Policy makers had ready at hand a second federally funded source of information about poverty and people’s use of welfare benefits. With backing from the National Science Foundation, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) began in 1968 to study a large, diverse sample of U.S. households.62 By the early 1980s, researchers had evidence to share about family incomes over a decade. In Years of Poverty, Years of Plenty (1984), Greg J. Duncan and colleagues argued using the PSID that poverty was a normal, not anomalous, experience among U.S. families. They attributed this ubiquitous poverty to easily identified features of the economy (e.g., structural unemployment) and government (e.g., a bare-bones welfare state that left families mostly on their own to accommodate the cost of raising young children). Along with ubiquitous poverty was a ubiquitous need for—and use of—welfare benefits. In the course of a decade, Duncan and his colleagues pointed out, over one-quarter of households received government grants from the means-tested programs AFDC, food stamps, Medicaid, and Supplemental Security Income (or its predecessor programs).63 These numbers suggested that welfare recipients should not be shamed, and that their economic dependence should not be treated as an outrage or scandal, but as a normal phenomenon in a society that had made economic and political choices with certain predictable consequences.
In the policy circles that produced anti-welfare initiatives, these data were either recruited into a wider war against welfare or largely ignored. The motives of ideological conservatives who censored normalizing ideas about welfare were fairly clear; they wanted to reduce the public sector and shore up the so-called traditional family.64 However, thanks to gendered, sexual, and racist biases that were rarely addressed head-on, researchers identified with the Democratic Party and liberal politics also joined a consensus of pseudowisdom about public assistance. In this regard, Senator Moynihan was again an early adopter, a nominal Democrat (veteran of both the Nixon and Johnson administrations) who reprised his emphasis on gender from the Moynihan Report. He drew on the Seattle-Denver Income Maintenance Experiment findings to goad the Carter administration about the effects of guaranteed income on marriage, suggesting that the findings could be applied to the far stingier, more conditional AFDC program. In other words, from his perspective, as a form of income maintenance, welfare was a moral hazard, inevitably breaking up marriages and undermining desirable behavior.65
Conservatives such as George Gilder, Charles Murray, and Lawrence Mead followed suit. They largely ignored the conclusions of Duncan and colleagues from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and utilized only portions of the Seattle-Denver evidence, in the touchstone texts of the Reagan presidency, Wealth and Poverty (1981), Losing Ground (1984), and Beyond Entitlement (1986). They argued that AFDC and, by extension, all government antipoverty efforts, reduced sexual abstinence and fidelity, pointing men toward “deadbeat” fatherhood and women toward lone parenting.66 The overall result, they claimed, was social chaos, with government policy at its source. Hovering high above the ground of empirically proven facts, they argued that welfare should end because it produced more poverty. This last point was easily falsified by the PSID evidence and other sources. However, the mix of moral anxieties about the patriarchal family and racialized scares about the future of the work ethic appears to have overwhelmed any weakness in their economic claims.67
The absence of publicly audible feminist analysis and the marginalizing of low-income mothers’ perspectives permitted victory for the Reagan Revolution’s war on welfare, a disaster for the supposed aims of Democrats and liberals. But truth be told, while many Democrats forfeited debate with antiwelfare Reaganites because they were afraid of the fray, other Democrats simply conceded the argument, helping to turn Moynihan’s dicta into popular “wisdom.”
The anti-feminist and anti-welfare consensus could not have formed without Democratic participation. Moynihan continued to set the tone, although he was hardly alone. In 1985, in a major address at Harvard University that he later published as the book Family and Nation, he revisited and reinterpreted the Moynihan Report from twenty years before.68 He omitted the most outré language from the report about men’s need to “strut,” and also downplayed his prior call for massive educational and employment investments to enable African American men to head their families and to help families avoid poverty. Moynihan focused instead on gender, sex, and poor people’s choices about intimacy. He claimed that a tight link that had once prevailed between overall prosperity and the poverty rate had broken since 1965, and that the phenomenon could be explained by behavioral or moral characteristics—chiefly, the propensity of poor and nonwhite people to bear and raise children outside of wedlock. Moynihan claimed nonmarital parenting was both a cause of poverty and a social problem in itself. He muted other explanations for the gap between “normal” economic well-being and that of African American families, such as racial discrimination, disproportionate rates of incarceration, and the hyperexploitation of many working women of color. The New York Times declared in an editorial that the speech was a landmark, a brilliant intervention into public policy.69
Moynihan’s moralism, which ignored the facts that a quarter of the U.S. population used means-tested public programs and used them as designed, prevailed through the welfare reform debates of the 1980s. It shaped the last major national legislative change in cash welfare before PRWORA. Moynihan himself was the primary author of this legislation, the Family Support Act of 1988, a reform that the remaining welfare rights activists and advocates in the United States considered dramatic and draconian although PRWORA subsequently made it seem fairly modest. The primary difference between Republican and Democratic versions of welfare moralism in this period was that Republicans, echoing policy intellectuals Gilder, Murray, and Mead, blamed government programs themselves for producing the supposed gender crisis in impoverished families and communities, while Moynihan and his allies who leaned Democratic largely blamed gendered arrangements for producing the need for government programs. The politically engaged scholars Mary Jo Bane and David Ellwood argued, in studies cited in Moynihan’s Family and Nation and in Ellwood’s Poor Support (1988), that the different welfare grant levels in different states represented a “natural experiment” of the effect of public aid on poor women’s and men’s choices: because there was no predictable statistical relationship between AFDC grants and rates of teenage and nonmarital parenting, then welfare could not have caused those phenomena.70 But that did not mean that public assistance was to be left alone, or that government officials should not concern themselves about poor women’s sexual, marital, and parenting choices. Ellwood continued to find the moral hazard in AFDC (but not other public welfare programs) significant; Poor Support included a proposal for dismantling women’s entitlement to support by placing a time limit on their access to the program.71
The debates that helped produce the Family Support Act were not only gendered. They were, simultaneously, deeply racialist. Ellwood devoted three chapters of his book to what he identified as the problem of changing families, and an additional chapter to the challenge of “ghetto poverty.” Although there was obvious slippage between the two, the distinction lay in the emphasis in the former on women, their bodies, and their choices, whereas the “ghetto” poor were stereotyped as black, male, criminal, and threatening to middle-class culture in a more immediate way than were women raising children outside of wedlock.72 Sociologist William Julius Wilson, whose influence on the debate is difficult to overstate, examined “ghetto poverty” exclusively. Again bypassing the normal, explicable, general picture of poverty and public assistance, he wrote compellingly about the sometimes illegal and self-destructive behavior that occurred in small, statistically aberrant communities in which few people had decent jobs. Wilson’s book The Truly Disadvantaged (1987), and a related series by journalist Nicholas Lemann in the Atlantic Monthly magazine, did as much as anything else to fuel anti-welfare politics by changing the subject from the economic circumstance of poverty to the behavior of poor people—behavior that readers inevitably interpreted through the lens of their stereotypes about women, African Americans, and the poor.73 As they were for Moynihan, men and masculinity were for Wilson at the center of the problem and the source of its solution: economic conditions and men’s bad choices, together, left poor, African
