Ensuring Poverty: Welfare Reform in Feminist Perspective

239 Pages·2018·2.795 MB·English

by  Felicia Kornbluh, Gwendolyn Mink

Ensuring Poverty
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Ensuring Poverty
Welfare Reform in Feminist Perspective
Felicia Kornbluh and Gwendolyn Mink
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2019 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or
scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means
without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104 - 4112
www . upenn . edu / pennpress
Printed in the United States of Amer i ca
on acid- free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Kornbluh, Felicia Ann, author. | Mink, Gwendolyn, author.
Title: Ensuring poverty : welfare reform in feminist perspective / Felicia Kornbluh
and Gwendolyn Mink.
Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2018] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018008572 | ISBN 978-0-8122-5068-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Public welfare—U nited States. | Welfare recipients—U nited States. |
Low- income single m others— Government policy— United States. |
Poor women— Government policy— United States. | Poverty— Government
policy— United States. | Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (Program).
Classification: LCC HV95 .K675 2018 | DDC 362.5/5680973— dc23
LC rec ord available at https:// lccn . loc . gov / 2018008572
For our mothers
Beatrice Kornbluh Braun, Esq., 1929–2017
Patsy Takemoto Mink, 1927–2002
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Contents
Preface ix
Chapter 1. Legislating the Personal Responsibility of Poor M others 1
Chapter 2. Welfare (Reform) as We Knew It 21
Chapter 3. Change They Believed In 42
Chapter 4. The New Demo cratic War on Welfare 57
Chapter 5. Welfare Ends 77
Chapter 6. Rethinking TANF as if Mothers Matter 90
Chapter 7. Patriarchal Consensus: Gender and Poverty
Under Bush and Obama 108
Conclusion. T oward Ending the Vulnerabilities
of Single Mothers in Poverty 130
Appendix. W omen’s Committee of 100/Project 2002, “An Immodest
Proposal: Rewarding W omen’s Work to End Poverty” 147
Notes 153
Index 209
Acknowl edgments 219
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Preface
In a study published in February 2015, researchers reported that the 1996
welfare reform law shortens women’s lives. Public health scholars studied
two states, Florida and Connecticut, and compared the old, pre-1996 welfare
program with the l ater one. They discovered that the new policy, authorized
by the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act
(PRWORA), shortened recipients’ lives by nearly six months (0.44 years).1 It
also saved governments approximately $28,000 per recipient over her life-
time. An earlier study by the same research group found that, in Florida
alone, the death rate for participants in the post-1996 welfare program was
16  percent higher than for p eople who had received welfare in earlier de cades.
“The message of the finding,” according to a scholar who was not one of its
authors, “is that there is a very small but statistically significant difference
in the mea sured death rates between t hese two populations.”2
This book is an effort to explain how we ended up with a national policy
that promotes the death of mothers. To grasp the politics and policy making
that gave us the cruel program unironically called “welfare,” we ask readers
to consider welfare policy in the broad intersectional context of gender, race,
poverty, and in equality. The subject of welfare reform always has been single
mothers, its animus always has been race, and its currency always has been
in equality. Yet public conversations about poverty and welfare, even in cur-
rent times, rarely acknowledge the nexus between racialized gender in-
equality and the economic vulnerability of single- mother families. We hope
this book w ill broaden how we talk about the safety net and welfare justice.
We offer a feminist chronicle and assessment of the contested history of wel-
fare reform, including the alternative arguments advanced by feminists and
proposals for welfare initiatives that actually would help mothers achieve
in de pen dence for themselves and economic security for their families. We