Women at the Margins

Neglect, Punishment, and Resistance

J Dianne Garner, Rosemary Sarri, Josefina Figueira-Mcdonough

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136578311
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

A compelling look at the crisis of disadvantaged women This powerful document takes a sobering look at the phenomenon of marginalized women pushed to the edges of society, holding on with the barest of hope and extraordinary bravery. Handicapped by the increasing societal inequality they face as an everyday fact of life, these women (and in many cases, their children) have been disconnected from the mainstream for reasons of age, race, gender, health, incarceration, domestic abuse, unwanted pregnancy, unemployment, and economic circumstance. They are poor in an affluent society, powerless in a powerful nation, and the suffering caused by their exclusion is poignant and troubling.Eloquently illustrated with poetry, art, and prose created by marginalized women, Women at the Margins: Neglect, Punishment, and Resistance makes a compelling argument for social change. The book offers a no-holds-barred look at how economic restructuring, welfare reform, neo-conservative ideology, and institutional exclusion have locked women into subservient, substandard roles, stripping them of their citizenship and rendering them expendable. Diverse authors track the life cycle of marginalized women, from teenage pregnancy to the lonliness of older women in poverty or prison.Women at the Margins: Neglect, Punishment, and Resistance addresses:

• the effects of welfare reform
• the forgotten group: women in prison and jail
• low-income women and housing
• women marginalized by substance abuse, poverty, and incarceration
• teenage pregnancy
• children and their incarcerated mothers
• recidivism and reintegration
• women, law, and the justice system
• and much more!Women at the Margins: Neglect, Punishment, and Resistance acknowledges the long history of the inequality faced by women living in exclusion but focuses on the present with a hopeful but realistic eye toward the future. It is an indispensible resource for sociology, social work, legal and penal system professionals, and academics, and an essential read for everyone.

Chapter 1

Increasing Inequality: The Ascendancy of Neoconservatism and Institutional Exclusion of Poor Women

Josefina Figueira-McDonough
Rosemary C. Sarri

The poor no longer the creators of wealth
But an expensive nuisance

W. H. Auden

The recession of the early 1980s was handled by cutting welfare and other programs addressing the urgent needs of citizens in poverty, while government decisions greatly benefited affluent groups. A trickle-down rationale justified these policies. The response to the 2001 recession has been molded along the same lines, although the evidence for the trickle-down effect is lacking.

To examine the process of exclusion in the second half of the 1990s when the nation experienced an economic boom, is particularly enlightening. Distributive injustice in times of economic contraction can be blamed on erroneous theories, but hardships imposed on the most vulnerable citizens in a period of affluence require a more complex explanation.

Focusing on the struggles and imprisonment of poor women highlights how welfare and correctional systems have robbed them of their citizenship status and treated them as expendable. These institutions achieve this outcome by constructing a holistic definition of such women as deviant, in fact attributing to them an “other“ identity which blocks empathy from the rest of society. Furthermore, the distance and isolation created by stigma and prison walls have the effect of rendering their realities invisible.

The marginality of poor women is not new. Historical evidence on how women in poverty and behind bars have been treated in the United Statesabounds. While acknowledging the past, the focus of this book is on the present. We need to frame the discussion within the current economic restructuring and the neoconservative ideology shaping policies that affect poor women. Since our purpose is to analyze the constraints imposed on women who are poor and behind bars, the growing economic inequality and the neoconservative ideology that shaped the policies provide a necessary context for discussion.

The oppression of women is embedded in circumstances that oppress others as well. The specific mechanisms that force women toward the margins are located within this broader context.

THE LAISSEZ-FAIRE MYTH, THE NEOCONSERVATIVES, AND THE LIBERAL MODEL OF WELFARE

Economic Restructuring and Inequality

Capitalism brings with it the expectation of inequality. Markets are built on competition—some participants will win; others will lose. Streaks of winning will make future wins easier and result in the accumulation of capital, the engine for further growth. The utilitarian assumption is that, regardless of inequality, the whole will be better off (Kuttner, 1984).

Government regulations, taxation, and income transfers are mechanisms used by capitalist nations to redress some of the inevitable inequality. The United States has never been very efficient with such redistribution. The onset of the welfare state came about relatively late. Transfers to the poor were restricted, residual, and meager, and the taxation policies favored the better off (Marger, 1999). Compared to other capitalist-welfare states, economic inequality in the United States has been greater (Heidenheimer, Heclo, and Adams, 1975), but recently it has risen to levels unknown since the 1920s and far in excess of other advanced societies today (Gray, 1998). For example, the Gini index¹ for the United States in 1998 was .401 as compared to Germany and Canada, respectively .281 and .312 (World Bank, 1999, Table 2.8).

