of gender and sexual politics. Age as a category of analysis has not received the attention it perhaps deserves from scholars of public policy. But a few feminist scholars have illuminated the ways in which gendered and sexual tensions have crystallized into anxieties about young people. Tensions about young women’s sexuality, in particular, have provoked repeated “moral panics” about the state of the country since World War II.20 These tensions have driven legislation and judicial decisions on abortion, adoption, and teenage pregnancy.21 In the welfare context, the association between teenage child-bearing and nonmarital motherhood excited anxieties about the failure of younger women to assimilate white, middle-class, marital norms, while the connection between single motherhood and poverty seemed to support theories about the high cost of teen parenting.
TANF legislation reads like the result of a profound moral panic over gender, age, sexuality, and social risk. The sixth finding, for example, opened with a claim about an overall increase in nonmarital births but then shifted to data on “non-marital teen pregnancy”: the congressional drafters failed to note that pregnancies terminated by a safe abortion posed little challenge to the welfare system or the public fisc, or that teen moms and their children were a miniscule fraction of the welfare caseload.22 The eighth and ninth findings enumerated dozens of negative effects of being born into or raised in single-mother homes if the single mother is poor and never married. These findings warned of low cognition and low educational attainment, increased delinquency and criminality, and higher rates of intergenerational welfare dependency among children born out of wedlock into fatherless families that need welfare. In the findings as elsewhere in the statute, TANF’s authors outlined the supposed deficiencies of poor single mothers while underlining the special value of biological fathers. Nowhere in TANF policy is there mention of the importance of mothers.
“No Individual Entitlement”
The introductory assertions about gender, sexuality, and parenting in the “findings” to TANF policy skewed the policy’s emphasis toward privatized, individualized, moral prescriptions. They pointed away from reforming labor market opportunities, educational and employment conditions and work supports, or racist and sexist social structures.23 The two overarching disciplinary mechanisms in the law were the elimination of an entitlement—an enforceable legal claim—to assistance, and the imposition of a lifetime time limit on TANF eligibility. Proponents of PRWORA chose punishing women for needing welfare over reducing their poverty; disciplining them through rules and sanctions rather than increasing their access to remunerative jobs or enlivening educational opportunities; and conditioning their well-being on attachment to men rather than blazing pathways to genuine self-sovereignty and independence.
The withdrawal of the welfare entitlement was the boldest change from established policy toward poor mothers and their children, the essence of what candidate Bill Clinton had termed “end[ing] welfare as we know it.”24 The end of the entitlement to welfare meant that impoverished mothers and children (and a few fathers), whom the government had for decades assured at least a minimal level of aid if they met specific eligibility criteria, could no longer count on such aid.25 The statutory entitlement to public assistance in the United States was never ideal or tantamount to what activists and theorists understood as robust “welfare rights.” This form of entitlement, because it was based on a statute, an act of the legislature, was always shaky and subject to potential reversal by that same legislature, as well as to interpretations by a bureaucracy that could vary dramatically depending on who was in charge. The girth of the entitlement also varied by jurisdiction, as each state could determine just how much assistance it was willing to offer, which, in turn, determined how much the federal government would contribute to a particular state. Nonetheless, the entitlement was meaningful, and so was its loss.
The removal of a reliable and accessible welfare benefit in TANF policy undid by means of national law a set of Supreme Court precedents that had guaranteed a minimal level of access to and fairness in the welfare system. The watershed opinion, written for a unanimous court by Chief Justice Earl Warren, was King v. Smith (1968).26 Mrs. Sylvester Smith, an African American single mother, challenged Alabama’s decision to terminate her welfare benefits because her nonmarital sexual relationship with a man violated the state’s “substitute father” rule.27 Under that rule, any man who frequented a woman’s home for conjugal purposes could bear responsibility for the economic support of her children, whether or not he was biologically related to them. Smith and welfare rights advocates initially argued that the substitute father rule violated the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution—an argument that, if successful, would have barred use of arbitrary moral criteria to decide poor families’ eligibility for aid.28 King v. Smith did not accomplish this end because Smith’s appellate attorneys and, ultimately, the Court, framed the case on statutory, not constitutional, grounds, and therefore did not establish access to welfare irrespective of sexual behavior as a matter of fundamental legal equality.29 Even so, the case was a strong response to the sexually regulatory, race-conscious deprivations of welfare benefits by individual states and established that the welfare statute—the old AFDC provision of the Social Security Act—did not intend to punish children for the sexual conduct of their mothers. This ruling, in combination with Supreme Court decisions in Shapiro v. Thompson and Goldberg v. Kelly, girded the welfare entitlement with rights against arbitrary state action—for so long as the federal program was an entitlement.30
With breezy definitude, Congress in 1996 declared “No Individual Entitlement” to welfare.31 The decision to end the entitlement to public assistance was inseparable from TANF policy’s concerns about marriage, sex, and gender. The resolution of the gendered “crisis” legislators outlined in the law’s findings lay, in part, in ending families’ ability to rely on government to help supply their basic needs when they were unable to afford these needs on their own. This may appear an odd argument. However, implicit within it were assumptions about the gendered ordering of a good society. The starting assumption appears to have been that mothers sometimes resisted marrying the fathers of their children because they knew government help was available to pay at least a portion of their bills. According to research, this assumption did not explain overall trends in marriage; however, some women did resist marrying men they found unreliable, unhelpful, or abusive, and others resisted marrying because they thought it came with obligations that they were too poor to afford.32 Examined through low-income mothers’ eyes, secure government aid in the form of an entitlement increased a woman’s bargaining power with men in her life. It may therefore have enabled her greater happiness, her ability to avoid or escape abuse, and opportunity to build a better intimate partnership when she chose to enter one.33 Reliable and accessible government assistance also assigned social worth to the family work poor mothers did as primary parents, while recognizing the impossible double burden of wage work and care work that so many faced in an inflexible, low-wage labor market.
For promarriage critics of welfare, relatively secure public assistance blunted the force of women’s traditional incentives to marry, especially the economic vulnerability that risked their children’s well-being. On this theory, entitlement to welfare reduced marriage rates among the poor by mitigating poverty in families with children. The idea that welfare supported poor unmarried mothers’ independence apparently drove the urge to transform welfare from a reliable and accessible income supplement to temporary and conditional alms. Pushing single mothers toward marriage by intensifying their economic insecurity, the elimination of the welfare entitlement by PRWORA was inextricable from the gendered agenda of its supporters.
By the 1990s, the very word “entitlement” had acquired a negative cast.34 Welfare reform demeaned the term even more profoundly and associated it in the lexicon of public policy ever more with stigmatized racial and gender identities. In its changing public meanings, “entitlement” resembled “welfare” before it, a term that came into wide use specifically to capture the expanded scope of economic citizenship in the twentieth century.35 The concept of entitlement indicated the degree to which people no longer had to beg private charities for
