Women in the American Welfare Trap

3. A Tenuous Advocacy

Chapter 3 A Tenuous Advocacy In his work on stigma, Coffman (1963) notes that one approach to managing what he calls "spoiled identity" consists of aligning oneself with groups of similarly situated individuals. This allows the otherwise stigmatized individuals to construct a universe in which they have legitimacy. Among welfare recipients, the opportunity to form such alliances is provided by welfare rights groups. Welfare rights groups encourage women to work on their identities, and to counteract negative stereotypes that blame them for their own poverty by constructing theories that blame the system instead (Hertz 1977, 1981; Pope 1989). In comparing their experiences, the women engage in what Mills (1959) refers to as the "sociological imagination," thereby discovering that their situations are not unique. This permits them in turn to move from internal imputations of character defects to external explanations of structural failings. What the women are accomplishing in the context of welfare rights groups is comembership, the recognition of similarity and commonality (Erickson 1975; Erickson and Shultz 1982; see also Shultz 1975). In the context of this study, comembership may be loosely defined as alliance or solidarity, the outcome ofwhich may be viewed in terms of consciousness raising, or of a Freireian conscientizacao (Freire 1970). Erickson and Shultz (1982: 35) focus on comembership based on "attributes ofshared status that are particularistic rather than universalistic"; in other words, on attributes that are directly or indirectly determined by birth, versus those that are potentially achievable by anyone. Although I am using the term in the simpler sense to refer to recognition ofany commonality, the dimensions of comembership I am most interested in do, in fact, concern particularistic attributes, such as gender and socioeconomic class. Most of the evidence that women's self-esteem is improved as a result of participation in welfare rights groups takes the form of retrospective self-reports (Hertz 1977). While interviews reveal what individuals have to say to "outsiders" about how they make sense of the world, they fail to 44 Chapter 3 capture the processes involved in individuals' concerted, or collective, efforts to make particular kinds of senses of the world. We know very little, then, of how women accomplish the "management" of stigma in their interactions with each other in welfare rights meetings. This process is, accordingly, the topic of the next three chapters. My analysis now moves from interviews to naturally occurring speech, speech which occurs for reasons other than that I, as a researcher, am present. My approach to gathering this kind of talk consisted of having a tape recorder running whenever possible. This allowed me both to be opportunistic and to minimize imposing my own definitions ofwhat was important onto the event (by, for example, turning the recorder on and off when something I deemed "important" was happening-an action that no doubt would have been noted by the women) (Erickson 1986). Since a running tape recorder was a feature of my presence-indeed, it was a part of my body, as I wore it at all times on a shoulder strap-the women were able to get used to the recorder as they got used to me. I was nevertheless present as an outsider and researcher at the events tape recorded and so cannot claim that this method was completely unobtrusive . The women occasionally made comments either about or to the recorder, indicating an awareness ofits presence (perhaps reflecting embarrassment , or a recognition of its utilitarian function in documentparticular sentiments for posterity). However, references to and speech directed at the recorder diminished markedly over time; and it was always the case that conversational topics were directed and managed by the group as it went about the business of having a welfare rights meeting. The two welfare rights groups I worked with, the Madrid Welfare Rights Organization (MWRO) and Low Income People for Equality (LIFE), were fragmented and tenuous, and struggled continuously to maintain cohesion. In the case of LIFE, the struggle was unsuccessful. Both groups, however, were part and parcel of the ongoing agitation for welfare rights in the United States, and they joined in a long history of protest against poverty and general economic oppression. As with many grass roots organizations, MWRO and LIFE suffered from shortages of time and money; in addition, they were restricted by the gendered nature ofwhat West and Blumberg (1990:4) refer to as the" 'appropriate' boundaries of political behavior," what it is that women are, and are not, supposed to do. They nevertheless expended considerable...