on marriage and fathers’ family role.7 The structure and terms of TANF encourage the privatized dependency of women on men, not only by incentivizing heteromarital family formation but also by ending poor families’ entitlement to cash assistance and time-limiting eligibility for TANF participation. This withdrawal of the safety net closed off reliable access to income support in hard times for the overwhelmingly female population of adult welfare participants. In a backhanded, if intended, way, this end to welfare amplified the pressure on mothers to seek income support from individual men who are biological fathers of their children.
If the 1996 welfare law was explicitly gendered, its gendered logic was inseparable from social and economic class, and from the deeply racialized assumptions and stereotypes it deployed. TANF was simultaneously racialized, gendered, and class-specific in the impacts it wrought. The welfare policy created by PRWORA was predicated on a specific understanding of the relationship between the individual and the government, with the individual in question not an abstraction or universal but a specifically gendered low-income woman, implicitly understood to be an African American, a Latina, an Asian immigrant, or a socially marginal white person.8 The statute drew ethical and regulatory lines between mothers and fathers, the married and unmarried, wealthy and poor, older and younger, “legitimate” and “illegitimate,” disabled and able-bodied, those employed in the waged labor market and those not employed, immigrants and the native-born. The implications of the statute far exceed its own text or even the lives it immediately shaped: as Representative Mink feared they might, the arguments policy makers inscribed in PRWORA affected the cultural and political environment in which all women, all mothers, all communities of color, and all economically vulnerable or exploited people in the United States lived in the years after the statute’s passage.
Racist Myths and Misogynist Stereotypes: The Preface to the New Welfare Law
The debate leading up to the 1996 welfare law, as well as the law itself, followed from policy makers’ refusal to hear feminist critiques of welfare reform proposals and their neglect of mothers who bore witness to poverty and the need for welfare. While grassroots welfare groups did raise their voices, as did allied feminist social justice activists, these voices did not reverberate in the legislative process. Quite the opposite. As we shall see in the law’s opening section, policy makers treated welfare reform as a paternalistic project—policy change from above to fix the individual failings of single mothers in need of aid.
The centrality of gender, the narrowing of debate, and the absence of direction from affected communities are all evident from the very start of the welfare reform statute. Notwithstanding proponents’ drumbeat for “work, not welfare,” gender, marriage, and motherhood held pride of place in the text of the law. Title I of PRWORA, the TANF provision, opened with a preamble that consisted of a list of “findings.” These commingled data from testable hypotheses, untestable value statements, and familiar welfare myths. Although offered as uncontroversial first principles, they represented a specific perspective on sex, gender, intimacy, and parenting.
The first three findings that undergirded TANF policy were the least empirical and most normative: “(1) Marriage is the foundation of a successful society. (2) Marriage is an essential institution of a successful society which promotes the interests of children. (3) Promotion of responsible fatherhood and motherhood is integral to successful child rearing and the well-being of children.”9 The last finding, number ten, was that “prevention of out-of-wedlock pregnancy and reduction in out-of-wedlock birth are very important Government interests.”10 Then followed language elevating these principles in a transformed welfare policy. Amending established welfare law and replacing the prior program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the congressional majority created TANF to “address the crisis” in marriage, childbearing, and child rearing by low-income women. Changing the purpose of welfare policy to align with heteromarital, patriarchal, and eugenic gender preferences, the 1996 TANF law declared among its purposes the goals of discouraging nonmarital childbearing, encouraging two-parent family formation, and promoting marriage.11
By emphasizing marriage and a supposedly traditional model of gender roles, TANF policy represented an intervention into a long-standing debate over “the black family.” In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many white and African American social scientists pointed to the disparity in marriage rates between families of European descent and those of African descent.12 They interpreted this statistic as a cause, rather than, as might be more appropriate, a symptom, of poverty among African American adults and children. At regular intervals, they went further, to posit a causal chain from adult marital patterns, to family economic well-being, to various social phenomena, such as children’s achievement in school, their likelihood to serve time in prison or jail, and mothers’ and children’s need for public assistance over their lifetimes.
The “Moynihan Report” of 1965, a product of President Lyndon Johnson’s Department of Labor, publicized one pole of the debate over “the black family.” The report muddled causes and effects, suggesting that the history of white supremacy (slavery and Jim Crow), the modern economy, and women’s economic and familial roles had all produced “black family” poverty—a poverty whose most immediate causes or symptoms allegedly were the bad behavior and limited employment prospects of African American men. Was the solution, then, a major macroeconomic intervention by the government to create more jobs, and a policy to direct such jobs to nonwhite men? Or was it a cultural program to reduce African American women’s autonomy and give men opportunities to, in the report’s ineffable phrase, “strut” like cocks in the farmyard? The report made the answer to this question unclear, perhaps deliberately so.13
Feminist, civil rights, antipoverty, and welfare rights activists successfully challenged the Moynihan Report, but their success did not last. That the ideas popularized in the report were disreputable for twenty years within some liberal and Democratic circles was a remarkable achievement, given the intellectual and political forces arrayed on their behalf. However, these ideas were recuperated and mobilized in debates over national welfare policy beginning in 1985 with a series of lectures the report’s author gave at Harvard University. The resurrected theories about the relationship between marriage and poverty in the preamble to PRWORA did not explicitly refer to the Moynihan Report; they subsumed it. And so the new welfare law gave legislative standing to ideas about poor people’s gender behavior that feminists and welfare rights activists had refuted as long ago as 1965.14
When we argue that TANF is centrally concerned with gender, we do not mean to suggest that adult women or mothers are its sole subjects or objects. Gender as an analytic tool encompasses all people. It serves as an interpretive guide to public policy by calling attention to ways in which policy incorporates assumptions about maleness and femaleness, masculine and feminine behavior, and the two-option gender system itself.15 As in the reference above to the promotion of “responsible fatherhood and motherhood,” the members of Congress who voted for PRWORA mobilized negative masculine stereotypes and endorsed policies that aimed to change men who came under the law’s jurisdiction, even as they also suggested that women should relinquish their claims for self-sovereignty and focus on marriage instead.16 So, for example, the fourth finding in the TANF preamble directed attention to the fathers of poor children. Here, policy makers offered quantitative data about the percentages of families who had child support orders and received payments under them.17 This emphasis on child support, calling to mind the stereotype of the so-called deadbeat dad, ushered in extensive changes under PRWORA to the national child support system Congress had established in 1974 and enhanced under the welfare reform of 1988.18 Likewise, the seventh finding revisited the subject of masculine behavior by dredging up the stereotype of the “statutory” rapist, the man who has consensual intercourse with a woman below the legal age of consent, placing her at risk of becoming a teenage mother. The authors of TANF insisted that a fix to the problem of teenage pregnancy “must address … male responsibility” for statutory rape and the “sexual and physical abuse” of young women.19
The
