The Radical Feminist Legacy of the National Welfare Rights Organization

Relying on archival and firsthand accounts, we argue that existing scholarship on the welfare rights movement has silenced many of the more radical feminist tendencies and accorded undue emphasis to the way recipient activists conformed to hegemonic, patriarchal standards. By exploring recipient activists’ rejection of waged work, anti-war politics, and their fight for reproductive justice, we demonstrate how a social movement of primarily poor Black women forged sophisticated arguments for the importance of guaranteed income as a means of facilitating autonomy and civic engagement, rather than reifying gendered social roles.