Backlash against Welfare Mothers: Past and Present

3. The 1950s Welfare Backlash and Federal Complicity

3. The 1950s Welfare Backlash and Federal Complicity 35 In the 1950s, states purged their welfare rolls through all sorts of new rules and regulations. In 1949, for example, Georgia’s welfare department required poor mothers to seek court orders of support from fathers and prohibited their supplementation, despite the fact that, as social workers noted, the father’s “contribution is often irregular and inadequate.” The rule also led to violent reprisals from fathers, as Mrs. Jones’s story, recounted by a local welfare official, illustrates: Mrs. Jones came to our department . . . seeking assistance, telling of the hardships, physical abuse, deprivation, and worry she had experienced until she finally left her husband in another county. She had one sixteen-year-old son who was trying desperately to be the breadwinner for the forlorn group. This son, mother, and other children were living in a remote area . . . and working in the field, but were unable to earn enough to buy all of their necessities. . . . Mrs. Jones signed the [welfare] application, but seemed to have doubts about pressing charges against her husband for support. . . . [Later] Mrs. Jones returned to the welfare office and reapplied. She took court action against her husband. The sheriff . . . apprehended Mr. Jones and he was tried. . . . The judge ordered him to contribute toward his children’s support. This man was [later] released from jail. He lived in a distant county, but he came to his wife’s home at 2 a.m., forced his way in with a shotgun. Mrs. Jones and the younger children escaped, but as the sixteen-year old son was trying to leave, his father shot him in the back, killing him instantly, and then committed suicide.1 When Georgia adopted even tougher welfare rules in 1952, it aroused many complaints among social workers and welfare recipients, who viewed them as inhumane. As one county official described: Under our new regulations, employed mothers cannot receive ADC . . . . Mrs. C., with two children, rents a farm. . . . Her children are small. She does her own plowing. She will have no income until the fall, and then perhaps not enough to pay her debts . . . . Another ADC recipient has six children. She has received assistance for four who in years past were abandoned by their fathers. The father of the last two is a substitute father living in the home. She has never asked for assistance for his two children, but he is now responsible for all six, when he stated that he would not be.2 These women were denied welfare by rules that prohibited aid to mothers who worked fulltime, regardless of their wages, and to families with a “man in the house,” regardless of his willingness or capacity to provide sufficient financial support. A federal administrator reviewing complaints and eligibility hearings in Georgia the year after these policies were implemented noted, “The hardships worked on dependent children by the application of non-supplementation of low wages . . . was . . . vividly demonstrated. . . . Most of the hearing officers recognized the urgent need of these cases and efforts were made by some of the hearing officers to seek other sources of help for them, but according to information revealed in the hearing records the limited resources of the communities [were] discouraging.”3 Similarly, another welfare employee claimed that this rule caused “an unfair and terrible hardship.”4 The deprivations created by these welfare rules continued to be felt many years later, as revealed by records from a 1967 court case challenging the state’s “seasonal employment” rule. One of the witnesses for that case was a black widow with eleven children. She reported that at the beginning of each harvest season, she received notice from the county that she would no longer receive her check because seasonal employment had become available . The widow had back problems and could not stoop, which made it impossible for her to work a full day or perform many jobs in the fields. Worried about how she could possibly provide for her eleven children, she went back to the welfare department. The social worker told her that “the children would have to go out and work.” The law exempted welfare mothers from working if suitable childcare was not available, but this rule was often ignored. Forced to work and unable to afford childcare, they took their children with them so they could watch them as they worked or left their children with aging parents too old to adequately care for them.5 Many other states besides...