by Barbara CloudThe headlines are familiar:
"Welfare mothers targeted."
"Welfare mothers should work." "Dethrone welfare queens."
With all of the attention to the subject of women and welfare reform in the news these days, you might think that it's a relatively new social problem - one that has perhaps resulted from recent changes in family values or from contemporary economic concerns.
Not so, says Joanne Goodwin, UNLV assistant professor of history. The "problem" of women and welfare is nearly a hundred years old.
Goodwin has traced the roots of today's policy debate about women and welfare to the early 20th century, and she has discovered several persisting themes. Specifically, she has found that today's concerns about morality, values, and responsibility have been voiced for the past century. She has also found, not surprisingly, that economics was at the heart of the matter then as much as it is now.
In her forthcoming book, Gender and the Politics of Welfare Reform: Mothers' Pensions in Chicago, 1911-1929 (University of Chicago Press, 1997), Goodwin details the way one city dealt with the needs of poverty-stricken mothers in the days before the Social Security Act and Aid to Dependent Children brought the federal government into the picture.
Her research offers unique insights into the way welfare for women began and how much - and how little - the debate has changed.
In 1911, Illinois became the first state to
pass a mothers' pension law
to provide relief primarily to women who were widowed and had no other
means of supporting their children.
Goodwin quotes a juvenile court judge who called it "the grandest law on the statute books" because it allowed the state to encourage and cherish "this most sacred thing in human life - a mother's love."
The idea caught on. By 1921, 40 states had some provision for the support of dependent children in their own homes.
The popularity of the issue could undoubtedly be traced to the
opportunity it presented to the politicians of the day, who enjoyed the
chance to pay homage to family and motherhood, Goodwin says. In the grand
tradition of politics, those politicians approving the mothers' pensions
made much of the expectation that the assistance would allow widows with
children to stay home to care for them.
"The majority of the sympathy in those days went to those they deemed to be in the category of 'the worthy widow,'" Goodwin explains. "People came to a moral consensus that a mother who, 'through no fault of her own,' faced tremendous economic hardships, should be able to receive public aid."
However, such understanding did not extend to mothers who had been deserted or were separated, divorced, or unmarried, Goodwin points out. They were generally excluded from the pension laws, although policies varied across the nation.
"There is evidence of tremendous sympathy for the deserted woman, although I have seen reports of judges saying the man left her because she was a bad girl or bad homemaker. But there was also a real question about spending public money to supplement this man's responsibility. No one wanted to say it's okay to desert your family - the county will make up the difference."
The issue was not pressing, however, because divorced and unmarried mothers were so few in those days they were easy to ignore.
Goodwin says that mothers' pension programs,
considered the forerunner of
modern-day welfare, were based on the assumption that "motherwork" -
child care, cooking, and housekeeping - had its own economic value. But
fiscal realities quickly set in as politicians calculated the cost of the
programs.
As a result, pensions were not easily obtained; authorities insisted on examining the family situation before aid was given. One variable that was taken into account was the wage-earning capacity of the family.
Women who were able to work were expected to find employment and, thus, could not focus on caring for their children, Goodwin notes. Indeed, the total ability of the family - including the children - to earn money was considered. Children over the age of 8 or 9 often contributed to an impoverished family's income in that era.
"The children might be rag pickers. They might be picking up coal off the railroad tracks, or in rural areas they might work in a coal mine. But their work became a part of the family income and helped determine the level of aid - if any - the family would receive," Goodwin says.
However, child and female labor practices were under scrutiny at the time, and laws were soon passed to get children out of the mines and factories and to limit working hours for women.
Intended to benefit women and children, these laws sometimes aggravated their financial plight instead.
"As soon as they put anti-child-labor laws into place, they took away some of the family's income, increasing the economic pressures on the family," Goodwin says.
More than ever, a mother had to find work. So, in spite of the good intentions that seemed to inspire the policies of the era, mothers' pensions did little overall to accomplish the goal of allowing mothers to stay home to care for their children, Goodwin says. Mothers who had worked before the advent of pensions continued to work, and more than half of the mothers receiving pensions had jobs outside the home.
Aid for needy mothers and children initially was a responsibility accepted by state and local governments. But when the Depression laid waste to state programs, Congress stepped in and passed legislation - the Social Security Act - greatly expanding the reach of the aid system. It was at about that time that the mothers' pension programs started being described as "welfare." Goodwin notes that though the name being used to describe the program may have changed, the underlying discussions of the issues did not.
