“Welfare Mother” Activism,Mainstream Feminism,and the Cunning of History in Ontario’s 1970s Welfare Debate

ABSTRACT

This article examines the voice of mobilized welfare mothers and the mainstream women’s movement in the welfare debate of the 1970s in Ontario. A question debated was whether welfare mothers had a right to “stay home” while receiving welfare. The article shows that a radical strain of welfare mother activists at this time demanded recognition of women’s unpaid work. While mainstream women’s groups were generally sympathetic to welfare mothers, their overriding focus on employability as the solution to their poverty served to derail the radical possibilities of welfare mother politics and solidify a policy agenda that undermined the deserving status of welfare mothers.     

Single Mothers “Do” Family

This paper explores how single mothers both incorporate others into family life (e.g., when they ask others to care for their children) and simultaneously “do families” in a manner that holds out a vision of a “traditional” family structure. Drawing on research with White, rural single mothers, the author explores the manner in which these women both endorse their children’s attachment to other caregivers and maintain boundaries around issues of discipline and attachment vis‐à‐vis these others. The author demonstrates that single mothers are willing to share this protected realm of family life with a new man (a fiancé or cohabiting boyfriend) as they pursue the goal of what has been called the “Standard North American Family.”     

Women's Voices: Explaining Poverty and Plenty in a Rural Community*

Abstract This paper explores how a multiclass sample of white rural women in an economically depressed, overwhelmingly nonfarm community explain both their own families' economic circumstances and those of the most disadvantaged families in their community. All women in the sample—even those with a history of economic instability and welfare receipt—articulate an ethic of family self‐sufficiency. They uniformly believe that anyone who can work should work, although they vary in their definition of who “can work.” In general, the lower the social class, the greater the understanding of the social processes that precipitate and perpetuate poverty. Both working‐class and poor women clearly recognize the limitations of the local market for labor. Sample women are ambivalent about welfare receipt and welfare reform. Although they believe that families should be self‐supporting, many recognize the necessity of welfare for the survival of some families in the community.     

LOOKING FOR “MR. RIGHT”: THE VIABILITY OF MARRIAGE INITIATIVES FOR AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN IN RURAL SETTINGS

Newly-funded initiatives aim to promote marriage among low-income African American women to reduce poverty and welfare dependency. Research indicates that these women have a strong desire to marry, but lack economically secure marriage partners. This research predominantly focuses on urban populations, and little is known about marriage as a strategy to end poverty and welfare dependency among the rural poor. Two case study counties in rural Mississippi were selected to examine if marriage promotion initiatives are a viable strategy for poor rural African American single mothers. Data were collected through semistructured interviews using a life history calendar procedure. The results show that, like their urban counterparts, poor rural single mothers are rarely able to find their “Mr. Right” because of their personal and contextual characteristics.     

Common and Specific Learnings for a Graduate of a School of Social Work

Abstract

Developing new scholarship on women is a recognized need in social work education. It can be furthered by applying a “gender lens” to the knowledge of the relationship between women and the welfare state. Reflecting historical concerns about providing public aid to the able-bodied male pauper and the impact of relief on the work ethic, social welfare literature has focused on male recipients while generalizing its findings to women. As a result, the story of the female pauper remains largely untold. This paper suggests that the relationship between women and the welfare state is shaped by a “family ethic” that in many ways parallels the work ethic known to shape the relationship between the welfare state and men. The family ethic is defined and applied to major income maintenance programs: public aid and social security. This article suggests foci for change.     

Between reforms and birth rates: Germany, Japan, and family policy discourse

This paper examines the development of employment-oriented family policy in Germany and Japan, two countries united by conservative welfare legacies and very low birthrates, through a close analysis of discourse. Why have recent reforms in Germany moved well beyond those in Japan despite remarkably similar “human capital” discourses? The relative strength of interpretative patterns—in this case, discursive patterns that successfully frame family policy reform as an economic imperative—and the role of employers are identified as critical explanatory factors. Further comparative attention is called to the role of the state as a guarantor of new family policy entitlements.     

