In the last half-century, the American definition of “welfare” has been reversed. A term that once meant prosperity, good health, good spirits, and social respect now implies poverty, bad health, despondency, and social disrespect. A word used to describe the health of the body politic now evokes images of its disease -- slums, depressed single mothers, neglected children, crime, despair.
Today, welfare particularly refers to one universally maligned government program -- Aid to Families With Dependent Children -- when once it referred to a vision of the good life.
As we begin to debate the welfare-reform proposal that President Clinton unveiled last month, it may be useful to understand how the concept of welfare became so despised. A recent renascence of scholarship on the welfare state in America may shed some light on this transformation. The research, coming from sociologists, political scientists, and historians, includes much work that recognizes how gender and race figured in the structuring of government programs.
The term welfare could logically refer to all of a government’s contributions to its citizens’ well-being, including provision of streets and sidewalks, schools, parks, police and fire protection, utilities, regulation of food and drugs, pollution control, building inspections, prevention of child abuse, and safe-sex education.
Even if we were to label as welfare only those programs that provide cash to citizens, we could include tax deductions for home mortgages and business expenses, farm subsidies, Medicare, and the old-age pensions provided under the Social Security Act, among many other government benefits.
The negative connotations of welfare in the United States rest on differences among the several programs originally included in the Social Security Act of 1935. The pejorative connotation attached to AFDC, a program of aid to children and single parents (almost all of whom are women), was not present when the program began. AFDC came to be viewed negatively only in the 1950’s and 1960’s.
The designers of the original statute did not intend to create a stratified system but rather were trying to meet different needs with different programs, all formulated under the influence of a major crisis -- the Great Depression of the 1930’s.
The most influential drafters of the Social Security Act advocated social insurance. Seeking to prevent poverty and another depression by providing assistance to breadwinners as soon as their wages were interrupted -- by unemployment, illness, or old age -- they installed unemployment compensation and old-age insurance as the centerpieces of the law.
Those programs excluded the majority of Americans, although for different reasons. Blacks, who in the 1930’s were still mainly agricultural and domestic workers, were effectively excluded at the insistence of Southern Democrats, who controlled crucial Congressional committees and wanted to maintain a low-wage labor force in the South. Black exclusion was the price, President Roosevelt believed, of getting the law through Congress. Most white women were excluded because the drafters assumed that the majority of them would continue to be non-employed housewives, collecting benefits as dependents of their husbands.
The program Aid to Families With Dependent Children was written by women heading the U.S. Children’s Bureau, who wanted to provide for women and children who did not have a male wage earner to support them. The program was not intended to be inferior to the other Social Security programs, merely small and temporary, because its framers believed that the model of the family in which the male was the breadwinner and the female the housewife would be the standard. The framers of AFDC even believed that the causes of single motherhood -- widowhood, divorce, and out-of-wedlock parenthood -- would decline as economic disruption abated. Because they considered families headed by mothers to be exceptional, they designed the AFDC program very differently from the social-insurance programs:
* AFDC would be means-tested. To receive aid, an applicant would have to prove her poverty, not just initially but repeatedly, and she would lose benefits the moment she earned even a poverty wage. By contrast, a person could collect old-age or unemployment insurance -- the “social insurance” programs -- even if he were a millionaire.
* AFDC recipients would be morals-tested. To get assistance, an applicant would have to prove that her housekeeping, child-rearing, and sexual behavior were respectable, submitting to invasions of privacy -- such as unannounced inspections of her home -- that recipients of old-age and unemployment insurance escaped. The social-insurance programs were entirely automatic once you qualified: You could spend your entire pension on illegal drugs with no social workers inquiring about it.
* AFDC would be more a state than a federal program. With the states providing two-thirds of the money and federal matching grants providing the rest, the program initially appeared to be a federal contribution to existing state and local systems for aiding the poor. (Although the federal contribution now exceeds 50 per cent in some states, the states still maintain discretion over many program rules.) The social-insurance programs, by contrast, had the cachet of newness, New Deal innovation, and exclusively federal administration, which separated them from the tradition of the dole to the poor.
* AFDC would be financed by general tax revenues. Thus it appeared to be a burden on those who paid property and income taxes. By contrast, the social-insurance programs were financed by payroll deductions, labeled “contributions,” from workers covered by them, as well as contributions from employers. Using the term contributions enabled the benefits to be categorized as earned benefits or entitlements. In fact, Social Security contributions have always been mingled with general revenue, and what beneficiaries receive is not determined by what they have contributed.
This stratification created the meaning of welfare today. AFDC was stigmatized because of its differences from the other social programs, which were not usually called welfare. Originally intended to serve that most deserving of all needy groups -- helpless mothers left alone with children by heartless men -- AFDC became shameful, making its recipients undeserving by the very fact of providing for them.
The history of how these differences arose shows the deep-seated sex and race distinctions that were incorporated into the U.S. welfare state from its beginnings. Because women were considered mainly dependents, it seemed unobjectionable to design the women’s welfare program to treat them as dependents of the state, while men had to be helped without eroding their dignity and head-of-household status. Because most members of minority groups were not considered full citizens, white lawmakers thought it acceptable to bar them from entitlements by excluding their jobs from coverage under the unemployment and old-age pension programs. Indeed, at first, members of minority groups were also effectively excluded from the AFDC program, because there was no federal control over racist local administrators.
