Backlash Against Welfare Mothers

Backlash Against Welfare Mothers

Author: Ellen Reese

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2005-07-29

Total Pages: 374

ISBN-13: 0520244621

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Ellen Reese considers the politics of welfare in the U.S. from the 1940s to the present, offering a historical perspective on the current debates over 'welfare mothers' & showing how racism has played a large part in the formulation of popular conceptions regarding welfare.


Backlash against Welfare Mothers

Backlash against Welfare Mothers

Author: Ellen Reese

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2005-07-29

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 9780520938717

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Backlash against Welfare Mothers is a forceful examination of how and why a state-level revolt against welfare, begun in the late 1940s, was transformed into a national-level assault that destroyed a critical part of the nation's safety net, with tragic consequences for American society. With a wealth of original research, Ellen Reese puts recent debates about the contemporary welfare backlash into historical perspective. She provides a closer look at these early antiwelfare campaigns, showing why they were more successful in some states than others and how opponents of welfare sometimes targeted Puerto Ricans and Chicanos as well as blacks for cutbacks. Her research reveals both the continuities and changes in American welfare opposition from the late 1940s to the present. Reese brings new evidence to light that reveals how large farmers and racist politicians, concerned about the supply of cheap labor, appealed to white voters' racial resentments and stereotypes about unwed mothers, blacks, and immigrants in the 1950s. She then examines congressional failure to replace the current welfare system with a more popular alternative in the 1960s and 1970s, which paved the way for national assaults on welfare. Taking a fresh look at recent debates on welfare reform, she explores how and why politicians competing for the white vote and right-wing think tanks promoting business interests appeased the Christian right and manufactured consent for cutbacks through a powerful, racially coded discourse. Finally, through firsthand testimonies, Reese vividly portrays the tragic consequences of current welfare policies and calls for a bold new agenda for working families.


Whose Welfare?

Whose Welfare?

Author: Gwendolyn Mink

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 9780801486203

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Discusses the effects of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996.


The Color of Welfare

The Color of Welfare

Author: Jill Quadagno

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1996-04-11

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0199874476

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Thirty years after Lyndon Johnson declared a War on Poverty, the United States still lags behind most Western democracies in national welfare systems, lacking such basic programs as national health insurance and child care support. Some critics have explained the failure of social programs by citing our tradition of individual freedom and libertarian values, while others point to weaknesses within the working class. In The Color of Welfare, Jill Quadagno takes exception to these claims, placing race at the center of the "American Dilemma," as Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal did half a century ago. The "American creed" of liberty, justice, and equality clashed with a history of active racial discrimination, says Quadagno. It is racism that has undermined the War on Poverty, and America must come to terms with this history if there is to be any hope of addressing welfare reform today. From Reconstruction to Lyndon Johnson and beyond, Quadagno reveals how American social policy has continually foundered on issues of race. Drawing on extensive primary research, Quadagno shows, for instance, how Roosevelt, in need of support from southern congressmen, excluded African Americans from the core programs of the Social Security Act. Turning to Lyndon Johnson's "unconditional war on poverty," she contends that though anti-poverty programs for job training, community action, health care, housing, and education have accomplished much, they have not been fully realized because they became inextricably intertwined with the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which triggered a white backlash. Job training programs, for instance, became affirmative action programs, programs to improve housing became programs to integrate housing, programs that began as community action to upgrade the quality of life in the cities were taken over by local civil rights groups. This shift of emphasis eventually alienated white, working-class Americans, who had some of the same needs--for health care, subsidized housing, and job training opportunities--but who got very little from these programs. At the same time, affirmative action clashed openly with organized labor, and equal housing raised protests from the white suburban middle-class, who didn't want their neighborhoods integrated. Quadagno shows that Nixon, who initially supported many of Johnson's programs, eventually caught on that the white middle class was disenchanted. He realized that his grand plan for welfare reform, the Family Assistance Plan, threatened to undermine wages in the South and alienate the Republican party's new constituency--white, southern Democrats--and therefore dropped it. In the 1960s, the United States embarked on a journey to resolve the "American dilemma." Yet instead of finally instituting full democratic rights for all its citizens, the policies enacted in that turbulent decade failed dismally. The Color of Welfare reveals the root cause of this failure--the inability to address racial inequality.


Poverty, Battered Women, and Work in U.S. Public Policy

Poverty, Battered Women, and Work in U.S. Public Policy

Author: Lisa D. Brush

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2011-07-28

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 0195398505

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Drawing on longitudinal interviews, government records, and personal narratives, feminist sociologist Lisa Brush examines the intersection of work, welfare, and battering. Brush contrasts conventional wisdom with illuminating analyses of social change and social structures, highlighting how race and class shape women's experiences with poverty and abuse and how "domestic" violence moves out of the home and follows women to work.Brush's unique interview data on work-related control, abuse, and sabotage, together with administrative data on earnings, welfare, and restraining orders, offer new empirical insights on the impact of work requirements and other post-welfare rescission changes on the lives of low-income and battered mothers. Personal narratives provide first-hand accounts of women's perceptions of the broad forces that shape the circumstances of their everyday lives, their health, their prospects, their ambitions, and their diagnoses of their world. Deftly integrating the political and the personal, the administrative and the narrative, the economic and the emotional, Brush underscores the vital need to reexamine ideas, policies, and practices meant to keep women safe and economically productive that instead trap women in poverty and abuse.With her fresh approach to problems people often see as intractable, Brush offers a new way of calculating the costs of battering for the policy makers and practitioners concerned with the well being of poor, battered women and their families and communities.


