Even when income inequality grabbed popular attention as a response to the Great Recession, invocations of “the 99%” were too vague to reach the particular situation of low-income women and children trying to stay afloat in the wake of welfare reform. Progressive campaigns on behalf of “ordinary Americans,” the “middle class,” or people who “do everything right but still can’t get ahead” may even have been counterproductive. The discourse of “playing by the rules” or “doing everything right” may establish a middle-class claim for a reformed home mortgage system or free college education. But it marginalizes and “others” people who do not “do everything right” almost by definition, because the rules the poor are required to live by are harsher and more stringent than any facing the middle class—starting with the compliance demanded by government in exchange for public assistance.
Mainstream public debates about poverty thinned to an unhealthy degree in part because many post-PRWORA policy interlocutors acquiesced in the othering of poor single mothers as behavioral anomalies who eventually would be fixed by the onward march of welfare reform. But policy debates about poverty also suffered because they were starved of progressive feminist ideas. Instead of giving a full hearing to feminist antipoverty ideas about self-sovereignty, economic opportunity, intimate liberty, and freedom from violence—ideas that touched on the structural and cultural inequality faced by single mothers—post-PRWORA welfare discourse treated patriarchalist solutions to poverty as neutral and self-evident, just as Newt Gingrich’s GOP designed them to be in the middle 1990s. The coercive, misogynous edge of demands for universal marriage and mandatory paternity, widely noticed if incompletely grasped during the high point of feminist influence in the 1970s, was hardly acknowledged by the early twenty-first century. Instead, for a wide swath of thinkers in Washington, D.C., marriage became a ubiquitous symbol of the moral and economic good.
Some of the narrowing of debate over welfare and poverty occurred through the efforts of those who tried to help low-income mothers by punishing their male partners. Beginning in the 1980s, some liberals joined the idea of welfare reform with feminist-sounding demands for a punitive regime of child support collections.13 Strengthened under PRWORA and the state laws that implemented it, child support policy ensnared many low-income men in a kind of carceral debt peonage, in which the combination of mandated child support awards and fees for court costs and arrears led to repeated jailing and was virtually impossible to escape. Walter Scott, one of the men who became famous because police killed him during the rise of the #blacklivesmatter movement, was $18,000 in arrears on child support payments at the time he was shot. Family members speculated that this may have been the reason he fled after police stopped him because of a broken tail light.14
The sidelining of progressive feminist analysis cramped the spectrum of socially acceptable opinion about welfare and poverty, as policy makers lost the sense that human activity and sustenance could occur outside of the labor market. One consequence or symptom of this trend was the liberal dedication to “make work pay” by expanding the Earned Income, Dependent Care, and Child Care Tax Credits.15 Rather than resisting the logic of welfare reform, which hollowed out the obligations citizens could impose on their government, policies that focused single-mindedly on making work pay participated in it: welfare reform drove women with young children, who had been somewhat sheltered from full-time waged work in twentieth-century public policy, into full-time low-wage jobs and away from their children. Policies such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, which has increased in value substantially since the 1990s, painted lipstick on this pig by using public resources to supplement bad private-sector jobs. Journalists, legislators, and think-tank intellectuals stopped asking why it was better for mothers to work in the food service or home health care industries than to prepare their children’s food or tend to their family members’ illnesses.16 As in the case of child support, those liberals who took women’s waged work as a positive end in itself, and who were willing to impose an obligation to engage in such work on low-income people, may have helped produce this disregard for the mostly uncompensated work of mothering.
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This book interweaves three primary concerns. The first is the significance of gender in welfare reform, and, more generally, in poverty and inequality in the United States. This is something of a truism within feminist scholarship about the American and European welfare states. However, since passage of PRWORA, the gendered dimensions of antipoverty policy appear to have receded ever more from view. We assume at least two major audiences, scholars and advocates who work on public policy but do not routinely use contemporary gender analysis as part of their work, and students and colleagues in the feminist academy who have sharp theoretical tools but rarely bring them to the task of studying policy. Our intention is to have this book serve as an object lesson in what can be gained when the lines between these two groups are effaced, when public policy history, analysis, and advocacy embrace contemporary feminism and when feminists use their rich understandings of sex, gender, difference, and power to interpret the public structures that shape contemporary life—and to change them for the better.
To capture the origins and effects of PRWORA requires a wide, intersectional understanding of gender and its role in welfare policy. Gender in the sense of women’s subordination, past and present, has unfortunately been a very salient part of this law’s development. But PRWORA’s gendered politics also was simultaneous with and inseparable from racism and race-based stereotypes. For example, the enthusiasm of some white, middle-class female legislators for federal policy that compelled other women’s out-of-home work, and the desire by many middle-class whites to cure poverty with paternal child support payments, can best be understood as a shared product of gender, race, and class relations refracted through political opinions. A full understanding of PRWORA and its effects further involves interactions among gender, nationality, legal citizenship, language, sexuality, disability, and transnational migration.17
A second thread of our analysis considers the narrowing of debate that has occurred in recent decades. We focus here on changes that occurred in the thinking and rhetoric of Democrats, progressives, and allied research ers. Conservative opinion and activism have, of course, been significant in the development of public policies that affect low-income people. The conservative “Contract with America,” issued by activist Republicans who became a congressional majority after the elections of November 1994, shaped the statute Congress passed for President Clinton’s signature two years later.18 Anti-welfare conservatism constrained later efforts to ameliorate the effects of PRWORA. But moderates and liberals also contributed to anti-welfare discourse, principally by leaving unrebutted underlying assumptions about parenting, poverty, and the role of government.
The third concern of this book is the path charted by social justice feminists in the 1990s and early 2000s, a path not yet chosen by policy makers but not impossible to choose. The social justice feminist path begins with the irreplaceable role of people who will be most affected by public policy decisions in making those decisions. In the case of PRWORA and whatever in the future might replace it, this means involving low-income mothers actively in discussions of their needs and perspectives—and, when discussing policies about marriage and fatherhood, involving fathers, too. It also means making policy as if poor people’s needs and perspectives matter even when poor people are not in the room. At a conference in 2002, in the midst of congressional struggles over TANF reauthorization, one of us asked, “Could we please talk about TANF as if mothers matter?”19 The history of PRWORA is an object lesson in the effects of policy making in which virtually everything about low-income mothers and fathers was decided without them. We endeavor to foreground and consider the distortions that occurred in political debates about poverty and welfare when those most affected, and their status as mothers and fathers, were omitted.
The social