Welfare Reform

Gendered Evolution of Welfare Policy

Early 20th-century Progressive Era advocates argued that women were naturally inclined toward caretaking and that the state should support women's efforts to rear their children because it benefited from those efforts. This concern translated into state-level policies (“Mothers' Pensions”) between 1911 and 1920, which targeted those viewed as most deserving—poor widows with young children. When a man with a wife and children died, the state stepped in on an emergency basis to minimally fulfill his financial responsibilities to young dependents. From the onset, these policies were intended to maintain women's role as caregivers and to address the poverty of children primarily. The programs only slowly came to serve other single mothers, many European immigrants among them.

With the enactment of the 1935 Social Security Act, the United States implemented a national welfare policy, based on previous state efforts. Funded jointly by the federal and state governments, Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) embodied many of the gendered and racialized biases that existed under the state programs, including targeting aid toward the children of poor women and excluding black women. In 1950, ADC changed to Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), for the first time extending assistance to adult single parents. AFDC gained entitlement status in 1965. By 1970, a series of Supreme Court decisions made in response to an active welfare rights movement affirmed this statutory entitlement as part of constitutional doctrine. National-level eligibility criteria could only reference need, though states were provided considerable administrative leeway in determining eligibility requirements and benefits levels. Changes in the 1980s included increasing child support efforts and establishing work requirements which included education and training programs

By the 1980s, however, few supported the existing AFDC program, though for different reasons. Conservative arguments against AFDC's entitlement status flourished in the discourse of the lazy dependent welfare mother, more inclined to stay at home and have babies to increase welfare benefits than work to providing for her children and improving their lives. Welfare advocates critiqued AFDC for its lack of respect toward recipients, insufficient benefits to support families, and lack of incentives and opportunities for education and training for jobs with family-sustaining wages.

Current Welfare Policies

Taking this dissatisfaction with AFDC to the presidential campaign trail in the early 1990s, Bill Clinton pledged to [Page 878]“end welfare as we know it.” The political discourse focused on ending the “cycle of dependency,” enhancing devolutionary control for states, renewing the commitment to wage work and promoting marriage. In 1996, President Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) into law, despite overwhelming criticisms from centrists and progressives that it would harm more people living in poverty than it would help. PRWORA ended welfare as a federal entitlement program for the poorest families by replacing AFDC with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and devolved more authority to the states. PRWORA also established much stricter work requirements and a lifetime time limit of 60 months' receipt of federal funds. As implemented, TANF-funded programs aim to ameliorate poverty among single-mother families by requiring mothers to obtain employment as quickly as possible. State welfare plans directly target individual behaviors around work and family life through a system of incentives and sanctions. Whether these programs have alleviated poverty or just hidden it is contested.

...