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Chapter 2 The Welfare Trap I: Recipients I bust my ass trying to get off ((welfare) ). (Susan Harrison) The 79 recipients I worked with can be divided into two groups, reflecting the women's differing degrees ofinvolvement with welfare rights and in the study. I spent the most time with (and thus focus my analysis on) 16 women, 6 of whom were core members of either the Madrid Welfare Rights Organization (MWRO) or Low Income People for Equality (LIFE). The second group of recipients consists of 24 occasional welfare rights participants and 39 recipients I encountered at the Kenyon County welfare office. I conducted in-depth interviews with 12 of the 16 key participants; these interviews are the focus of this chapter. The 12 women ranged in age from 19 to 48 and had at least one child each (see Appendix B, Table Bl). Eight of them had been married, and three had been married more than once. Three were presently living with men who contributed to household expenses. All of them were Anglo and heterosexual. The women had both enduring and sporadic relationships with the Department of Social Services. Half of them had received public assistance continuously, for periods ranging from 18 months to 10 years. Maggie Fletcher, for instance, had been on AFDC for three years prior to entering graduate school, while Jody Dixon had been an AFDC mother for the nine years since her divorce. The remaining six women, who had been connected to the welfare department intermittently for an average of 12 years, referred to their experiences of "getting on and off welfare" as if it were comparable to going in and out of a bad relationship . Over the course of 25 years, Pat Graham had received various forms of relief for periods ranging from nine months to several years. And Mary McDonald, for her part, had been on the AFDC rolls for one to two years (she could not remember which), kept herself out of the system for two years, and then gotten back on the rolls for another five. The majority of the other recipients I encountered at welfare rights The Welfare Trap I: Recipients 11 meetings and in the Kenyon County welfare office also had sporadic relationships with public assistance. According to the Michigan Department of Social Services, the average length of time recipients are on assistance is 34 months. In addition, 25 percent of recipients receive aid for from four to twelve months, while 40 percent are on assistance for over 24 months (Michigan Department of Social Services 1990). It is noteworthy that these statistics relate to recipients' "most recent period" of relief, an approach which recognizes that, like the women I worked with, individuals move in and out of the system as warranted by their personal circumstances. When not on welfare, the women either received sufficient economic support from men or were in employment that paid enough for survival. Eleven of the 12 women had been or were currently in the paid workforce . Many of them had held numerous jobs, and many had earned an income while receiving public assistance. As with the often episodic nature ofwomen's interactions with the welfare system, the fact that all but one of the women had worked to earn a living mirrors what we know in general about welfare recipients, namely, that many participate in paid labor (e.g., Zopf 1989). The events that contributed to the women's initial and continuing relationships with the Department of Social Services are also typical. As they described it, poverty was not simply a problem of unemployment but was related to the gendered nature of their economic marginalization in U.S. society, a significant aspect ofwhich is their financial dependence on men and their financial responsibility for children. In many cases, divorce was economically devastating because child support was insufficient or not forthcoming, a problem that seems to cut across socioeconomic class (Ehrenreich and Piven 1984; Folbre 1988). Coupled with the disadvantages they experienced in the labor market, then-only three of the women had been able to find employment paying more than the minimum wage I-the burdens of providing child care if they were employed left them financially vulnerable. Thus the connections between employment and relationships with significant others, rather than any single factor, were the key to the women's involvement with welfare. The complexity of these connections and the burdens the women shouldered as clients of the welfare system come across clearly in...

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