The Great Society and the High Tide of Liberalism

Chapter 4 - Contested Rights: The Great Society between Home and Work

Contested Rights The Great Society between Home and Work Eileen Boris 115 The proper relation between wage earning and family labor has stood at the center of a century-long debate over public assistance for those in need. A set of binaries has framed this discussion. Do public or private efforts sap initiative or alleviate suffering? Will marriage or economic independence relieve the poverty of single mothers and their children ? Must mothers of preschool children be forced into the labor market , or can they stay home? Should charity or welfare be available only to worthy widows or women with incapacitated husbands and withheld from those without “suitable homes” or with out-of-wedlock pregnancies? The Great Society of the 1960s faced these questions in the midst of changing expectations about women, work, and motherhood that were racialized as well as a product of both labor market demands and the aspirations of women. In grappling with the persistence of poverty amid affluence, it embodied prior policy assumptions about good homes and families, even as it reinforced emerging understandings of employment as the norm for full citizenship for women as well as men, for mothers of small children as well as other women. It looked backward to the New Deal but extended ideals of male breadwinners and female homemakers to black as well as white family life. Yet in apparent contradiction, the Great Society also embraced the movement of women of all groups into the labor force, punishing poor and black women who desired to remain at home because they could not afford to do so on their own. Initiatives grouped under the War on Poverty, initially run by the innovative Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), crossed the boundaries between home and work, family and market, carework and waged labor. They sought to remake families through employment, provide relief through “manpower ” training, and push wage labor through welfare requirements. Rather than existing in separate spheres, employment or “manpower” policy and welfare policy were interconnected. As political scientist Margaret Weir has argued, employment policy sought “to alter the supply of labor by modifying workers’ characteristics rather than seeking to change the demand for labor.”1 Welfare policy, in turn, sought to fashion self-sufficiency through the labor market, not relief checks. For those building the Great Society, economic opportunity was never dependent on the workplace alone. It would be fought through remaking the home as well. President Lyndon Baines Johnson himself recognized that the War on Poverty “must be won in . . . every private home.” Launching his assault in January 1964, he claimed that “our chief weapons in a more pinpointed attack will be better schools, and better health, and better homes, and better training, and better job opportunities .”2 Failed homes, labeled as sites of broken and abnormal families and places of deprivation and blight, impeded attainment of an equal place at the starting line when it came to the competition for opportunity . So Johnson, following aide Daniel Patrick Moynihan, suggested in his 1965 Howard University commencement address, “To Fulfill These Rights”: “The family [understood as the heterosexual nuclear family] is the cornerstone of our society. More than any other force it shapes the attitude, the hopes, the ambitions, and the values of the child.”3 The War on Poverty would rehabilitate families and rebuild communities in the process of providing education, training, and jobs. It promised to transform “the culture of poverty” into a culture of aspiration , if not achievement, “to fashion a world in which ‘the meaning of man’s life matches the marvels of man’s labors,’” as OEO director Sargent Shriver reiterated Johnson’s vision in the agency’s first annual report in 1965.4 After consideration of the New Deal legacy and the overall War on Poverty, I analyze the Job Corps, a major “manpower” program, in terms of its assumptions and impact on home, family, and gender. I then turn to the better-known story of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) or “welfare,” which investment in “manpower” was to sup116 Eileen Boris plant, to suggest that reforms in that arena were as much about wage labor as about family. Indeed, the two realms, work and family, were—and remain—interdependent in social policy and American politics. The New Deal Legacy: An American Welfare State The white male breadwinner has existed at both the symbolic and policy center of America...