Why did the War on Poverty give way to the war on welfare? Many in the United States saw the welfare reforms of 1996 as the inevitable result of twelve years of conservative retrenchment in American ...social policy, but there is evidence that the seeds of this change were sown long before the Reagan Revolution-and not necessarily by the Right.The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty, and Politics in Modern Americatraces what Bill Clinton famously called "the end of welfare as we know it" to the grassroots of the War on Poverty thirty years earlier. Marshaling a broad variety of sources, historian Marisa Chappell provides a fresh look at the national debate about poverty, welfare, and economic rights from the 1960s through the mid-1990s. In Chappell's telling, we experience the debate over welfare from multiple perspectives, including those of conservatives of several types, liberal antipoverty experts, national liberal organizations, labor, government officials, feminists of various persuasions, and poor women themselves. During the Johnson and Nixon administrations, deindustrialization, stagnating wages, and widening economic inequality pushed growing numbers of wives and mothers into the workforce. Yet labor unions, antipoverty activists, and moderate liberal groups fought to extend the fading promise of the family wage to poor African Americans families through massive federal investment in full employment and income support for male breadwinners. In doing so, however, these organizations condemned programs like Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) for supposedly discouraging marriage and breaking up families. Ironically their arguments paved the way for increasingly successful right-wing attacks on both "welfare" and the War on Poverty itself.
This article uses “urban homesteading” to argue that working-class activists played an important role in the transformation of American housing policy from the 1970s through the 1990s. Designed to ...tackle abandonment and promote gentrification, homesteading programs in the 1970s offered houses to individuals who would rehabilitate and reside in them. Through protest, negotiation, and squatting campaigns, working-class urban activists demanded that policymakers reorient homesteading programs to enable low-income homeownership. Activists’ alternative vision of homeownership demanded access to a regulated system of federally subsidized homeownership and often adopted limited equity ownership; at the same time, their celebration of homeownership as a strategy for self-reliance offered a useful tool for Republicans seeking to privatize public housing and bipartisan efforts to deregulate mortgage lending, both of which increased housing insecurity. The article thus argues that working-class urban residents, often seen as merely victims of neoliberal policymaking, played an important role in that process.
This essay examines Theda Skocpol's landmark 1992 book, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, and discusses its influence historians of the U.S. welfare state. The first section summarizes the book's ...“state-centered” approach and its central arguments and discusses its reception. It pays particular attention to critiques from women's and gender historians, who challenged Skocpol's characterization of Progressive Era “maternalist reform” particularly for its failure to account for racial politics or the limitations of rooting women's claims to social citizenship in mothering. The second section explores Skocpol's influence on historians of the U.S. welfare state in the past twenty-five years. Scholars of women and gender followed Skocpol's call to “bring the state back in,” bringing the insights of two decades of social and cultural history to the arena of state-building. In the process, they illuminated the centrality of race and racial politics to American social policy and citizenship in ways that Skocpol largely elided. Skocpol's discovery of the peculiar forms of American social provision also profoundly influenced welfare state scholars, who uncovered the vast reach of the “hidden” or “submerged state” in shaping unequal citizenship and political identities around race, gender, sexuality, and other axes of difference. Finally, the essay discusses historians’ attention to an aspect largely absent from Protecting Soldiers and Mothers—the voices, perspectives, and actions of participants in welfare state programs and policies—which has deepened and expanded understanding of the processes and effects of welfare state-building in the past twenty-five years.
In 1981, President Ronald Reagan regaled a corporate audience with a tale from his welfare-reforming days as governor of California. “After we undertook our welfare reforms” in the early 1970s, ...Reagan had received a letter from a former AFDC recipient who thanked him for cutting the state’s welfare rolls. “She wrote that she had become so dependent on the welfare check that she even turned down offers of marriage,” Reagan recounted; “she just could not give up that security blanket that welfare represented.” Reagan’s cuts allowed her to break free from welfare dependence. The woman’s conversion narrative ended with employment;
In 1963, United Auto Workers (UAW) president Walter Reuther launched a “Citizens’ Crusade Against Poverty” (CCAP), an effort to harness the energies of a “unique coalition of church, civic, ...fraternal, labor and business groups” toward a “national issue of conscience.” That “unique coalition” was in the thick of another issue of conscience in 1963, of course—the struggle for African American civil rights. Coupled with massive civil disobedience among African Americans throughout the nation, pressure from organized liberal America would result in the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which effectively dismantled the legal framework of racial segregation in the
During the 1970s, from her post at the National Social Welfare Assembly (NSWA), Elizabeth Wickenden waged a valiant campaign to keep antipoverty liberals informed about political action on welfare. ...Her “Washington Notes” newsletters tell a story of social services under fire and an embattled AFDC program. During the Nixon and Ford administrations, Congress and federal welfare administrators implemented many of the same restrictive features that had so offended welfare rights activists during the FAP campaign. HEW tightened eligibility requirements and limited recipients’ access to fair hearings, states found numerous ways to restrict eligibility, Congress tightened work requirements, and federal administrators
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