years of being a university teacher with adult students who work in human services, who are or have been on welfare, or who are or want to be activists, have taught me never to underestimate how much remains to be learned, by all of us, by any means necessary.

About Activism

My first and most critical lesson was You don’t have to be on welfare or a mother or even a woman to be for welfare rights—but building a movement means that everyone must learn from and take leadership from women who are or have been “in the system.” This was how I initially learned the limits of the workerism embedded in my labor activism. Head Start mothers argued forcefully that they needed not jobs but time for their families and themselves—as well as more education, and access to decent housing and schools. They only wanted employment as a positive option and not another dead end. Even today, as bad as things are, activists, social workers, and legal service workers who work with and for low-income women must learn that the movement for “welfare rights” was just that, a movement, because it was led by poor people and their allies who together gave it radical strategic meaning, not just tactical efficacy. Frances Fox Piven, Richard Cloward, Betty Reid Mandell, Guida West, and many others would never have been helpful if they had not learned this, along with how to work as equals...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Editors
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I: The Context of Welfare Reform
• Part II: Poverty and Welfare Reform
• Part III: Family Construction and Destruction: Marriage, Fatherhood, and Domestic Violence
• Part IV: Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration
• Part V: Looking to the Future
• Index