Independent Workers, Dependable Mothers: Discourse, Resistance, and AFDC Workfare Programs

In the late 1980s the United States demanded that all womenreceiving federal welfare payments begin efforts to move offof welfare and into wage work. Underlying these demands wasa discourse of dependency that opposed wage work to state benefits,men to women, white to people of color, and deserving to undeserving.This article examines the operation of dependency discoursein one city's welfare-to-work program, explicating the waysin which staff and welfare clients manipulated the discourse,creating some spaces for resistance by poor nonwhite women receivingwelfare.