The Battle for Welfare Rights
The Battle for Welfare Rights

Author: Felicia Kornbluh

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2007-12-05

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 9780812220254

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The Battle for Welfare Rights chronicles an American war on poverty fought first and foremost by poor people themselves. It tells the fascinating story of the National Welfare Rights Organization, the largest membership organization of low-income people in U.S. history. Setting that story in the context of its turbulent times, the 1960s and early 1970s, historian Felicia Kornbluh shows how closely tied that story was to changes in mainstream politics, both nationally and locally in New York City. The Battle for Welfare Rights offers new insight into women's activism, poverty policy, civil rights, urban politics, law, consumerism, social work, and the rise of modern conservatism. It tells, for the first time, the complete story of a movement that profoundly affected the meaning of citizenship and the social contract in the United States.

Rethinking the Welfare Rights Movement
Rethinking the Welfare Rights Movement

Author: Premilla Nadasen

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-05-22

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 1136490752

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The welfare rights movement was an interracial protest movement of poor women on AFDC who demanded reform of welfare policy, greater respect and dignity, and financial support to properly raise and care for their children. In short, they pushed for a right to welfare. Lasting from the early 1960s to the mid 1970s, the welfare rights movement crossed political boundaries, fighting simultaneously for women's rights, economic justice, and black women's empowerment through welfare assistance. Its members challenged stereotypes, engaged in Congressional debates, and developed a sophisticated political analysis that combined race, class, gender, and culture, and crafted a distinctive, feminist, anti-racist politics rooted in their experiences as poor women of color. The Welfare Rights Movement provides a short, accessible overview of this important social and political movement, highlighting key events and key figures, the movement's strengths and weaknesses, and how it intersected with other social and political movements of the itme, as well as its lasting effect on the country. It is perfect for anyone wanting to obtain an introduction to the welfare rights movement of the twentieth century.

Between the Lines
Between the Lines

Author: R. Shep Melnick

Publisher: Brookings Institution Press

Published: 2010-12-01

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 9780815705543

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Judicial interpretation of federal statutes has often been at the center of political controversy in recent years. In fact, it would be difficult to find a major domestic policy area in which statutory interpretation by the federal courts has not played a significant role in shaping the activities of government. In most important cases, judges base their interpretation not on the letter of the law, but on their reading of its history, purpose, and spirit. What judges discover between the lines of statutes often has major policy consequences. This book examines how statutory interpretation has affected the development of three programs: Aid to Families with Dependent Children, education for the handicapped, and food stamps. It explores how these decisions have changed state and national policies and how other institutions—especially Congress—have reacted to them. Although these three programs differ in several important ways, in each instance court action has expanded program benefits and increased federal control over state and local governments. R. Shep Melnick ties trends in statutory interpretation to broader policy developments, including the expansion of the agenda of national government, the persistence of divided government, and the resurgence and decentralization of Congress. He demonstrates that Congress frequently modifies or overturns court rulings, and he explains why statutory interpretation became so controversial in the 1980s. Between the Lines also explores the understanding of welfare rights that has guided the development of welfare policy over the past fifty years. What basic beliefs about the welfare state underlie court decisions interpreting these statutes? To what extent do members of Congress share these views? How have the assumptions of judges and members of Congress changed over time? These are some of the questions addressed in this detailed study of American welfare policy.

The War on Welfare
The War on Welfare

Author: Marisa Chappell

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2012-02-02

Total Pages: 359

ISBN-13: 0812201566

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Why did the War on Poverty give way to the war on welfare? Many in the United States saw the welfare reforms of 1996 as the inevitable result of twelve years of conservative retrenchment in American social policy, but there is evidence that the seeds of this change were sown long before the Reagan Revolution—and not necessarily by the Right. The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty, and Politics in Modern America traces what Bill Clinton famously called "the end of welfare as we know it" to the grassroots of the War on Poverty thirty years earlier. Marshaling a broad variety of sources, historian Marisa Chappell provides a fresh look at the national debate about poverty, welfare, and economic rights from the 1960s through the mid-1990s. In Chappell's telling, we experience the debate over welfare from multiple perspectives, including those of conservatives of several types, liberal antipoverty experts, national liberal organizations, labor, government officials, feminists of various persuasions, and poor women themselves. During the Johnson and Nixon administrations, deindustrialization, stagnating wages, and widening economic inequality pushed growing numbers of wives and mothers into the workforce. Yet labor unions, antipoverty activists, and moderate liberal groups fought to extend the fading promise of the family wage to poor African Americans families through massive federal investment in full employment and income support for male breadwinners. In doing so, however, these organizations condemned programs like Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) for supposedly discouraging marriage and breaking up families. Ironically their arguments paved the way for increasingly successful right-wing attacks on both "welfare" and the War on Poverty itself.

The National Welfare Rights Movement
The National Welfare Rights Movement

Author: Guida West

Publisher: Greenwood

Published: 1981

Total Pages: 490

ISBN-13:

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Monograph describing the origins and evolution of the national level social movement for welfare rights social reform, a social protest by primarily low income black women in the USA from 1965 to 1975 - examines mobilization of financing, membership, leadership, and supporting women's and black associations such as Core, the National Urban League and Churches, discusses conflict and cooperation within the movement and with welfare social administration authorities, and notes the changing socio-political climate. Bibliography pp. 407 to 427.

Under Attack, Fighting Back
Under Attack, Fighting Back

Author: Mimi Abramovitz

Publisher:

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13:

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Named an "Outstanding Book" by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in North America "Abramovitz introduces the reader to cutting edge socioeconomic analysis. . . . It is not possible to come away from Under Attack, Fighting Back with a sense that welfare is a simplistic topic or that the human consequences of adjustments in the existing system are inconsequential." --Labor History "This lively and informative book deserves to be widely read. It provides an excellent history of AFDC and the activities of various women's groups who have campaigned hard over the years for improvements in services to the poor." --Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare "Extraordinarily lucid and useful . . . " --In These Times In this short, eye-opening book, Mimi Abramovitz describes the heartless assault on impoverished single mothers in the name of "ending welfare dependency." Outlining the history of Aid to Families with Dependent Children, Abramovitz shows how the manipulation of gender, race, and class have made welfare vulnerable to attack. This new edition brings a well-received work completely up to date with analysis of recent developments in welfare "reform" and activism.