with bringing attention to this idea because his administration proposed a kind of guaranteed income to Congress in 1969 and appeared to support it until it finally failed in 1972. However, poor women and men, and the organizers and professionals who worked with them, deserve primary credit for generating a credible case for a guaranteed income—what would later be termed a Basic Income Grant and become the object of social policy experimentation across the world.51 The Nixon initiative, called the Family Assistance Plan (FAP), distorted the idea and then used it against welfare recipients by tying income assistance to mandatory wage-earning by heads of households. Even while advocating expanded income assistance in the form of a guaranteed income, FAP policy advocates mobilized gendered and racialist arguments. President Nixon argued that FAP would end traditional public assistance, which he claimed unfairly privileged female-headed versus male-headed households. Following the lead of Democrats, he committed the national government to forced waged work for recipients (although only for one parent in a two-parent household, thus discriminating between married and unmarried mothers). The Nixon administration proposed a relatively low national income standard, at least by NWRO’s standards and the standards of welfare recipients in northeastern states, who worried that their benefits would drop to the FAP level.52
The legacy of welfare reform from below may have been most powerful in the record of things not done, or not even proposed, during the period when activism by and on behalf of poor people was powerful. Rather than further stereotyping public assistance as a social problem, identified with African Americans, Latinas, and women with lax sexual morals, these welfare reformers conceptualized public assistance as a necessity for all people in poverty, living in a society that routinely generated poverty. A guaranteed income that applied equally to those who were not working because of their family care responsibilities, those who were unemployed, and those whose wages were simply too low, placed the onus for creating poverty on the economic system rather than on individual or group failures.
Welfare rights activists forced the repeal of the “freeze” provision that President Johnson and conservative Democrats had written into the 1967 Social Security Act amendments. They helped defeat Nixon’s FAP proposal. And they helped turn the work requirement under the “WIP” program (also part of the 1967 amendments) into a dead letter; if governments were unwilling to provide adequate training, education, and child care services, then welfare activists and advocates made it difficult for them to implement forced work programs.
Coalitions of poor people and professionals working together had some significant victories. The Supreme Court’s holding in King v. Smith applied beyond Alabama to invalidate “man in the house” laws in every state that had them. It established an individual entitlement to public assistance under the Social Security Act, and signaled surveillance by federal courts of state efforts to deprive benefits to families of color. Shapiro v. Thompson (1969), another Supreme Court case brought by welfare rights attorneys, reformed state laws that distinguished new migrants from other states from long-term residents in regard to their access to public aid. And this principle has endured, even in the wake of state statutes that attempted to compromise it. It was reaffirmed strongly by the Supreme Court in Saenz v. Roe (1999), which invalidated both a California statute that created two distinct classes of welfare recipients, based on their length of residence in the state, and a portion of PRWORA that expressly supported the California law. The Supreme Court’s holding in Goldberg v. Kelly (1970) affirmed the access of poor people to legalistic appeals before they were deprived of benefits on which they relied. In all these cases, the principles for which they stood—sexual self-determination even for racial and economic minorities; entitlement; free movement in pursuit of economic well-being (and physical well-being, as in the case of women fleeing domestic violence); and access to benefits in the face of what Justice Brennan termed “brutal need”—have been compromised over time.53 But none of the cases has been judicially overturned. If by nothing else, their power was demonstrated in the efforts of anti-welfare reformers to reverse them legislatively through PRWORA.
The Age of Moynihan
The next phase of welfare reform from above began in the early 1980s. It culminated in a major legislative reform in 1988. The central figure in creating that reform was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, veteran of debates over the Johnson administration’s “Moynihan Report” on African American families and, by the 1980s, a U.S. senator from New York. A rough balance between continuing activist energies to improve welfare and anti-welfare reformism resulted in a kind of stalemate for most of the 1970s. After Nixon’s FAP proposal failed, voices quieted at the two poles of welfare reform, the one that stood for expansion and rationalization, and the one where racist misogyny defined the need for welfare reform and underlay calls to require more wage work and to keep benefits low.
A new welfare politics gathered slowly in the aftermath of poor people’s powerful assertion through NWRO and other groups. In addition to and intermixed with the collapse of a nationally coordinated welfare rights movement, the ebbing of African American and feminist activism by the end of the 1970s helped enable the change.54 One way to observe the shift is by studying intellectual treatments of poverty and welfare.55 As so often was the case in the history of social policy, Moynihan’s work was an early indicator of what was to come: he attempted to recuperate his experience advocating the Nixon administration’s FAP, with all its contradictions, in The Politics of a Guaranteed Income (1973).56 Deploying the same racialized and gendered stereotypes with which President Nixon had encased his ambivalent FAP proposal, the book blamed activist welfare recipients for defeating FAP—which, according to Moynihan, had been perhaps the last, best hope for major social policy reform for a generation.57 Moynihan’s book became increasingly influential as the contributions of other interlocutors stirred the debate over welfare reform anew.
Two tributaries of research had the potential to challenge the anti-welfare agenda, but their findings were hijacked by conservatives who claimed that the availability of welfare undermined heterosexual marriage and the waged work ethic. The first body of work emerged following the deadlock over FAP, when the federal government funded “income maintenance” demonstration projects in selected cities. The projects provided FAP-like basic income solely on the basis of economic need. Preliminary data that became available in the late 1970s revealed that this kind of basic or minimum income—essentially, welfare provided irrespective of a recipient’s personal or family characteristics—reduced poverty without causing the kind of cataclysm that had long been predicted by opponents of welfare rights. Basic income security had a slight depressive effect on recipients’ willingness to do paid work—concerning in Washington although arguably exerting a salutary pressure on employers, who would have to offer more decent working conditions to ensure a robust labor force. Among the variables researchers chose to study, the only sizable effect, which manifested in a Seattle-Denver study, was on sexual and marital behavior:58 women with a steady, nonstigmatized income source were more likely to leave intimate partnerships than were women without it. Researchers in the Canadian province of Manitoba, which conducted a comparable experiment, found similar results. Later analysis of the data indicated that this kind of no-strings-attached welfare also limited women’s exposure to domestic violence.59
Hostility to the possible links among women’s independence, self-sovereignty, and economic security had inspired previous welfare retrenchment and helped doom policy proposals such as NWRO’s guaranteed income proposal and President Nixon’s FAP. Fresh data from the income experiments were used against both traditional welfare and the Carter administration’s guaranteed income–like initiative, the Program for Better Jobs and Income.60 Members of the male-dominant policy establishment argued among themselves, shutting out feminists and poor people. Not surprisingly, virtually no one in official Washington argued that some women had good reasons to withdraw from their relationships. Perhaps the impact of income on heterosexual unions should have been received as an alarming measure of the state of those unions rather than as evidence against economic redistribution. Officials of the Carter administration, federally funded social scientists, and anti-welfare policy intellectuals united in their squeamishness about
