In the mid-2000s, I decided to write a book on the subject, and in order to do so I set out to conduct a new round of interviews with a different group of women now living in the post-reform world. These women were at a similar stage in their life course to that of the women I had interviewed ten years earlier, meaning that they had children young enough to be eligible for welfare and that they either were receiving welfare or had received it in the past few years. The interviews with this new group of women coupled with the interviews conducted with the other group of women interviewed earlier would form the basis of the book.
While of course it would be interesting to know how my original interviewees were doing, they most likely had long moved on from straddling the border between welfare and work—either because their children would now be too old to be eligible for welfare or simply because only a tiny minority of women use welfare benefits for that long. In the pre-reform era, the average woman who entered the welfare system received assistance for just about four and a half years before stopping.10 Reinterviewing the original group of women would thus have entailed major problems. It could not have addressed the question that interested me, namely how women at the same point in their lives (i.e., with minor children and current or recent welfare usage) were faring after reform and whether distrust in each of the contexts I had studied earlier still played a role in the actions of women at this life stage.
I expected to see enormous differences after reform, and of course, I did see some. Welfare reform heralded important changes. These changes are reflected in the fact that Bethany faced no work requirements and hence could hesitate to take a job and keep getting welfare benefits. By contrast, Susan was driven to eschew welfare in order to save the limited time she could draw on benefits for when “hard times” might strike. The women I interviewed in the mid-2000s knew they would have to find child care and try to find work or make do without the welfare benefits, which required work activity. Most of the women I interviewed, like so many other low-income women in America since reform, tried to stay off welfare as much as possible. Indeed, the mass exodus of low-income mothers from the welfare rolls in the aftermath of reform represents the near elimination of one piece of the U.S. welfare state.11
But my other expectations about differences across the two time periods were not met. I had assumed that after reform women would no longer feel they could afford the luxury of acting upon their suspicions of others. For instance, I thought that no mother would leave a job because of questions about her supervisor’s fairness, since she could no longer count indefinitely on welfare to support her. Nor did I expect distrust to play as much of a role in blocking women’s actions in any of the contexts I studied. The new policy gave women voluntary incentives to leave the welfare rolls before mandatory ones hit, to find and stay in jobs, to find and maintain child care arrangements, to get married, to get help from children’s fathers, and to rely on friends and family for support, and I had presumed that these would override mothers’ feelings of distrust when they made decisions. But instead, I was mostly struck by the similarities across time. Women interviewed in the mid-2000s described the same problems and the same distrust in much the same ways as women interviewed in the mid-1990s. In fact, until I became so familiar with my interview transcripts that I immediately recognized the details of a case, I often could not tell whether I was reading one from the pre- or post-reform time period. They did not really differ. Yes, the details of how welfare policy operated had shifted, but the women’s struggle to keep their families afloat and the impact of their lack of faith in others in the five contexts studied remained remarkably stable.
The post-reform interviews echoed the theme of the pre-reform interviews: the contexts I studied and the interactions within them were often marked by distrust. And that suspicion, the wariness that so many women described, functioned in the same way at both time periods: it kept women from taking risks. Distrust kept them from believing that the “carrots” in policies designed to voluntarily entice them into the labor market were real (though it also led them to be certain that the mandatory “sticks” that forcibly pushed them to work were real). It led them to quit jobs at the first sign a boss might not treat them fairly. It encouraged them to yank their children out of child care arrangements they questioned. It made them hesitant to marry or to become too close to their romantic partners. It gave them pause about involving their children’s fathers in their lives. And it kept them from exchanging goods and support with certain friends and family members. In other words, it kept them from doing many of the very things welfare reformers wanted them to do.
The more I compared the interviews conducted at the two different time periods, the more the book became about continuity rather than change. What started as a book about how welfare reform played out in the lives of low-income mothers became a book about the consistency of distrust in low-income mothers’ lives as they managed the same old struggles. Despite the controversy and hyperbole that accompanied the development and passage of welfare reform of the 1990s, the legislation fell short of addressing root causes of many of the problems of those in poverty.12
Welfare reform strove to “fix” the individual behavior of low-income mothers, who were seen as unduly dependent on government funding and personally averse to mainstream family norms. Reform held such mothers accountable for their own plights and aimed to encourage their “personal responsibility” by creating a set of incentives and mandates designed to promote behaviors such as welfare exit, employment, and avoidance of nonmarital fertility. These incentives achieved some success for some groups of women but left other women’s lives unchanged or changed for the worse.13 Reform had a greater impact on outcomes related to work and welfare use than on those related to marriage and childbearing.14 And the initial positive effects of reform slowed over time both as economic recession hit and as the most advantaged recipients left the rolls, leaving behind those who were less likely to fare well without more support.15
Why were reform’s benefits limited in these ways? One reason is that basing reform legislation on a single-minded conception of low-income women as autonomous actors ignores the ways low-income women’s actions are constrained by their social environment. This approach fails to grasp a fundamental social science finding: social contexts profoundly influence individuals’ behavior. A host of social experiments make this fact abundantly clear. For instance, the Asch conformity experiments show that people will correctly answer questions about the lengths of lines drawn on cards if they are alone but will answer incorrectly if they are in a group of people who give incorrect answers.16 They succumb to peer pressure and conform to others’ answers even when they know the answers are incorrect. An even more dramatic example is the Stanford prison experiment conducted by Philip Zimbardo.17 In this study, Stanford University students were randomly assigned to perform the role of either “guard” or “prisoner.” In the course of just a few days, the simulated prison context of the experiment led the guards to behave sadistically toward the prisoners, and the prisoners, traumatized by the experience, to become submissive to the guards’ authority and depressed.
It is not enough to try to change individual behaviors; we also need to understand the individual’s reaction to her surrounding contexts. Contexts where key people—such as caseworkers, employers, or boyfriends—act in erratic, irresponsible, or untrustworthy ways can produce a form of distrust in individuals that in turn affects their behavior. Distrust and the behaviors influenced by distrust were often a response to the conditions the women I interviewed found (or expected to find) in various social contexts.
If we really want to understand low-income mothers’ welfare, employment, and family choices and outcomes, we need to look beyond the mothers themselves to the social contexts in which mothers find themselves.18 These contexts affect low-income mothers’ impressions of what will happen if they take the actions the reformers hoped for. The women I interviewed reported that they did not trust the people and the institutions in their environment to follow through on promises and to treat them with respect. This lack of trust constrained their actions. It protected them when people around them proved untrustworthy, but it could cause them to forego or misperceive potential opportunities that would improve their situations.