Approved in 1935, the Social Security Act provided a system of entitlements for employees in certain industries; Title IV of that act included Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), a welfare program. Later, legislation extended Social Security benefits to widows and children of those covered by the act.
Goodwin says these measures divided government aid for mothers into two categories, leaving some mother-only families on welfare (ADC) and giving others Social Security benefits. And she says, there were significant differences between them.
Social Security was an entitlement: if the father was covered under the act's provisions, so were his widow and children; no additional economic test or standards of behavior were used to evaluate a family in order for it to qualify.
On the other hand, if the father had worked in agriculture or other employment not covered by Social Security, his widow and children could receive only the more restrictive Aid to Dependent Children, which required applicants to face the scrutiny of the agency granting the aid.
Although ADC was established by the federal government, it was administered by the states; to protect their economic interests, some states continued to use the family's wage-earning ability to determine eligibility.
Critics accused them of forcing women to work at "starvation wages," pushing them into domestic, seasonal, and other low-paying jobs.
"ADC was intended for those who had 'been deprived of parental support and care,'" Goodwin says. "To the authors of the Social Security Act, 'parental support' referred to the income the father would have brought to the family if he had been alive; the 'parental care' was provided by the mother of the family. Soon, however, both care and support became the responsibility of the mother when the father was gone."
In the decades that followed, even the federal government largely abandoned the goal of attempting to enable mothers to stay home with their children, Goodwin explains. By the 1960s both parents were given responsibility for the financial support of their children. Absent fathers were expected to pay child support, and mothers were expected to take their places in the work force. Goodwin points out that the Family Support Act of 1988 made these expectations official, although they had clearly governed policy for decades.
With such extensive knowledge of the history of
the welfare
policy debate, Goodwin finds herself in a unique position to comment on
contemporary welfare reform efforts.
She observes that today's discussions on the subject openly center on putting mothers to work - ostensibly as a means of getting them off welfare.
But the current battle cry of politicians - "ending welfare as we know it" - is not as easy as they make it sound, Goodwin adds, noting that putting people to work requires access to jobs.
"The rural poor have few job opportunities. Even in cities there are not enough jobs to take everyone off welfare," she says.
Training is another important com-ponent of welfare reform because most welfare recipients have few skills, Goodwin notes. Also, little attention is given to the question of who will look after the children while the mother is at work.
Complicating policy-making, Goodwin says, is a major misconception about welfare: namely that all recipients are mired in it forever.
"For most people, welfare helps in a crisis. They don't use it long-term," she explains. "About 23 percent of welfare recipients receive benefits for 10 years or more, which is still a considerable number, but by no means a majority."
But, of course, to policy makers, every welfare recipient costs money, and money - not family values, such as a mother's desire to stay at home and look after her children - has been the real driving force in welfare policy, she says.
Goodwin acknowledges that the plight of welfare mothers might seem toæbe an unlikely choice of research topics for her. After all, she grew up in comfortable circumstances and attended Whitman College, a small, private liberal arts college in Walla Walla, Wash., during the late 1960s. It didn't take Goodwin long to recognize her privileged status; she was a college student during a period when conciousness raising was perhaps at its peak.
At the time, she recalls, she viewed the issue of poverty with a combination of intellectual curiosity and genuine concern.
"I knew that I had a lot of advantages, but I didn't understand how there could be poverty in the midst of an era of not only personal, but national affluence," she says.
So, she dedicated two years to the Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) program, working mainly with impoverished families in the Appalachians.
"We tend to forget the rural poor and talk mostly about the urban poor," she says, reflecting on her VISTA experience. "But I think it's important to consider both. Contemporary welfare reform is based on getting people jobs, and getting a job requires a different strategy in the country than in the city."
When she decided to pursue her doctorate in history at the University of Michigan in 1983, the Reagan administration was attempting to create new policies, and welfare was frequently in the headlines. The debate renewed her interest in the problems of needy mothers.
"I wanted to know what scholars had done on the topic, and I found out that they hadn't done much," she says.
"When I started the research, women's historians had written about the origins of laws such as Aid to Dependent Children and about the intent of keeping mothers at home to care for their children. But they hadn't looked at what really happened."
And, as most historians will tell you, what really happened yesterday can tell us a great deal about what should - or shouldn't - happen tomorrow, she says.
SIDEBAR - And that's not all....
