The anti-feminist and anti-welfare consensus could not have formed without Democratic participation. Moynihan continued to set the tone, although he was hardly alone. In 1985, in a major address at Harvard University that he later published as the book Family and Nation, he revisited and reinterpreted the Moynihan Report from twenty years before.68 He omitted the most outré language from the report about men’s need to “strut,” and also downplayed his prior call for massive educational and employment investments to enable African American men to head their families and to help families avoid poverty. Moynihan focused instead on gender, sex, and poor people’s choices about intimacy. He claimed that a tight link that had once prevailed between overall prosperity and the poverty rate had broken since 1965, and that the phenomenon could be explained by behavioral or moral characteristics—chiefly, the propensity of poor and nonwhite people to bear and raise children outside of wedlock. Moynihan claimed nonmarital parenting was both a cause of poverty and a social problem in itself. He muted other explanations for the gap between “normal” economic well-being and that of African American families, such as racial discrimination, disproportionate rates of incarceration, and the hyperexploitation of many working women of color. The New York Times declared in an editorial that the speech was a landmark, a brilliant intervention into public policy.69
Moynihan’s moralism, which ignored the facts that a quarter of the U.S. population used means-tested public programs and used them as designed, prevailed through the welfare reform debates of the 1980s. It shaped the last major national legislative change in cash welfare before PRWORA. Moynihan himself was the primary author of this legislation, the Family Support Act of 1988, a reform that the remaining welfare rights activists and advocates in the United States considered dramatic and draconian although PRWORA subsequently made it seem fairly modest. The primary difference between Republican and Democratic versions of welfare moralism in this period was that Republicans, echoing policy intellectuals Gilder, Murray, and Mead, blamed government programs themselves for producing the supposed gender crisis in impoverished families and communities, while Moynihan and his allies who leaned Democratic largely blamed gendered arrangements for producing the need for government programs. The politically engaged scholars Mary Jo Bane and David Ellwood argued, in studies cited in Moynihan’s Family and Nation and in Ellwood’s Poor Support (1988), that the different welfare grant levels in different states represented a “natural experiment” of the effect of public aid on poor women’s and men’s choices: because there was no predictable statistical relationship between AFDC grants and rates of teenage and nonmarital parenting, then welfare could not have caused those phenomena.70 But that did not mean that public assistance was to be left alone, or that government officials should not concern themselves about poor women’s sexual, marital, and parenting choices. Ellwood continued to find the moral hazard in AFDC (but not other public welfare programs) significant; Poor Support included a proposal for dismantling women’s entitlement to support by placing a time limit on their access to the program.71
The debates that helped produce the Family Support Act were not only gendered. They were, simultaneously, deeply racialist. Ellwood devoted three chapters of his book to what he identified as the problem of changing families, and an additional chapter to the challenge of “ghetto poverty.” Although there was obvious slippage between the two, the distinction lay in the emphasis in the former on women, their bodies, and their choices, whereas the “ghetto” poor were stereotyped as black, male, criminal, and threatening to middle-class culture in a more immediate way than were women raising children outside of wedlock.72 Sociologist William Julius Wilson, whose influence on the debate is difficult to overstate, examined “ghetto poverty” exclusively. Again bypassing the normal, explicable, general picture of poverty and public assistance, he wrote compellingly about the sometimes illegal and self-destructive behavior that occurred in small, statistically aberrant communities in which few people had decent jobs. Wilson’s book The Truly Disadvantaged (1987), and a related series by journalist Nicholas Lemann in the Atlantic Monthly magazine, did as much as anything else to fuel anti-welfare politics by changing the subject from the economic circumstance of poverty to the behavior of poor people—behavior that readers inevitably interpreted through the lens of their stereotypes about women, African Americans, and the poor.73 As they were for Moynihan, men and masculinity were for Wilson at the center of the problem and the source of its solution: economic conditions and men’s bad choices, together, left poor, African American neighborhoods with a paucity of what he termed “marriageable males” and therefore created women’s and children’s distress.74 Rather than defend the anti-poverty policies that extended what lifeline there was in urban communities awash in postindustrial poverty, Wilson saw the solution to women’s circumstances in a far-off, social-democratic program of education, training, and employment directed at men.
The Family Support Act of 1988 was in many ways a rehearsal for PRWORA. In a reverse of the later pattern, the Family Support Act emerged from a Democratic Congress and was signed by a Republican president. It received critically important support from the self-styled centrist Democratic group the Democratic Leadership Council and from the National Governors Association, both led by Governor Bill Clinton.75 The history of its passage reveals that leaders of the two major parties disagreed on matters of emphasis but fundamentally shared an analysis of the problem they were trying to fix. They agreed, too, on the necessity of “reform,” a word that encoded the same “picayune cruelties” and drive to cut spending that A. J. Liebling had analyzed decades earlier. Its most distinctive feature followed William Julius Wilson’s emphasis on masculinity and paternity without the social investments he recommended. The Family Support Act dramatically increased the involvement of the national government in paternity establishment and child support enforcement. This reprised the principles of the NOLEO requirement from the Eisenhower era and expanded the power of the national Office of Child Support Enforcement, which Congress had created in 1974. Under the new law, states were required to withhold money from the wages of absent fathers to support their children and were penalized for failing to establish paternity in a substantial number of cases.76 The other major portion of the legislation, less distinctive but equally significant for poor people, was a program of work mandates and promised investments in education and services. The Job Opportunities and Basic Skills (JOBS) program replaced and reprised WIN/WIP from the 1967 welfare law. Like that earlier effort, it both federalized and placed a rehabilitative gloss on the kind of forced work that states had once faced federal opprobrium for applying on a smaller scale and more openly discriminatory basis. However, one bright spot of the law was that it contained a definition of “work” that included fulltime participation in work training or school, including in advanced programs and four-year colleges.77
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Intellectuals and politicians who reformed welfare in the period from the 1930s to the 1980s apparently believed their prescriptions were new each time they offered them. They proceeded as though confident that the policy shifts they endorsed would end an old and acrimonious national debate. But stubborn ideas about gender, race, poverty, and disability made the debate endlessly recursive. Almost regardless of which party held the majority in Congress or the White House, legislative innovations presented with the greatest fanfare proved to be retreads of earlier models. The only major changes in understanding and approach occurred at the relatively brief moments during which people who relied on public aid, themselves, authored welfare reform. The Family Support Act of 1988 was the last great push to reform AFDC and quiet the gender trouble it represented to so many observers.78 If Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s analysis of the problem had been correct, then the law might have improved intimacy and parenting in impoverished neighborhoods, relieved poverty, saved AFDC, and rid Democrats of the need to defend the program from its critics. In the end, its effects were mostly nil or negative: too underfunded to change poverty or poor people’s choices, the law stoked even greater acrimony among politicians, who heaped even more aspersions on welfare families and the people who stood