A Mother's Place

A Mother's Place

Author: Susan Chira

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 1998-12-30

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 0060930241

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Mothers today are under siege. Society belittles mothers at home while telling mothers at work they are blighting their children's lives. Susan Chira, a veteran New York Times journalist, separates myth from reality, showing how the media, the courts, and politicians have conducted a backlash against working mothers that hurts all women. Here, she reviews the latest scientific research and shows, contrary to popular belief, that children of working mothers turn out just as well as those raised by stay-at-home mothers. But instead of telling mothers where their place should be, Chira wants to reframe this distorted debate and help mothers get where they want to be, whether at home or at work.


Feminism’s Forgotten Fight

Feminism’s Forgotten Fight

Author: Kirsten Swinth

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2018-11-05

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0674988906

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A spirited defense of feminism, arguing that the lack of support for working mothers is less a failure of second-wave feminism than a rejection by reactionaries of the sweeping changes they campaigned for. When people discuss feminism, they often lament its failure to deliver on the promise that women can “have it all.” But as Kirsten Swinth argues in this provocative book, it is not feminism that has betrayed women, but a society that balked at making the far-reaching changes for which activists fought. Feminism’s Forgotten Fight resurrects the comprehensive vision of feminism’s second wave at a time when its principles are under renewed attack. Through compelling stories of local and national activism and crucial legislative and judicial battles, Swinth’s history spotlights concerns not commonly associated with the movement of the 1960s and 1970s. We see liberals and radicals, white women and women of color, rethinking gender roles and redistributing housework. They brought men into the fold, and together demanded bold policy changes to ensure job protection for pregnant women and federal support for child care. Many of the creative proposals they devised to reshape the workplace and rework government policy—such as guaranteed incomes for mothers and flex time—now seem prescient. Swinth definitively dispels the notion that second-wave feminists pushed women into the workplace without offering solutions to issues they faced at home. Feminism’s Forgotten Fight examines activists’ campaigns for work and family in depth, and helps us see how feminism’s opponents—not feminists themselves—blocked the movement’s aspirations. Her insights offer key lessons for women’s ongoing struggle to achieve equality at home and work.


Welfare Racism

Welfare Racism

Author: Kenneth J. Neubeck

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2002-09-11

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 1134001517

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Welfare Racism analyzes the impact of racism on US welfare policy. Through historical and present-day analysis, the authors show how race-based attitudes, policy making, and administrative policies have long had a negative impact on public assistance programs. The book adds an important and controversial voice to the current welfare debates surrounding the recent legilation that abolished the AFDC.


Caring for Mom and Dad

Caring for Mom and Dad

Author: Susan Stein-Roggenbuck

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-10-05

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 1009203347

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Throughout the twentieth-century, the United States implemented social policies targeting the needs of dependent parents – parents who were no longer able to work but lacked sufficient financial resources to support themselves. These parent dependency policies either encouraged or required family members, particularly adult children, to provide support as an alternative to government benefits. Debates over how best to support aging parents centered on conceptualizations of dependency and the moral obligations family owed their parents. Measures of dependency often inhibited aging Americans' access to benefits they needed, focusing instead on ensuring that they were, in fact, dependent and that other family resources were not available. Susan Stein-Roggenbuck highlights this understudied aspect of the modern US welfare state, highlighting the limited support provided to aging parents and the hardship they and their adult children endured in the efforts to minimize public expenditures.


The Oxford Handbook of U.S. Women's Social Movement Activism

The Oxford Handbook of U.S. Women's Social Movement Activism

Author: Holly J. McCammon

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-05-05

Total Pages: 960

ISBN-13: 0190204214

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Over the course of thirty-seven chapters, including an editorial introduction, this handbook provides a comprehensive examination of scholarly research and knowledge on a variety of aspects of women's collective activism in the United States, tracing both continuities and critical changes over time. Women have played pivotal and far-reaching roles in bringing about significant societal change, and women activists come from an array of different demographics, backgrounds and perspectives, including those that are radical, liberal, and conservative. The chapters in the handbook consider women's activism in the interest of women themselves as well as actions done on behalf of other social groups. The volume is organized into five sections. The first looks at U.S. Women's Social Activism over time, from the women's suffrage movement to the ERA, radical feminism, third-wave feminism, intersectional feminism and global feminism. Part two looks at issues that mobilize women, including workplace discrimination, reproductive rights, health, gender identity and sexuality, violence against women, welfare and employment, globalization, immigration and anti-feminist and pro-life causes. Part three looks at strategies, including movement emergence and resource mobilization, consciousness raising, and traditional and social media. Part four explores targets and tactics, including legislative forums, electoral politics, legal activism, the marketplace, the military, and religious and educational institutions. Finally, part five looks at women's participation within other movements, including the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, labor unions, LGBTQ movement, Latino activism, conservative groups, and the white supremacist movement.