This growth of inequality indicates a decline of working-class income as compared to the higher classes. In 1997, 20 percent of American families with higher incomes received 47 percent of all income, while the lowest 20 percent received 4.2 percent. Comparing such distribution to 1970, the higher income group has increased their share by 6.3 percent while the bottom three quintiles lost the same amount (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1998, Table F-2). Although productivity increased between 1973 and 1996, the weekly earnings of 80 percent of the rank-and-file workers fell by 18 percent. At the same time, the income of CEOs increased 19 percent (Mishel and Bernstein, 1994). In the past, good times meant the betterment of all classes. Now this link between positive economic cycles and benefits to the whole seems to have been disrupted (Danziger and Gottschalk, 1995).

Explanations for the emergence of a two-tiered society are usually linked to deindustrialization, economic globalization, and technological advances. More precisely, the situation involves the loss of manufacturing jobs due to more effective production processes that have left previously well-paid, low-skilled, blue-collar workers scrambling for lower paid service jobs. Furthermore, some of the low-skilled jobs move to developing countries where production is much cheaper, further depressing the wages at home. Third, demands of world-market competition have created a very well paid technological service workforce (Sassen, 1998). The moral issue of extreme inequality within a democratic regime is thereby erased by the unalienable demands of the market (Gray, 1998).

However, the technological innovations, deindustrialization, and global competition pressures do not impinge only on the United States; therefore, this explanation is incomplete. Inequality levels in other industrialized countries are much lower and have not increased in recent years (Esping- Andersen, 1999).

The Neoconservative Ascendancy and the Fashioning of Exclusion

Kuttner (1984), Phillips (1990), and Gray (1998), among others, agree that the United States has veered away from the democratic equality praised by Tocqueville and the vision of expanding opportunities embodied in the New Deal. They contend that governmental institutions have been highjacked by neoconservative ideologies. They also agree that this ascendancy gained legitimacy during the Reagan administration, the chief indirect effect of which was to condone wide economic inequality.

A key dimension of this conservative vision was the proposal for a return to a laissez-faire policy that implied a scaling back of regulations and a move toward Lockean restrictions on state interference in the market (Kuttner, 1997). The appeal of this ideology was buttressed by statements linking laissez-faire to the early successes of the young republic and nineteenth- century economic growth. As Goodin and associates (1999) point out, this hands-off role for the state is hardly supported by historical evidence. Examples of early state intervention include the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and an arsenal of government subsidies that served as a framework for national territorial expansion, the National Road, and theintercontinental railway. The federal government initiated large-scale public works projects and protectionist tariff policies, a foundation for early American prosperity. In the backwash of the CivilWar, the first war of mass mobilization, the federal government found itself paying war pensions to a substantial portion of the northern population (Skocpol, 1992; Goodin et al., 1999). Gray (1998), in fact, claims that in no other market economy has state intervention been more invasive of personal liberties than in the United States during prohibition.

This combination of demanding greater autonomy for the market while enforcing greater controls on certain citizens on moral grounds is a trademark of the new ideology, reflecting strong class biases. Remolding American society to suit the “imperatives of the market” carried with it an ethos of rugged individualism, liberal notions of self-help, and puritanical notions of virtue and punishment.

Through the neoconservative lens, welfare was interpreted on one hand as contributing to the erosion of American virtues—autonomy, work ethic, family ethic, and community ethic (Murray, 1984; Mead, 1986)—and, on the other, as a waste of resources that delayed economic growth by encumbering capital with taxation (Greenberg, 1985). The spread of this ideology, and its eventual effect on social policies, had its onset in the mid-1970s and culminated in the 1990s.

The Ambivalent Welfare System

Although the American State, as noted previously, was hardly noninterventionist in the economic development of the country, it remained indifferent to poverty for a long time. The old poor laws,² combined with private charity, provided the dominant mode of relief for the old and destitute (including orphans and widows) throughout the first third of the twentieth century, fully two or three generations after most other industrialized countries had enacted public-age pensions.

The Social Security Act of 1935 inaugurated the welfare state in the nation. It provided old age, survivors, and disability insurance to a substantial number of citizens, doing much to ease the problem of poverty among the elderly. Nonetheless, enactment was, for a long time, drastically limited in the portion of the population covered in terms of race and gender (Quadagno, 1994; Gordon, 1994). Also, benefits were quite low (Skocpol, 1995; Orloff, 1993). This combination left a large residual population relying upon means-tested public assistance of a traditional poor-law sort.

The United States lacks any universal “family allowance” or “children benefit” and, in its place until 1996, had only a stringently means-tested program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). While the neoconservative supporters made public assistance the target of reform, especially AFDC, Social Security evaded criticism because it was interpreted in terms of self-help (Goodin et al., 1999). This ideological gloss was almost certainly the result of an awareness of the political power of retirees' organizations. It could not be based on economic considerations because the AFDC program consumed less that one-fifth of the welfare budget (Marger, 1999).