Much has changed in the 60 years since the Social Security program was designed, and the changes have combined to increase the need for, and decrease the political support for, AFDC.
* As part of a ground swell of civil-rights agitation in the 1950’s, black women began asserting that the right to receive welfare was one they were entitled to as citizens, just like the right to vote. The success of this claim not only increased the AFDC rolls, but also increased the proportion of blacks among AFDC recipients. Then, in the 1960’s, a welfare-rights movement forced the courts to restrict the arbitrary power of states to invade recipients’ privacy and cut off benefits summarily. Even more important, this activism created a more dignified image of the work of poor single mothers, reminding the public that mothering was not only work, but socially useful work. As the welfare-rights movement declined in the 1970’s, however, the stigma attached to welfare intensified, strengthened now by racist animosity toward the growing number of welfare recipients from minority groups.
* The increasing number of mothers in the labor force, including middle- and upper-income women, gradually undermined the ideological basis of AFDC -- the assumption that mothers should be helped to stay home with their children. This made the AFDC requirement that its beneficiaries not work for wages seem anachronistic -- and the recipients, not the program, were blamed.
* Increasing divorce rates left more women alone to raise their children. Despite the greater numbers who worked, many single mothers could not earn enough to support themselves and their children and pay for child care. AFDC rolls thus expanded.
* The drastic decline of industrial jobs during the last two decades not only raised unemployment rates, but also left more people chronically unemployed, underemployed, or employed only sporadically. This has meant that interruption of wages, the problem that unemployment compensation was originally designed to address, is no longer the chief cause of poverty in the United States. Many of today’s unemployed are not eligible for unemployment compensation, and the parents among them turn to AFDC. The majority of AFDC recipients have been employed but are not entitled to unemployment benefits.
* Since World War II, the better jobs have carried private benefits such as health insurance, company pensions, and disability insurance -- benefits that undercut support among many Americans for AFDC.
The problems of unemployment, underemployment, and employment in casual labor have helped deepen the division in our system for providing social benefits -- between the “middle class” (those with permanent jobs), which gets honorable, supposedly earned, benefits, and the people who receive welfare. The stigma attached to welfare is self-reinforcing: The low status of its recipients stigmatizes the program, and the low status of the program stigmatizes its recipients.
The poorer and more maligned welfare recipients are, the more difficult it is for them to build political support for improving welfare. The further their benefits deteriorate, the deeper their indigence and hopelessness become. By contrast, the fact that Social Security old-age pensions were not originally classified as welfare has strengthened the lobbying power of organizations that represent older citizens, such as the American Association of Retired Persons. This has helped them maintain the level of their benefits and has reinforced their identity as citizens collecting earned entitlements.
No one likes welfare. But the idea being bandied about today that it could be abolished is misleading, a political dead end, and morally indefensible. Our goal should be to abolish poverty, not welfare. In a democracy, you can’t simultaneously try to improve a public-assistance program and malign its recipients, because you have to develop popular support for trying to help them.
President Clinton’s welfare-reform proposal, aimed largely at AFDC, offers nothing to alter the political, economic, and social decline of welfare recipients. It does include some changes aimed at reducing poverty, such as its call for more child-care support and its proposal for subsidized and community-service jobs. But since the new law is supposed to be “revenue neutral,” insufficient money will be available to enable these programs to make a difference. The most-publicized aspect of the Clinton program is its proposal to limit women born after December 31, 1971, to two years of benefits under AFDC -- two years over their entire lifetime. The proposal thus would initially affect only some AFDC recipients, but it would gradually expand to cover them all.
President Clinton’s proposal resists today’s powerful conservative agenda in several ways -- for example, it does not echo the ridiculous right-wing call for marriage as the solution to the problems of the poor (as if sexual immorality caused poverty). But its focus on ending welfare is mainly a gesture to pick up conservative support. This futile and cruel regulation would do nothing to increase employment or decrease poverty.
Even if all AFDC recipients could get jobs, few of them would earn enough to support themselves and their children. Provisions that would require teen-age mothers to live with their parents and that would cut benefits for children born while their mothers are on AFDC are based on the fallacious assumption that poor and single mothers have children because they think it economically advantageous to do so.
President Clinton’s rhetoric about supporting the values of “work and responsibility,” as opposed to those of welfare, makes scapegoats of the poor and members of minority groups, while obstructing honest thought, research, and discussion about welfare. This rhetoric matters, because it defines what is politically possible.
Instead of talking about ending “welfare as we know it,” I wish the Administration would question what we “know” about welfare. Looking at how and why our country came to stigmatize welfare would reveal some of the unfairness in our characterizations. Why not open all government subsidies to reform, questioning those to the middle class and the wealthy as well as those to the poor?
Why doesn’t Mr. Clinton consider, along with the problems of teen-age pregnancy, ways to give credit for the hard work that many welfare recipients are doing bringing up children in poor neighborhoods? Why not remind the public about the low wages typically paid women and members of minority groups, which make earning a living so hard for many welfare recipients? I hope that other scholars who have studied welfare will join me in pressing the Administration and other decision makers to respond to these and other fundamental questions about how our nation distributes economic benefits.
Linda Gordon is a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She is the author of Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (forthcoming from the Free Press in September).