The Trouble with Welfare

The United States is in the midst of vociferous debates about the structure of its public assistance for the very poor. After the 1994 congressional elections, policy discussions about reforming “welfare” lurched to the right. The federal government’s involvement in regulating assistance for many impoverished mothers and children will soon be sharply curtailed. America looks as if it will finish the twentieth century pretty much where it started, with social responsibility for the poor resting with state and local governments and private charities.

As an era in politics and public policy comes to a close, it is important to look backwards in order to understand where we are now. How are we to understand the origins and development of Aid to Families with Dependent Children? Can history tell us important things about how and why AFDC is at the controversial center of today’s debates about “ending welfare as we know it”? Gwendolyn Mink’s The Wages of Motherhood and Blanche Coll’s Safety Net both consider Aid to Dependent Children—the program at the core of what Americans now call “welfare”—in relation to its antecedents before the New Deal, and both examine the evolution of welfare within the context of the Social Security system launched in the 1930s. Present controversies about welfare, these books suggest, are rooted in the past.

Despite similarities of topic and scope, it would be difficult to imagine two more contrasting styles of scholarship. Political scientist Gwendolyn Mink has produced a set of interpretive essays. The Wages of Motherhood offers grand assertions in vague language, often with little anchorage in appropriate historical sources (for example, an entire section of chapter 2 discusses the origins of mothers’ pensions, which mostly passed in the 1910s, with only a few scattered footnotes to sources in the 1920s and 1930s). Historian Blanche Coll, a retired civil servant steeped in the administrative minutiae of several decades of U.S. policy making and implementation, uses a rich array of primary governmental sources. Safety Net plugs along entirely chronologically. Its key arguments have to be discovered by a patient reader, for Coll rarely highlights them herself. Mink’s book is, in short, mostly a point of view, while Coll’s is an assemblage of modestly analyzed detail.

The Wages of Motherhood argues that welfare in the United States has from the start played out a flawed “maternalist” vision that links public assistance to the imposition of “Anglo-American” norms about proper family behavior. “Maternalists” are never precisely defined in this account, but seem to include all intellectuals, politicians, and policymakers who have ever, since at least the early 1900s, advocated social benefits for impoverished children and mothers conditional on any aspect of the family status or behavior of the mother.

Mink argues that maternalist welfare got its start in mothers’ pensions, which are presented as achievements of educated female reformers in the Children’s Bureau around World War I. In fact, mothers’ pensions were enacted in most states between 1911 and 1917, and were championed across states and localities by voluntary associations of married women (on this, see my Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States, 1992). Officials of the Children’s Bureau were not central to the campaign for mothers’ pensions. But for Mink, distinctions among policies and groups of reformers do not matter because she portrays a monolithic “maternalist” ideology, which tied women’s citizenship to motherhood and defined proper child-rearing in “Anglo-American” middle- and upper-class terms. In Mink’s recounting, “maternalism” was merely carried forward in a new way when Aid to Dependent Children was established as a program encoding “women’s dependency” under the Social Security Act of 1935. Mink so stresses continuities from the 1910s through the 1930s that...