Urban Democrats outside the South found their voices to oppose restrictive welfare policies, even when their chief antagonists were others in their own party. The 1967 welfare reforms from the Johnson administration and leading congressional Democrats represented a post–Civil Rights Act backlash against activist demands for racial and economic equality. Under Democratic control, Congress passed into law a welfare “freeze” that capped the national budget for public assistance. This was an early compromise of the principle of entitlement. However, under pressure from Democrats such as Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who was threatening a dissident presidential run, Congress repealed the freeze before the administration implemented it. President Johnson and the white Southern Democrats who chaired major committees also ushered into law a national work mandate under welfare policy. The Work Incentive Program of 1967 was known as “WIN” to policy makers and “WIP” to the activists who thought of it as just the latest in a long line of efforts to compel African American women to perform demeaned, low-wage (or no-wage) work.41
Another rising theme of the 1960s, which would later prove significant in PRWORA, was the importance of men, masculinity, and fatherhood in public assistance. Although most mainstream Democrats agreed on this, serious splits emerged over how to translate it into policy. Following on the NOLEO provision were other initiatives to reengage noncustodial fathers in their children’s and female partners’ lives.42 At the same time, unemployed and underemployed men were increasingly a focus of public assistance policy. This was a masculinist response to the civil rights and Black Power movements, and to the perception that urban riots were driven by male unemployment. Even the work training and educational benefits sponsored under the “service” provisions of the 1962 reforms went overwhelmingly to low-income men.43 A demonstration program to enhance the access of two-parent families to welfare aid, which the Kennedy administration initiated in 1961, was made, later in the decade, a permanent option the states could adopt. These policies were a fit with the Moynihan Report and an address President Johnson gave at Howard University in 1965, which described a crisis in black masculinity caused by the twin scourges of discriminatorily high unemployment for men and African American women’s excessive access to income.44
Nothing About Us, Without Us
The arc of welfare reform bent, briefly, toward expansion. This was a result of enormous, organized energy on the part of welfare clients and a wide array of nonclient allies in the 1960s and 1970s. Activists and advocates built on prior models to make a greater impact on local, state, and national antipoverty politics than they had at any time since passage of the Social Security Act. The forces that conspired to enable and sustain this wave of welfare reform from below were the African American movement, south and north; related activist movements among lawyers and social workers (including, reprising earlier models, unionized welfare caseworkers); the renaissance of feminism, especially a variety of radical feminisms shaped by the New Left and by the Black Power, Chicano/a, and Puerto Rican movements; and the emergence of a newly configured movement for disability rights.
The organization that is most closely associated with this mobilization is the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). The national headquarters of NWRO lasted only from 1967 until 1974. However, its seedbed was local activism by public aid recipients and allies early in the 1960s, and it had legacies that continued into the 1990s and even into the twenty-first century. In New York City, for example, discontent and a coalescing sense of entitlement on the part of poor people fed and was fed by the African American and Puerto Rican civil rights movements. With the help of resources from the War on Poverty, Protestant and Catholic churches, and old-line charities, this discontent grew into welfare rights organizations in several different neighborhoods by 1963–65. In northern and southern California, welfare rights activism was also fed by contact between the welfare reformers from the National Federation of the Blind and those from African American and Chicano groups.45 Alongside NWRO efforts were those sponsored directly by local outposts of the War on Poverty and by other civil rights groups. Local attorneys from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, such as Marian Wright (later Marian Wright Edelman) and her colleagues in Jackson, Mississippi, represented welfare recipients who lost their benefits because of civil rights activism, or simply because of the way race, gender, and class hierarchies operated in their communities.46 While most of these efforts dissipated after the middle 1970s, national networks of local welfare activist groups remained and continued to offer expansive welfare reform proposals through the period during which Congress and the White House debated PRWORA.
Gender, parenting, and sexuality were as central in the agendas of organized poor people and their allies as they were in the thinking of politicians who wanted to restrict welfare. The feminist dimensions of welfare rights include the demand for human dignity outside of marriage and for free sexuality. Claimed by majority-white groups of liberal and radical feminists, such rights of independent personhood applied as well to low-income and nonwhite women. Welfare reformers from below further claimed the positive right of economic support to parent one’s own children even if one were not attached to a man who earned a high wage. These aspects of their agenda were precisely those that anti-welfare reforms, culminating with PRWORA, sought to reverse. The earliest welfare rights groups on both coasts wanted to restrict the ability of local welfare departments to deny families benefits on the basis of women’s sexual and romantic behavior. Activist social workers resisted participating in “midnight raids” on the homes of welfare clients, and activist lawyers brought questions about welfare recipients’ sexual privacy before the appellate courts.47 NWRO members argued that forcing women to name their sexual and romantic partners, and efforts to criminalize men’s failure to pay child support, were dangerous. They either would lead to men’s further alienation from their children or would bring them back, angrily, into the lives of women who had separated from them with good reason.
One of the movement’s paramount successes came in the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the case King v. Smith. As discussed in Chapter 1, the court’s opinion invalidated the “man-in-the-house” rule that had been the Alabama legislature’s way to deprive especially African American women assistance on the basis of their sexual behavior after national authorities indicated their dissatisfaction with “suitable home” restrictions. It was in King v. Smith that the court specified that, under the Social Security Act, if a public assistance applicant met all the eligibility criteria for aid, then he or she was entitled to receive it. The Mrs. Smith at the heart of the case had lost her and her children’s benefits because she was rumored to have an occasional sexual relationship with a married man. Her landmark case started its legal life as one strand in a much larger skein of activist litigation by a post–Civil Rights Act southern freedom movement that was simultaneously a movement for civil rights, welfare rights, and public-interest law.48
The activism that brought the perspectives of poor people into the policy-making process also launched into national politics the idea of a national minimum income, or guaranteed income. The idea originated with intellectuals, such as economist John Kenneth Galbraith Jr., who sought a solution to the problem of rising productivity in advanced industrial societies. Absent a moral or disciplinary commitment to the work ethic, Galbraith and colleagues concluded, it was hardly sensible to keep all adults in the labor force—or to punish them with starvation when they were outside it.49 The welfare rights movement added to this rationale a feminist or motherhood-centered one: AFDC mothers asked, why should a woman work for wages in a child care center or another woman’s kitchen when the social good was served as well by her raising her own children? NWRO formalized the idea into a proposed Guaranteed Adequate Income, which members demanded that politicians consider. After years of calculations, welfare rights leaders finally settled on $5,500 per year for a family of four as an appropriate level. They went into battle on its behalf with the slogan, “5500 or fight!”50
Welfare reformers from below believed they needed to “fight” over the guaranteed income despite the fact that mainstream politicians, themselves, were considering variations
