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Reviews in American History 33.3 (2005) 439-448



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Rethinking Women, Work, and Welfare in Postwar America:

The Liberal Origins of Contemporary Welfare Reform

Jennifer Mittelstadt. From Welfare to Workfare: The Unintended Consequences of Liberal Reform, 1945–1965. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. 296 pp. Notes, selected bibliography, and index. $49.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

According to a host of politicians, policymakers, and pundits, welfare reformers finally got it right in 1996. With the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), Congress replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with a capped block grant (Temporary Aid to Needy Families, or TANF), imposed two-year consecutive and five-year lifetime limits on welfare receipt, and significantly expanded welfare-to-work requirements. Commentators hailed the reform as a break from the past, a revolution that promised to replace a permissive system that rewarded indolence with a work-based program that would promote wage labor and "personal responsibility." New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani summed up prevailing opinion when he praised lawmakers for abandoning a "perverted social philosophy" under which "from 1960 to 1994 the work ethic was under attack" and "reawaken[ing] the respect for work" (p. 171).

Historical scholarship closely parallels Giuliani's understanding of welfare history (though not his celebratory attitude toward AFDC's demise). In most narratives, aid to single-mother families remained largely uncontroversial from its inception in the Progressive Era through the 1960s. But in the 1960s, federal antipoverty programs and civil rights/welfare rights activism pushed AFDC rolls upward, prompting journalists to declare a "welfare crisis." Fueled by rising and increasingly regressive taxes and a broader backlash against African American demands, anti-welfarism became a significant political force. In response, conservative politicians invented "workfare," a way to cut government spending, reward low-wage employers, and inculcate a work ethic into poor, mostly minority Americans suffering from a "culture of poverty." The drive to push AFDC recipients into the labor market resonated with a public—particularly working- and middle-class whites— [End Page 439] prone to racism and increasingly offended by out-of-wedlock births; it also received implicit sanction from second-wave feminism, which promoted maternal employment as a step forward for women. Federal welfare policy— subject to liberal interest groups intent on "coddling" the poor (especially poor minorities) —lagged behind public opinion, but eventually caught up, thanks in no small part to corporate-funded conservative anti-welfare literature. The Family Support Act of 1988, though hailed at its passage as revolutionary for its focus on moving recipients from welfare to work, failed, but PRWORA finally achieved a significant decline in welfare caseloads and an increase in labor force participation. The "welfare mess" is over, and the poverty of single mothers has largely disappeared as a political problem.

In an insightful new study, Jennifer Mittelstadt shows that "workfare" has a much longer, much more complex history than the prevailing narrative suggests. Far from a new invention, work for welfare mothers entered federal policy in the 1950s, the creation not of anti-welfare conservatives but of well-meaning liberals. From Welfare to Workfare explores an often-overlooked period for welfare historians, who tend to focus on periods of large-scale policy innovation (the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society). Mittelstadt highlights the ideas and actions of a group of policymakers who have thus far received scant attention, a coalition of "self-designated liberals" who worked tirelessly within the federal government and in academic and social work circles to expand and redirect America's safety net for poor single mothers and their children (p. 5). In the process, Mittelstadt sheds new light on American attitudes toward women, work, and welfare in the postwar era and, more importantly, on the contradictions and limitations of postwar liberalism.

The protagonists of Mittelstadt's story are members of a "coalition of welfare and social work professionals, researchers, foundations, and interest groups," most prominently the leaders of the American Public Welfare Association (APWA) (p. 4...

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