We discuss the history of welfare reform in two distinct periods. We start with revisions to the Social Security Act of 1935, the New Deal innovation in policy making that made aid for impoverished children, blind adults, and older women and men a national responsibility. We chronicle the multiple welfare reforms enacted between 1935 and the 1980s, including both expansionist and reductionist reforms. Some of these came entirely “top-down” from politically powerful institutions at the national level. Others moved “bottom-up,” having been proposed initially by welfare clients and their allies. We then explore the 1980s, examining in some detail the intellectual and political shifts that occurred in that period, which resulted ultimately in passage of the Family Support Act of 1988, the last major welfare reform before PRWORA.
Welfare Reform Before “Welfare Reform”
From the beginning of the United States onward, poverty policy has been gendered. It has been shaped by diverse constituencies and motives, and by the presence or absence of poor people at the tables where policies were made.6 All the welfare programs created during the New Deal period have been subject to efforts at reform from above and below. However, the program originally called Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), the means-tested income assistance program for children and their custodial parents, has seen the most dramatic and draconian reforms.
One of the earliest and most consequential top-down reforms after the New Deal came with the Social Security Act Amendments of 1939. These amendments added minor children and spouses, including widows, as beneficiaries of the old-age pension system we know as Social Security, which was just one part of the Social Security law. The effect was to exacerbate women’s economic dependence on men in theory and practice; the national government preserved the dependency of wives on husbands even when the husbands were no longer alive.7 The 1939 amendments removed a disproportionately white group, women and children attached to men whose jobs were covered by Social Security, from the pool of potential ADC families. This privileged group was disproportionately white because the jobs typically held by African Americans and Latinos/as in that period, in agriculture and domestic service, were explicitly omitted from coverage by the original Social Security Act.8 After 1939, ADC recipients, who had limited employment options themselves and whose male partners overwhelmingly had uncovered or marginal jobs, were still majority white, but they were disproportionately nonwhite. Policy change left them in a starkly precarious political position from which they never recovered.9
Understandings of gender inflected by race shaped recurrent attempts to curtail access to ADC benefits. In the early 1940s, ADC and other nationally organized but locally administered antipoverty programs changed as states and localities responded, first, to continued economic doldrums and then to the effects of World War II. Restrictive welfare reform was not a primary concern of policy makers. However, canards that would be familiar from the debate over PRWORA appeared in service of larger political goals shortly after the war. In 1947, for example, Republicans who controlled the New York State government fomented a scandal over the supposed excesses of public assistance in Democratically controlled New York City. The media stoked popular outrage over the city’s efforts to alleviate poverty. The New York Times led in calling attention to a “Woman in Mink” who lived on the dole.10 The story combined gendered fury at an atypical public aid recipient, presumptively white in this case and known to be divorced, with suspicion of the whole idea of welfare. Unstated in the article were some of the main features of the postwar labor market for mothers, such as limited child care exacerbated by the end of federal subsidies, and the rebuilding of barriers to women’s employment that had relaxed during the war.11 This early version of the “welfare queen” archetype prompted the writer A. J. Liebling to complain—in 1947!—about hackneyed use of the term “reform” to mean cuts in public budgets.12 He wrote of the “picayune cruelties” in journalistic treatments of poverty.13
Liebling-style reform began in earnest in the 1950s thanks to the tight coils of gender and race that wound around ideas about poverty at the height of the “American Century.” National and state policy makers, Democrats and Republicans alike, pursued restrictive welfare reforms. In some cases, federal officials pushed back against these efforts in the name of defending the true meaning of the Social Security Act.14
Democratic politicians debated one another over specific initiatives and about whether the overall trend of “reform” should be expansive or restrictive. Some wanted to dismantle what they saw as the excesses of the New Deal. Anti-Communist and anti–trade union Democrats pursued restrictive welfare reforms in the states and nationally. An overlapping but distinctive group of Democrats sought to amend public assistance in order to sustain Jim Crow hierarchy in the South. A third group generally favored expansive welfare reforms but could be persuaded otherwise by explicitly gendered and implicitly racialized appeals.
Ideas and biases about disability mixed with those about gender and race.15 Disability discourse and policy were especially important parts of the intersectional mix in postwar America; as disability policies for civilians expanded, policy makers who were interested in liberalizing welfare increasingly understood poor people as having deficits that rehabilitative policy needed to cure.16 Part of the cure could be found in spending more on services that welfare clients sometimes desired and sometimes resisted.17 The organized welfare clients who were most recognized in the period were those from the National Federation of the Blind (NFB), advocating with and for impoverished blind adults who received federal Aid to the Blind. NFB fought unwanted services and interference in people’s choices by social workers and rehabilitation counselors. They sought welfare reforms that broadened eligibility, raised income and property ceilings imposed on people applying for aid, reduced supervision of their romantic and consumer choices, and removed the presumption that they would exhaust the economic support from their relatives before the government would help them.18
Gendered arguments for welfare reform built on ideas about flawed maternal and paternal behavior. The idea that paternal child support was vital to the well-being of impoverished children, and that collecting it was a good use of governmental resources, led to the Notice to Law Enforcement Officials (NOLEO) policy of 1950. The Truman administration and many Democrats in Congress approved this provision, which aimed to shape the behavior of impoverished women and men, or perhaps, more realistically, simply to drive women who were not on good terms with their children’s fathers away from the rolls.19 The NOLEO provision demanded that state welfare offices share with police the names of men who had deserted or abandoned mothers who received welfare. The mothers who refused to share their partners’ names or prosecute them for child support—whether out of concern for the men or fear of the consequences of pursuing them—lost eligibility for public aid. The provision applied to over one-quarter of families who received ADC benefits. Within a decade of its implementation, an estimated five thousand women had chosen in effect to give up government help by not disclosing the names of their partners.20
Among the most controversial reforms of the period were those that spoke to anxieties about trade unions and the political left, but which also violated the professional standards of the field of social work. Chief among these was the Jenner Amendment, which Congress, with both houses under Democratic control, passed and President Truman signed in 1951.21 The amendment guaranteed that no state would lose the federal portion of its funding for ADC if it permitted welfare department personnel to publicize the names of people who received benefits, thus violating professional standards of confidentiality.22 Democratic representative Burr V. Harrison of Virginia fought for the amendment on the grounds that “criminals, illegitimate children, prostitutes and Cadillac owners [we]re receiving welfare payments” because their names were secret.23 He distinguished sharply between the disproportionately white, supposedly more deserving, beneficiaries of old-age pensions and Unemployment Insurance, and the disproportionately nonwhite recipients of ADC.24 “Behind an iron curtain of secrecy and concealment,” he claimed, “we have today a miniature welfare state … that spends public money for luxuries for