created women’s and children’s distress.74 Rather than defend the anti-poverty policies that extended what lifeline there was in urban communities awash in postindustrial poverty, Wilson saw the solution to women’s circumstances in a far-off, social-democratic program of education, training, and employment directed at men.
The Family Support Act of 1988 was in many ways a rehearsal for PRWORA. In a reverse of the later pattern, the Family Support Act emerged from a Democratic Congress and was signed by a Republican president. It received critically important support from the self-styled centrist Democratic group the Democratic Leadership Council and from the National Governors Association, both led by Governor Bill Clinton.75 The history of its passage reveals that leaders of the two major parties disagreed on matters of emphasis but fundamentally shared an analysis of the problem they were trying to fix. They agreed, too, on the necessity of “reform,” a word that encoded the same “picayune cruelties” and drive to cut spending that A. J. Liebling had analyzed decades earlier. Its most distinctive feature followed William Julius Wilson’s emphasis on masculinity and paternity without the social investments he recommended. The Family Support Act dramatically increased the involvement of the national government in paternity establishment and child support enforcement. This reprised the principles of the NOLEO requirement from the Eisenhower era and expanded the power of the national Office of Child Support Enforcement, which Congress had created in 1974. Under the new law, states were required to withhold money from the wages of absent fathers to support their children and were penalized for failing to establish paternity in a substantial number of cases.76 The other major portion of the legislation, less distinctive but equally significant for poor people, was a program of work mandates and promised investments in education and services. The Job Opportunities and Basic Skills (JOBS) program replaced and reprised WIN/WIP from the 1967 welfare law. Like that earlier effort, it both federalized and placed a rehabilitative gloss on the kind of forced work that states had once faced federal opprobrium for applying on a smaller scale and more openly discriminatory basis. However, one bright spot of the law was that it contained a definition of “work” that included fulltime participation in work training or school, including in advanced programs and four-year colleges.77
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Intellectuals and politicians who reformed welfare in the period from the 1930s to the 1980s apparently believed their prescriptions were new each time they offered them. They proceeded as though confident that the policy shifts they endorsed would end an old and acrimonious national debate. But stubborn ideas about gender, race, poverty, and disability made the debate endlessly recursive. Almost regardless of which party held the majority in Congress or the White House, legislative innovations presented with the greatest fanfare proved to be retreads of earlier models. The only major changes in understanding and approach occurred at the relatively brief moments during which people who relied on public aid, themselves, authored welfare reform. The Family Support Act of 1988 was the last great push to reform AFDC and quiet the gender trouble it represented to so many observers.78 If Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s analysis of the problem had been correct, then the law might have improved intimacy and parenting in impoverished neighborhoods, relieved poverty, saved AFDC, and rid Democrats of the need to defend the program from its critics. In the end, its effects were mostly nil or negative: too underfunded to change poverty or poor people’s choices, the law stoked even greater acrimony among politicians, who heaped even more aspersions on welfare families and the people who stood with them. All this set the stage for the political rise of the Family Support Act’s backstage champion, Bill Clinton of Arkansas.
Chapter 3
Change They Believed In
In 1988, President Reagan signed the Family Support Act (FSA), the most significant welfare reform passed by Congress in two decades. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Democratic senator from New York who had served both a Democratic president and a Republican one, claimed primary authorship for the law. Like Moynihan’s own career, the Family Support Act was bipartisan. As with the Moynihan Report of 1965, his 1988 bill, the FSA, was the object of protest by many liberals and intersectional feminists.1 Reagan attempted to soften the demeaning messages about African Americans and women that had helped produce FSA by promising the law would “lead to lasting emancipation from welfare dependency.” While underlining the preference in FSA for married couples raising children with a patriarchal family division of labor, President Reagan insisted that “single parent families also share[d] in the message of hope underlying this bill.”2 Indeed, alongside the terrifying aspects of FSA for welfare parents, which included a waged work mandate, a renewed requirement that women participate in paternity establishment and child support collection, and consequences delivered to fathers who lacked steady income to pay child support, there was a promising side to the law. For those who wanted to further their educations or were ready to combine waged and unwaged work more than they had been doing, the Job Opportunities and Basic Skills (JOBS) initiative under FSA might help.3 The states were to receive $6.8 billion over seven years from the federal government to finance efforts to provide job opportunities. They would receive additional funds to cover child care and children’s health care costs while parents were in what was conceptualized as a “transitional” period from welfare receipt to permanent family support via the waged labor market.4 The law forbade states to require mothers of children under six to participate “unless child care is guaranteed and participation is on a part-time basis.” Perhaps most significantly, it specified that if recipients were “attending a school or course of vocational or technical training … such attendance may constitute satisfactory participation in the Program so long as it is consistent with his or her employment goals.”5
President Reagan did not acknowledge Moynihan for his role in creating the Family Support Act. But he did single out one increasingly renowned Democrat, Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas.6 Clinton had headed the National Governors Association and cochaired its Task Force on Welfare Reform. Consistent with the bipartisan shift across the twentieth century toward viewing poverty as a disease or disorder, Clinton and his task force cochair, Republican governor Mike Castle of Delaware, renamed their effort the Task Force on Welfare Prevention.7 In congressional testimony shortly after states began to implement FSA, Clinton repeated a misleading and racially tinged old saw about the history of welfare and its recipients. “When welfare was first instituted,” he claimed, “the typical recipient of welfare was a West Virginia miner’s widow,” a white woman, in other words, who married before bearing children and whose husband pursued waged work under notoriously unsafe conditions.8 He contrasted this white widow with “a class of permanently dependent individuals, sometimes passing their dependency from generation to generation.”9 The data made it clear that this “class” was vanishingly small: according to the state-of-the-art Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), less than 1 percent of the U.S. population received welfare for ten years consecutively and depended on welfare for over half of their family income.10 The PSID data and others also indicated that, while similar conditions might produce similar rates of poverty for parents and children, welfare receipt was not “passed down” from mother to child in the way that biological traits can be passed down.
As a practiced state-level welfare reformer, Clinton rehearsed many of the arguments that would ultimately shape the bill he signed while in the White House. He complained that welfare “had become fundamentally a substitute child support system” and proposed to place more of the burden of financial child support on low-income parents.11 He did not propose time limits on receipt of economic assistance or ending the entitlement status of family economic aid. However, his rhetoric pushed policy in that direction by inveighing against the idea of an entitlement or right to welfare. “This program,” he argued about FSA, says to everybody, “‘We don’t want to maintain you. We don’t think you have a right to anything other than assistance in return for your best efforts.’”12 Governor Clinton’s rhetoric regarding the Family Support Act helps explain the centrality of similar arguments to his presidential bid and agenda once he took office. It also