When “Best I Can” is Not Enough: Welfare Managers’ Appraisal of Clients’ Mothering Practices

The “mommy wars” are a cultural narrative of conflict between mothers that amplifies the scrutiny placed on mothering practices. While mothers at all social locations face criticisms for their choices surrounding parenting, mothers in poverty lack the resources to enact many socially mandated parenting practices and contend with additional scrutiny through participation in programs like welfare-to-work. In this project, I examine the parenting expectations mothers on welfare must navigate. I use 69 semi-structured interviews with welfare-to-work program managers in Ohio from 2010-2011 to examine which mothering ideologies they encourage and discourage clients to adopt. I find that managers are highly critical of clients’ (perceived) parenting practices and instead promote a combination of intensive mothering and economic nurturing. Managers promote intensive mothering and meeting children's needs—so long as it does not interfere with the work requirements of the program. Economic nurturing simultaneously allows managers to express concern for children and promote clients participating in the work requirements of OWF, implying that work and family needs are aligned and can be met via work.     

“I Try Not to Depend on Anyone but Me”: Welfare‐Reliant Women's Perspectives on Self‐Sufficiency,Work, and Marriage*

Welfare reformers sought to reduce “dependency,” or reliance on state‐supported cash benefits and deployed a discourse of “self‐sufficiency” to promote the legitimacy of efforts to remove welfare recipients from publicly funded cash assistance through either wage labor or marriage. We use longitudinal, qualitative interview data collected from 38 initially welfare‐reliant women to examine what self‐sufficiency means to them and their perspectives on how work and marriage affect their ability to be self‐sufficient. Grounded theory analysis revealed that for these women, self‐sufficiency means formal independence from both the state (i.e., Temporary Assistance to Needy Families [TANF]) and men (i.e., marriage). Although they value marriage as an institution and would ideally marry, they do not consider marriage to be a likely route to self‐sufficiency given the pool of men available to them. Rather, they embrace their own market‐based wage labor as the means by which they can attain some measure of independence. Taking our lead from the women in this study, we challenge the emphasis on marriage in current welfare policy. We argue that employment training that results in better jobs for women and men and work supports that make low‐wage work pay are clearly the appropriate direction for policy aimed at the welfare‐reliant and working poor.     

Innenansichten eines Wohlfahrtsmarkts

The 2001 pension reform act (“Riester reform”) has recast old-age security in Germany by placing more emphasis on private provisions. The new policy draws on markets and competitive structures in social welfare, as done earlier in long-term care and in public utilities. In the social welfare sector in Germany, such privatisation mostly goes hand in hand with a far-reaching “social” regulation of markets. Old-age pensions are the most recent case in point. For the first time, financial markets figure as welfare markets. This is done in the politically most sensitive sector of the German welfare state, old-age security. In theoretical terms, we interpret the change as a structural transformation of German “social capitalism”. Empirically, we investigate the structure of the new welfare market and the attitudes of the providers, based on a survey of all providers of private pensions in Germany. The findings include: (1) Markets can produce the welfare good “income security in old-age” only by way of a complex arrangement of three markets – financial markets, pension markets and markets for financial consultancy services. (2) The pension reform of 2001 has given rise to a new welfare market: an old-age pension market as a distinct sub sector of the wider market for financial investment and saving. The pension market constitutes a new field of business, with new actors, new products and new arenas of competition. The new market is created and shaped by politics. (3) The new private pension market combines market principles with welfare state principles. The providers conceive of their business as contributing to social security, and they recognise that the state sustains and structures the market.     

Not just maternalism: marriage and fatherhood in American welfare policy

The United States' 1996 welfare reforms are often interpreted as a historical break in transitioning from supporting motherhood to commodifiying women's labor. However, this cannot account for welfare reform's emphasis upon heterosexual marriage and fatherhood promotion. The paper traces continuities and shifts in over a century of familial regulation through American welfare policy, specifying the place of marriage promotion within welfare policy. Up until 1996, families were key sites of intervention through which the American welfare state was erected, especially through single women as mothers - not wives. However, as of the 1960s, concern with African American men's "failed" familial commitments turned policymakers toward concern over marriage promotion for women and men. While marriage "disincentives" for aid recipients were lifted in the 1960s, the 1996 reforms structured a new form of nuclear family governance actively promoting marriage rooted in, but distinct from, the previous. Given the historical absence of welfare policies available to poor men, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families' (TANF) marriage promotion policies have positioned poor women as nodes connecting the state to poor men, simultaneously structuring poor women as breadwinners, mothers, and wives. Recent welfare reform has also started to target poor men directly, especially in fatherhood and marriage promotion initiatives. The article highlights how, in addition to workfare policies, marriage promotion is a neoliberal policy shifting risk to the shoulders of the poor, aiming to produce "strong families" for the purposes of social security.     

