Living on the Edge in Suburbia: From Welfare to Workfare

3. From Welfare to Workfare

23 3 From Welfare to Workfare The Crafting of a Stratified and Stigmatized Welfare Program A woman who lived in an affluent community called me to say that she spotted my flyer on the bulletin board of her neighborhood supermarket and was interested in scheduling an interview. As was my customary gesture to callers, I suggested that we pick a meeting place conveniently located close to her. This woman did not want to meet at her downtown diner or any local venue where someone might eavesdrop on our conversation. She did not want anyone in her community to overhear that she was “on welfare.”1 Public welfare began in colonial America. Throughout most of U.S. history, the term “relief” was used in reference to the public and private provisions for poor people. The term “welfare” had a positive connotation when it first came into use in the early twentieth century because it differentiated old relief practices (e.g., the poorhouse) from the newly instituted social programs (Katz 1986). Katz notes that it is not clear when the term acquired its contemporary stigma (1986). In the early years from 1911 to 1935, women who received relief from mothers’ aid programs (relief programs that predated the Social Security Act) were held in esteem because the programs selected “fit” and “deserving” women. Moreover, the programs were considered prestigious because they set recipients apart from the pauper class (Bell 1965:13). The contemporary meaning of welfare may have been created by the Social Security Act of 1935, which set up a stratified system of provisions (Gordon 1994). As part of the New Deal, the Social Security Act of 1935 established the U.S. welfare state by federalizing state relief programs and creating two types of benefit programs—social insurance and public assistance pro- 24 Living on the Edge in Suburbia grams. From their inception the benefit programs were exclusionary and stratified along lines of gender, race, class, and marital and labor status. The social insurance programs were unemployment insurance and old age insurance (the precursor to the contemporary Social Security program). The benefits were funded through taxation on employment; because of this, during the first half of the twentieth century, the beneficiaries were mostly white males. These programs insured some financial security to those beneficiaries when unemployment and old age resulted in income loss. The public assistance programs were Old Age Assistance (for indigent elderly outside the wage labor market who could not obtain old age insurance ), Aid to the Blind, and Aid to Dependent Children (ADC). ADC, which came to be known as “welfare,” provided financial aid to needy, dependent children deprived of parental support or care due to the death, continued absence, or incapacity of a parent. That is, children in families headed primarily by widows, as well as divorced, abandoned, or separated mothers.2 Overall, the social insurance programs, which were federally administered , were more generous than public assistance programs. In addition, these social insurance programs were based on rights and earnings and respected recipients’ privacy, though they also disproportionately served whites, especially adult white men. These federally administered programs had a larger tax base that supported the programs. In contrast, the lowertier public assistance programs were less supportive because they were state or locally administered, needs-based, and means-tested. They were highly supervised and provided inferior payments; ADC benefited women and children. Locally administered programs were more susceptible to political attacks and a declining tax base (Gordon 1994:5, 11, 294). The New Deal social programs were influenced by a domestic code, an ideology that flourished in the industrial era when urbanization and the growth and competition of industrialization created a division of labor in which men became the designated wage earner in the public sphere and women were restricted to the home. Women became further subordinated to men, being dependent on their sole wage. In the mid-nineteenth century, motherhood and domesticity were idealized and glorified. Kessler-Harris notes that the domestic ideology “exalted home roles” while it “condemned” women who were forced to take on wage labor—those who worked beyond teen years, free blacks, and immigrants (1982:53). The domestic code, and the fact that it was less costly to main- From Welfare to Workfare 25 tain poor children in homes than in institutions, led to the establishment of public aid programs that provided assistance to children in their homes (Bell 1965:4...