The United States, according to Goodin and associates (1999), is the prototype of the liberal model of welfare. The model argues that the road to citizens' well-being can be achieved primarily through a highly productive economy and participatory insurance and only very secondarily through a residual system of social-welfare transfers. In an economy keeping pregovernment incomes high, pregovernment poverty would by definition be low; therefore, there would be little need for public sector transfers. Transfers should be minimal and exclusively targeted to the “truly” poor (in absolute terms).

A test of the efficiency of this model was carried out by Goodin and associates (1999) using ten-year panel data for three countries considered prototypes of the three welfare models described by Esping-Andersen (1990). The United States represented the liberal model; Germany, the corporatist model; and the Netherlands, the sociodemocratic model. The research sheds some light about the efficiency of each model.

While gross domestic product (GDP) per capita growth in these three countries is quite similar during the ten-year period (1985-1995), the growth in median income was much lower in the United States (50 percent as compared to 63 percent and 75 percent). On the other hand, the amount of pretransfer poverty created by the market in these three countries is equally high (around 20 percent). But the posttransfer poverty level in the United States is considerably higher than in the other two countries at any time in the decade under study. The United States shows a poverty rate of 18 percent as compared to 9 percent in Germany and 4.5 percent in the Netherlands. ³

The persistence of posttransfer poverty over ten years (e.g., the percentage of people who remained poor during that time) continues to be higher in the United States (13 percent) as compared to Germany (6 percent) and the Netherlands (0.5 percent). Of those in poverty in the liberal system, even after postgovernment transfers, half remain each year in deep poverty (50 percent below the poverty line) and over the ten-year period this percentage was reduced only by 2 percent. While the United States did, in fact, report much higher employment rates than other countries, the data also showed that a large proportion of the employed (10 percent) remain poor (Gray, 1998). I

The ineffectiveness of the liberal-welfare system according to its own standards is compounded by the permanence of a large part of the population in deep and persistent poverty. Citizens living in such economic dereliction are also excluded from mediating economic resources (such as education and employment). Using measures of deep and persistent deprivation, such as level and duration of poverty, lack of access to education, health vulnerability, and extent of layoffs, Goodin and associates (1999) built a multideprivation index. They found that in the United States, 5 percent of households with working heads fell in the bottom category. Considering only households with female heads, the percentage was four times higher (20 percent). This calculation is conservative as it does not include homeless and illegal immigrant households or those who are institutionalized.

It was in the context of national economic growth and ineffective welfare performance that the 1996 welfare reform actwas passed (Personal Responsibility andWork Opportunity Act). That legislation was especially restrictive for recipients of AFDC, now tellingly relabeled Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). Beyond the political rhetoric that accompanied it, the shift meant, above all, a retrenchment of the liberal system rather than a reform of an ineffective system. Its base was neoconservative devotion rather than the result of an outcome-and-process evaluation. In the face of the evidence on long-term and deep poverty and the ineffectiveness of the market to improve the situation, residual welfare was tightened and shortened. Most important, the citizenship principle of entitlement was erased. The clock was turned back to pre-New Deal times.

An economic system that creates great wealth and great poverty runs the risk of being contested and possibly creating civil unrest. It needs to show evidence of good performance to preserve legitimacy. Indicators of wellbeing, such as employment rates, are crucial. The acceptance of such indicators conveniently obscures earnings levels, security and length of employment, and who is and is not counted. An efficient strategy of hiding the true victims of the economic restructure is the use of policies intent on constructing these victims as deviants. Two neoconservative leaders expertly did this: Reagan with his tale of the welfare queen and Bush followed with the scare story of Willie Horton. The stage was set for policies that would demonize the poor.

Women's Marginalization in the Welfare System

The marginalization of women and minorities in the U.S. welfare system has been brought to light most clearly by a group of women (Abramovitz, 19...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Editors
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction to Art and Women at the Margins
• Chapter 1 Increasing Inequality: The Ascendancy of Neoconservatism and Institutional Exclusion of Poor Women
• SECTION I: INCREASING THE DUAL CONTROL OF WOMEN AND DISTORTING THEIR STRENGTH
• SECTION II: BLOCKAGES TO AUTONOMY
• SECTION III: GENDER, AGE, AND HEALTH INTERACTIONS
• SECTION IV: BAD WOMEN, UNDESERVING MOTHERS
• SECTION V: PRAGMATIC KNOWLEDGE, LEGAL REDRESSING, AND WOMEN’S SOLIDARITY
• SECTION VI: ACTION STRATEGIES FOR TODAY
• Index