Pension Reform in China

This article analyzes China’s pension arrangement and notes that China has recently established a universal non-contributory pension plan covering urban non-employed workers and all rural residents, combined with the pension plan covering urban employees already in place. Further, in the latest reform, China has discontinued the special pension plan for civil servants and integrated this privileged welfare class into the urban old-age pension insurance program. With these steps, China has achieved a degree of universalism and integration of its pension arrangement unprecedented in the non-Western world. Despite this radical pension transformation strategy, we argue that the current Chinese pension arrangement represents a case of “incomplete” universalism. First, its benefit level is low. Moreover, the benefit level varies from region to region. Finally, universalism in rural China has been undermined due to the existence of the “policy bundle.” Additionally, we argue that the 2015 pension reform has created a situation in which the stratification of Chinese pension arrangements has been “flattened,” even though it remains stratified to some extent.     

The Father as an Idea: A Challenge to Kinship Boundaries by Single Mothers

In separating parenthood from partnership, women have created new family forms in which men may be involved but not as traditional fathers. Through in‐depth interviews with single middle‐class women, I compare families created with anonymous donors to those created with known donors. In the former cases, mothers craft imagined fathers as their children become “looking glasses” into the men they will probably never meet. These children must rely on the mothers’ imagination to create a sense of the fathers’ view of them. While known donors are not “dads” either, the mothers help these children imagine positive fathers, often through more concrete, personal knowledge, and these fathers often know the children from a distance. In an interesting manner, although children may be created without men as physically present “dads,” women contextualize the donors that allowed them to become mothers through acknowledging the social ways that blood kinship creates families. They ultimately reaffirm certain kinds of kinship rather than challenge them.     

Common sense: Why jobs and training alone won't end welfare for homeless families

With the advent of welfare reform, its proponents anticipate that millions of Americans chronically dependent on public assistance will be set free. In reality, far too many welfare recipients are trapped in a web of poverty from which they are incapable of escaping. Today, over a third of all welfare recipients are single, poorly-educated mothers with little or no work experience (Pavetti 1995, 3). Worse yet, extreme poverty has forced 600,000 of these families into homelessness. Common sense dictates that unless the states, in their new role as leaders in welfare innovation, immediately forge strategic policy, these women and their children–yet another generation–will sink deeper into poverty and dependence.     

When the Spirit Blooms: Acquiring Higher Education in the Context of Welfare Reform

ABSTRACT

Established within a political context greatly influenced by stereotypical assumptions of impoverished women of color, welfare reform codified a work-first philosophy meant to attack perceived “dependency” and spur “self-sufficiency.” This article describes the shortcomings of the work-first approach and highlights the importance of higher education for helping women, and especially women of color, achieve economic well-being. It then reports key findings from a study that examines the impact of higher education on the lives of welfare participants in California. Utilizing a mix of surveys, focus groups, and personal interviews, this study finds that despite the challenges associated with balancing parenthood, college-level coursework, and the bureaucratic demands of welfare reform, the stereotypical notions of the “welfare queen” do not apply. Instead, study participants exhibited a high level of ambition, persistence, determination, and hard work in pursuit of their educational ambitions; and in the process, improved their lives and the lives of their children.     

Russian lesbian mothers: Between “traditional values” and human rights

Abstract

Contemporary Russian state ideology has turned towards instituting “traditional family values,” an official turn that increased legal and social discrimination against queer families. The concept of “traditional family values” in the contemporary Russian state discourse refers to the “naturalness” of the heterosexual family, consisting of two parents and their biological offspring. This discourse eliminates the possibility of public lesbian parenting. Following the idea of the conceptualizations of queer temporalities in different geo-cultural contexts, I examine the impact of recent oppressive legal changes in Russia on reproductive choices, everyday parenting strategies, and social interactions among lesbian mothers. In this work, I seek to show more than the obvious harm caused by the “anti-gay law” in terms of its effects on lesbian-headed families. To do so, I analyze the strategies applied by Russian lesbian mothers to tackle the rapidly changing state ideologies and legislative landscapes. I do this by discussing the ways in which lesbian mothers in Russia “manipulate” their social status to avoid possible official or unofficial homophobic actions directed towards them and their children. For example, they may come out selectively, carefully choosing the people to whom they openly present their identity. I argue that to adhere to “ordinary” or “normal” family life, lesbian mothers in Russia use several survival strategies. One of these strategies relates to speculation about immigration to the “West.” That is, some lesbian families prepare all of the necessary documentation, secure valid visas, and attend special workshops where they receive legal and informational support on asylum seeking and emigration from Russia. Another set of strategies for maintaining family identity relies on the decision to come out as a co-mother during interactions with official institutions or to choose other identities; for example, godmother or sister of the birth mother of a child. An additional important strategy for lesbian mothers relies on drafting documents that maintain their rights in severe circumstances. This set of actions focuses on legally supporting the parental rights through the use of loopholes in the Russian legislation and drafting documents that maintain their rights to child custody and their partner’s property.     

