Work Incentives for "Welfare Mothers" in 1970s Ontario: Screening Out the Political

Feminist political economists have written extensively on the decline of women's social rights, particularly with regard to the treatment of single mothers on welfare. This work has attributed the way that single mothers have been oppressed under welfare policy to built-in gender biases that fail to recognize their unpaid care work.¹ This article contributes further to understanding the roots of this decline by examining the political struggle over the issue of work incentives for "welfare mothers."² While many scholars have identified the neoliberal mid-1990s as the period in which the Ontario government reclassified single mothers on welfare as employable and subject to work requirements, in reality the Ontario government began promoting this policy in the early 1970s – and it is on this decade that the article focuses.

Much of the existing research on this period of social assistance reform and its relevance to women has been from a political economy perspective.³ Research on the emergence of "workfare" in Canada has also often drawn from this tradition and examined the macro-level variables that influenced its adoption.⁴ For example, Jamie Peck has argued that the rise in neoliberalism and neoconservatism was a pivotal influence on Canada's embrace of workfare, as were the influence of US policy discourse and the shift toward decentralization of social policy from the federal to provincial governments.⁵ With respect to Ontario's embrace of work incentives for welfare mothers, Patricia Evans argues that economic crises and fiscal pressures on the government were critical, along with such factors as the rising number of single mothers on social assistance, the influence of feminism, and the increased acceptance of, and growth in, maternal employment.⁶ Other scholars explain this phenomenon by focusing on cultural shifts; for example, Amber Gazso emphasizes the influence of shifts in the "culture of mothering."⁷ While these analyses are important, they give little attention to political agency and historical struggles over discourse and meaning, including, especially, the impact that activist welfare mother groups have had in shaping the debate in this area.

This article seeks to address this gap by examining in detail the content and dynamics of struggle over the issue of work incentives for welfare mothers that took place in Ontario in the 1970s and early 1980s. Various actors were involved in this debate, including both powerful interests (primarily government) and more marginalized and oppositional actors (primarily a progressive social policy sector made up of social policy and social service advocacy groups, feminists, and activist welfare mother groups). The article poses questions and uses tools drawn mainly from poststructural and governance theory and, specifically, from the work of Sanford Schram on contemporary poverty research, Nancy Fraser on the politics of needs interpretation, and Tania Murray Li on practices of assemblage and government improvement schemes.⁸ These works are concerned with understanding the mechanisms by which governments rule and govern, especially in relation to "difficult" populations, and within this, how it is that some ideas are brought to the fore and normalized while others are foreclosed and seemingly lost. Drawing from Li's concept of generic "practices of assemblage," this article seeks to identify the practices used by government actors to contain and depoliticize the debate on work incentives for welfare mothers and the implications this had for the government's ability to manage this population while avoiding many of the reforms that welfare mothers and their allies sought and foreclosing the alternative and more radical perspectives advanced by oppositional groups – not least, welfare mother activists.

The article comprises four parts. Part one expands on the theoretical/methodological approach and research material used in this study. Part two provides background on, and an overview of, the debate on the issue of work incentives for welfare mothers that took place in Ontario during the 1970s and early 1980s. This includes a focus on the broader conditions that encouraged this ideological and policy turn, the political and policy choices made by the Ontario government in this area, and the nature of the progressive oppositional sector...