unrebutted underlying assumptions about parenting, poverty, and the role of government.
The third concern of this book is the path charted by social justice feminists in the 1990s and early 2000s, a path not yet chosen by policy makers but not impossible to choose. The social justice feminist path begins with the irreplaceable role of people who will be most affected by public policy decisions in making those decisions. In the case of PRWORA and whatever in the future might replace it, this means involving low-income mothers actively in discussions of their needs and perspectives—and, when discussing policies about marriage and fatherhood, involving fathers, too. It also means making policy as if poor people’s needs and perspectives matter even when poor people are not in the room. At a conference in 2002, in the midst of congressional struggles over TANF reauthorization, one of us asked, “Could we please talk about TANF as if mothers matter?”19 The history of PRWORA is an object lesson in the effects of policy making in which virtually everything about low-income mothers and fathers was decided without them. We endeavor to foreground and consider the distortions that occurred in political debates about poverty and welfare when those most affected, and their status as mothers and fathers, were omitted.
The social justice feminist path further requires centering the equality of mothers, especially mothers of color, in policies aimed at poor families. Disproportionately, poor children live in single-mother families. Disproportionately, single-mother families are the poorest families. And disproportionately, single mothers are required to trade self-sovereignty for even the stingiest economic assistance. The exclusion of intersectional gender analysis in creating and advancing a policy that is about gender has resulted in a cruel deepening of inequality for poor mothers. We will highlight the legislative effort engaged by social justice feminists to make welfare policy work for poor mothers in the hope that the effort instructs future possibility.
In the work that follows, we return repeatedly to these themes. We return as well to a set of overarching questions that haunt this study: What are the terms of political incorporation and economic well-being for adults, paradigmatically women, who spend much of their time caring for others? How do we explain the failure of our polity and society to address the basic and predictable tensions between families and job markets as they are currently constituted? What roles have race, class, and nationality played in this failure? And what do we do next?
These are fundamental questions of feminist social thought. They demand a broader conceptualization of rights than we are accustomed to encountering in popular feminist texts or narrow discussions of civil rights. To resolve the problems PRWORA has raised so pointedly requires a rich, substantive menu of rights, “freedom to” rights in addition to “freedom from” invidious public or private action. We need a government that enters social life actively to enable those who do the work of care to survive and thrive.
These are theoretical claims, but the possibility of pursuing them is not merely theoretical. At the same time that the United States has experimented with PRWORA and other devastating reductions in public assistance, numerous other societies maintained low rates of women’s and children’s poverty. Western and northern European countries—and even our near North American ally Canada—have spent dramatically more on public welfare and less on incarceration than the United States has since the late twentieth century.20 The trade-off appears not to have diminished public safety but to have reduced social strife and the worst effects of poverty on citizens’ well-being. Substantive rights are more rare in the United States than in Europe or Canada. But they are not entirely lacking in our traditions; after all, for at least thirty years, before the welfare reform of the middle 1990s, the government promised basic economic help to every impoverished mother with children who met certain criteria. As Representative Patsy Mink said: “We have to build things that we want to see accomplished…. It is easy enough to vote right and be consistently with the majority … but it is more often more important to be ahead of the majority and this means being willing to cut the first furrow in the ground and stand alone for a while if necessary.”21
Chapter 1
Legislating the Personal Responsibility of Poor Mothers
Early in the political wrangling over welfare reform, Congresswoman Patsy Takemoto Mink (D-Hawaii) warned her colleagues of a persistent bias they appeared not to have noticed. “The brunt of our criticism, the brunt of the burden of the debate,” she argued, “is being heaped upon women in this society.”1 While the controversy raged, Mink gathered scores of Democratic lawmakers to remind President Clinton and the Republicans that their proposals would create more poverty. She led a much smaller group that underlined what she termed the “gender issue” framing the whole conversation about welfare.2
Politicians and many researchers still understate the importance of sex, gender, marriage, and reproduction in the politics of the 1990s and the years that followed. But Representative Mink was right: women and gender were, indeed, at the center of welfare reform and the debate that preceded it. When they voted in favor of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), a bipartisan majority of Congress pledged to change the behavior of mothers and fathers who were living at the edge of economic survival.
Declaring that “marriage is the foundation of a successful society,”3 the welfare overhaul made mothers’ marital status, fathers’ financial child support, and childbearing by young women newly paramount in antipoverty policy.4 The promise of the law was that by limiting access to benefits, pressuring women to have fewer children, requiring men to support biological children, and persuading biological mothers and fathers to marry one another, the U.S. government would reduce the need for welfare more effectively than it had done in the previous six decades. Virtually lost in this framework for privatized, patriarchal poverty mitigation was the role of government in stanching the effects of extreme economic need or fostering the conditions for economic security.
This chapter explores the major features and implications of the 1996 welfare law and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program it created. The primary method here is statutory analysis of Title I of the law, which established TANF. At the time we are writing, the TANF provision of PRWORA remains controlling law, although legislation reauthorizing the program in 2006 added mechanisms to advance goals for labor market participation, marriage, and fatherhood. In later chapters we use a variety of methods to explore the origins of TANF and changes over its history, changes that have not altered its basic structure or purposes. Here, we examine what Congress actually said in 1996 to illuminate the major features of the policy legislators designed and that President Bill Clinton endorsed. Before we can appreciate the history of welfare reform and its impact, we must first understand what it is, what it means, and why it matters.
Our reading of the welfare reform statute underlines the need for contemporary feminism and gender analysis in public policy. Because the 1996 law singles out low-income women—single mothers, disproportionately of color—for regulation and discipline, we find it imperative to bring to the subject an intersectional gender and reproductive justice perspective that we have developed alongside many academic colleagues. Intersectional feminism insists on the formative and ongoing political significance of differences among women’s experiences of gender based on their race, class, sexual identity, immigration status, and disability circumstance. It summons solidarity across the diverse ways in which women endure sexism, gender discrimination, and subordination, but it cautions specificity in designing remedies for inequality.5 A reproductive justice approach impels us to analyze public policy by considering its impact on all people’s ability—including their economic ability—to bear and raise children, as well as to avoid child-bearing when that is their preference.6
The gender dimensions of TANF were in plain view in the 1996 welfare reform statute. The law’s authors made frequent mention of the negative effects of childbirth by single women, especially teens; the perils imposed on children when they are raised
