chapter offers an analysis of welfare reform from the years following the federal program’s creation through the last major legislative intervention prior to PRWORA, which occurred in 1988. We argue that the welfare reform enacted during the Clinton administration was merely the latest in a long series of reforms. But while noting continuities in this history, we also argue that the 1996 law was a major departure. President Clinton and the Republican majority in Congress were certainly not alone in reforming welfare; they were not even alone in reforming welfare along highly gendered and racialized lines. Nonetheless, they changed the fundaments of safety net policy in the United States.
Our guides through the thickets of social welfare history are the same themes that have led our inquiry up to this point. Intersectional gender and feminist theory, and analysis based in the principles of reproductive justice, are the guides we follow most closely. We maintain our focus on the ways in which femininity and masculinity have shaped policy, and vice versa. We join other feminist scholars in noting the many ways in which law and policy have reproduced and reinforced gendered arrangements of power. We understand gender in social welfare history as always also racialized, inflected by class relations and political economy, and tied to the gendered person’s perceived sexuality, nationality, and dis/ability.
The history of social welfare is not only gendered. It is also discontinuous and contingent, chock full of debates, divisions, and reverses. We resist the temptations of both chiliasm and a belief in Armageddon, that is, interpretations of history that find it trending ultimately toward good or ill. Our account brings to the surface debates that have occurred in the history of welfare reform. Other accounts have muted some of these debates. We amplify the leitmotifs of division and dissent in the history of welfare reform, listening especially closely to divisions among Democrats.
In reviewing the history of welfare reform, it is not enough to study only the actions of legislators and bureaucrats. We consider as well the impact of policies on people who received government help or who might have done so if the rules had been different. In studying the period after World War II, in particular, we appreciate the role of organized groups of welfare recipients and their allies in demanding, shaping, resisting, or, in certain cases, provoking welfare changes. The groups that participated in reforming the welfare state included low-income blind recipients of the categorical welfare program Aid to the Blind and their more well-off allies in the National Federation of the Blind; rural African Americans and attorneys in the civil rights movement; and urban African American, Puerto Rican, Mexican American, and white members of the National Welfare Rights Organization, who resisted what they saw as invidious welfare reforms and demanded what they believed would serve their families.5 This history reveals the importance to many welfare clients of the principle “Nothing about us, without us,” in other words, the intensity of their demand to be included in policy making. It also reveals the impact of clients’ actions on public policy.
We discuss the history of welfare reform in two distinct periods. We start with revisions to the Social Security Act of 1935, the New Deal innovation in policy making that made aid for impoverished children, blind adults, and older women and men a national responsibility. We chronicle the multiple welfare reforms enacted between 1935 and the 1980s, including both expansionist and reductionist reforms. Some of these came entirely “top-down” from politically powerful institutions at the national level. Others moved “bottom-up,” having been proposed initially by welfare clients and their allies. We then explore the 1980s, examining in some detail the intellectual and political shifts that occurred in that period, which resulted ultimately in passage of the Family Support Act of 1988, the last major welfare reform before PRWORA.
Welfare Reform Before “Welfare Reform”
From the beginning of the United States onward, poverty policy has been gendered. It has been shaped by diverse constituencies and motives, and by the presence or absence of poor people at the tables where policies were made.6 All the welfare programs created during the New Deal period have been subject to efforts at reform from above and below. However, the program originally called Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), the means-tested income assistance program for children and their custodial parents, has seen the most dramatic and draconian reforms.
One of the earliest and most consequential top-down reforms after the New Deal came with the Social Security Act Amendments of 1939. These amendments added minor children and spouses, including widows, as beneficiaries of the old-age pension system we know as Social Security, which was just one part of the Social Security law. The effect was to exacerbate women’s economic dependence on men in theory and practice; the national government preserved the dependency of wives on husbands even when the husbands were no longer alive.7 The 1939 amendments removed a disproportionately white group, women and children attached to men whose jobs were covered by Social Security, from the pool of potential ADC families. This privileged group was disproportionately white because the jobs typically held by African Americans and Latinos/as in that period, in agriculture and domestic service, were explicitly omitted from coverage by the original Social Security Act.8 After 1939, ADC recipients, who had limited employment options themselves and whose male partners overwhelmingly had uncovered or marginal jobs, were still majority white, but they were disproportionately nonwhite. Policy change left them in a starkly precarious political position from which they never recovered.9
Understandings of gender inflected by race shaped recurrent attempts to curtail access to ADC benefits. In the early 1940s, ADC and other nationally organized but locally administered antipoverty programs changed as states and localities responded, first, to continued economic doldrums and then to the effects of World War II. Restrictive welfare reform was not a primary concern of policy makers. However, canards that would be familiar from the debate over PRWORA appeared in service of larger political goals shortly after the war. In 1947, for example, Republicans who controlled the New York State government fomented a scandal over the supposed excesses of public assistance in Democratically controlled New York City. The media stoked popular outrage over the city’s efforts to alleviate poverty. The New York Times led in calling attention to a “Woman in Mink” who lived on the dole.10 The story combined gendered fury at an atypical public aid recipient, presumptively white in this case and known to be divorced, with suspicion of the whole idea of welfare. Unstated in the article were some of the main features of the postwar labor market for mothers, such as limited child care exacerbated by the end of federal subsidies, and the rebuilding of barriers to women’s employment that had relaxed during the war.11 This early version of the “welfare queen” archetype prompted the writer A. J. Liebling to complain—in 1947!—about hackneyed use of the term “reform” to mean cuts in public budgets.12 He wrote of the “picayune cruelties” in journalistic treatments of poverty.13
Liebling-style reform began in earnest in the 1950s thanks to the tight coils of gender and race that wound around ideas about poverty at the height of the “American Century.” National and state policy makers, Democrats and Republicans alike, pursued restrictive welfare reforms. In some cases, federal officials pushed back against these efforts in the name of defending the true meaning of the Social Security Act.14
Democratic politicians debated one another over specific initiatives and about whether the overall trend of “reform” should be expansive or restrictive. Some wanted to dismantle what they saw as the excesses of the New Deal. Anti-Communist and anti–trade union Democrats pursued restrictive welfare reforms in the states and nationally. An overlapping but distinctive group of Democrats sought to amend public assistance in order to sustain Jim Crow hierarchy in the South. A third group generally favored expansive welfare reforms but could be persuaded otherwise by explicitly gendered and implicitly racialized appeals.
Ideas and biases about disability mixed with those about gender and race.15 Disability discourse and policy were especially important parts of the intersectional mix in postwar America; as disability policies for civilians expanded, policy makers who were interested in liberalizing welfare increasingly