Low‐income and Middle‐class Mothers Gendered Work and Family Schemas

Conflict between the demands of paid work and motherhood has been studied primarily from the experience of middle‐class and professional mothers in dual‐earner families. Recently, with the reform of welfare, a number of studies have focused on the problems of poor mothers in meeting the demands of paid employment and caring for children. This article explores the moral discourse of judgments about paid work and motherhood and how this differs for low‐income and married middle‐class women. It reviews research that considers why poor single mothers are seen as irresponsible when they leave work due to family demands when professional and middle‐class married mothers are seen as acting selflessly. It examines how gendered schema differentially influences the work and family choices of married middle‐class and professional mothers compared to poor and low‐income mothers.     

Was government the solution or the problem? The role of the state in the history of American social policy

This article attempts to resolve a contradiction noted by Charles Tilly between my earlier writings on education and later writings on the welfare state. The earlier work on education was critical of governments’ role in constructing bureaucratic school systems that reinforced inequality; the later work on the welfare state argued for the extension of government social provision. This article shows how the contradiction poses a false dichotomy. It then uses history to show how assessments of governments’ role reflect the political context in which they are written but rest on consistent values and priorities. The article emphasizes, as well, the absence of a counter narrative to the political right’s assertion of government policy failure; the truncated and inappropriate use of “state” in much writing on public policies; and the need for historians of policy to develop means of assessing the success or failure of government policies and programs.     

Welfare reform and the family cap: Rhetoric versus reality

Among welfare reform s many targets are welfare mothers who have additional children while receiving welfare benefits. To deter women from having children while on welfare, twenty-two states have implemented family caps, which deny additional benefits for children born while their mother is on welfare. The cap imposes a severe hardship on welfare mothers by reducing already meager welfare budgets at a time–after the birth of a child-when families are at their most vulnerable. It also represents the latest in a long line of governmental policies that have attempted to control the child-bearing choices of poor women. This article examines this history and reviews the decades of research that have disproved the relationship between welfare and out-of-wedlock births.     

Women and Migration in Albania: A View from the Village

Since the fall of communism in the early 1990s, Albania has experienced migrations of epic proportions: 17 years later almost one in four Albanians has emigrated and lives abroad, primarily in Greece and Italy. Albanian emigration has by and large represented a typically male‐dominated model, whereby men have “led the way” and women have followed as family members. Despite the considerable participation of Albanian women in this migration, their roles and experiences remain under‐researched. Based on in‐depth interviews with rural migrant women and their families, as well as additional ethnographic material collected from 2004 to 2006 in Albania and Greece, this paper aims to fill this knowledge gap. The findings demonstrate the various ways in which Albanian rural women participate in the migratory process. They are often the most important pillar for supporting the family migration strategy through their productive and reproductive labour when remaining behind. They are also closely involved in decision‐making about the migration of other family members. Furthermore, they have been among the pioneers of the early 1990s migration themselves, including taking the long and risky journeys across the mountains to Greece. Overall, their contribution to the migrant household is beyond their presumed reproductive role and includes a strong economic component. While some “traditional” norms and values persist and are reinforced during migration, change does take place, albeit at a slow and gradual pace. However, for the emancipatory benefits women could accrue through migration to be enhanced, immigration policies need adjusting to address their position as fully autonomous economic and social actors, thus reducing their dependency on male “bread‐winners.” Albanian women’s particular migratory experiences, combined with their increasing numbers as migrants, make a compelling case for further attention from researchers and policymakers.     

Single Motherhood: A Personal View

What model of “family” do social workers carry around in their heads? How does this influence their behaviour in relation to, say, single mothers? Through identifying the difficulties experienced by women who are single mothers, the author challenges social workers to reflect on the value judgments they pass and the expectations they hold of this client group.