“Welfare Queen”

Background

The U.S. welfare program began as a set of state-funded widows' and mothers' pensions. Beginning in 1911 and by the end of 1921, forty states adopted mothers' pension legislation. Pensions were seen as a kind of salary for public service, much like those given to officers and teachers, so that mothers could fulfill their national duty by raising the nation's children. The pensions allowed women and children to avoid entering the workplace and ensured that children could remain in the home after the death of the father, who was seen as the primary breadwinner. Solutions to the problem of spousal death that were not considered were those that might help women effectively become mothers and workers. Critics have argued that the policy constructed mothers as eternal dependents, who, after they lost their husbands, effectively “married” the state.

State officials, however, did not accept this union unconditionally, and they worked to make sure that the homes were “suitable” and that mothers were doing their jobs in raising the nation's children. Many state laws included morality clauses, which restricted benefits to widows alone, as opposed to single mothers, and regulated the sexual behavior of recipients. There is also evidence that historically, the dominant conception of motherhood as public service had much more to do with a state of being than with the tasks a woman performed. Early welfare legislation came at a time of intense nationalism and xenophobic sentiment in the United States, and the policies reflected that. So intense were nationalist sentiments that benefits could be terminated for something as “egregious” as not speaking English in the home.

Given the xenophobia of the age and U.S. racial history, it is ironic, though not surprising, that a group of women existed who had been represented in the country since its founding who were by and large denied benefits. Before World War II, 86% of Black applications for welfare were denied. Often, the intentions of the policy conflicted with officials', and the wider public's, beliefs about Black womanhood. The pensions were created so that women would not have to become workers to support their families, yet some officials saw Black women as workers who should be able to do without benefits. Some of these officials entrusted to help the general public actually believed that any Black woman who requested benefits did so out of laziness.

Black women were also disadvantaged by longstanding beliefs, formed in the published accounts of early travelers to Africa and solidified during slavery, about Black female hypersexuality and hyperfertility. These beliefs only strengthened some aid workers in their resolve to deny benefits to Black women. Such public assistance workers and policymakers thought that benefits would encourage a morally suspect class of women to “have more children.” However, in the 1950s and 1960s, Blacks were able to secure access to benefits as they won access to U.S. civil rights.

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