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 THE LADYAND THE TRAMP (II):
FEMINISTWELFAREPOLITICS,
POOR SINGLEMOTHERS,AND THE
CHALLENGEOF WELFAREJUSTICE

GWENDOLYNMINK

I have worked in various political venues on welfare issues for

ten years-for about as long as I have been researching and
writing about women and U.S. social policy.' Most recently, I
worked as a Steering Committee member and cochair of the
Women's Committee of 100, a feminist mobilization against
punitive welfare reform. I signed up with the Women's Com-
mittee of 100 in March or April of 1995-roughly a year after
completing a book on welfare policy history and around the
same time as the book'spublication.2
I have always done both politics and scholarship, so di-
recting my activism toward my field of professional expertise
at first did not seem especially odd or problematic.However, I
had just published a book critical of experts like me-a book
which, among other things, faulted solipsistic women welfare
innovators of the early twentieth century for building a welfare
state harmful to women and to gender equality. The book was
barely between covers, and I had already embarked on a path
of policy advocacythat veered disturbingly close to the reform-
ers I had criticized. There I was, consorting with a group of
supereducated, do-good feminists, most of whom would never
need a welfare check. And there we were, using our social and
professional positions to gain entry into congressional offices,
where we spoke against reforms that would affect not us but
poor women. It seemed to me that maybe I hadn't really inter-
nalized the lessons I had drawn from early-twentieth-century
welfare history.
I struggled a bit with my own contradictions-between what
Feminist Studies 24, no. 1 (spring 1998). ? 1997 by Feminist Studies, Inc.
55
56 GwendolynMink

I felt compelled to do as a feminist activist confrontedby the

political crisis of welfare reform and what I had cautioned
against as a student of elite women reformers. But I didn't
have to struggle long. It quickly became apparent that any his-
torical analogies I feared were the product of academic overin-
terpretation. An awesome collection of women makes up the
Committee of 100-none of whom, to my knowledge, has any in-
terest in mothering the poor as our forebears did earlier in the
century and all of whom reject the morally and culturally pre-
scriptive politics of early-twentieth-centurywelfare innovation
and of late-twentieth-centurywelfare reform.
We mobilized not to speak for poor mothers but with them-
to speak for ourselves as feminists frustrated by the absence of
women's voices and by the lack of gender equality concerns in
the welfare debate. Although members of Congress paid scant
attention, in our lobbying, letter writing, and media efforts, we
repeatedly explained how welfare reform risks many of the
rights and protections upon which women's security and
equality depends. Often speaking of "welfare as a women's
issue," we argued that "a war against poor women is a war
against all women."
This was a strategically clever rallying cry, but it failed to
rally many women-even feminists. In fact, the war against
poor women was just that: a war against poor women. And it
was a war in which many middle-class women participated on
the antiwelfare side. All but one woman in the U.S. Senate
supported the Personal Responsibility Act when it first was
taken up in the summer of 1995.3 In 1996, twenty-six of thirty-
one Democratic women in the House of Representatives voted
for their party's substitute bill, which, like the Personal Re-
sponsibility Act, stripped poor single mothers of their entitle-
ment to welfare.4 Meanwhile, across the country, a National
Organization for Women Legal Defense and Education Fund
appeal for contributions to support an economicjustice litiga-
tor aroused so much hate mail that NOW LDEF stopped doing
direct mail on the welfare issue.5
Although the feminist Women's Committee of 100 cam-
paigned ardently against the welfare bill, Republicans won
their war against poor single mothers with the complicity of
millions of other feminists. Feminist members of Congress did
GwendolynMink 57

not write the Personal Responsibility Act, of course. Nor did

NOW members or contributors to Emily's List comprise the
driving force behind the most brutal provisions of the new wel-
fare law. My point is not that feminists were uniquely respon-
sible for how Congress reformed welfare. It is that they were
uniquely positioned to make a difference.We have made a dif-
ference in many arenas across the years, even during inauspi-
cious Republican presidencies-reforming rape laws, winning
recognition of sexual harassment as a form of sex discrimina-
tion, and securing passage of a federal law against domestic vi-
olence. Feminists certainly could have made a differencewhen
a friendly Democratic president began casting about for ways
to reform welfare in 1993; and although we could not have
changed Republican intentions in the 104th Congress, we
surely could have pressured the Democrat we helped elect to
the White House to veto the Republicanbill.
In the absence of widespread feminist opposition to the wel-
fare reform principles of the Personal Responsibility Act, the
legislative record is devoid of a counternarrative that might
temper administrative and judicial enforcementof the new law.
Moreover,it is devoid of any discursive precedent for women-
friendly, equality-enhancing amendments to the new law. Be-
cause most feminists did not contest or disturb the Republican
welfare paradigm, about all they can do now to fix the new
welfare mess is urge that more money be spent on job training
and childcare and that broader exceptions for battered women
be adopted. These are important goals, but they do not repair
the damage wrought by the new welfare law on the lives and
rights of poor single mothers.
Why were so many feminists unconcerned that welfare re-
form not only repealed poor single mothers' entitlement to cash
assistance but encroached on their basic civil rights as well?
Given the degree of harm inflicted on poor single mothers by
the new welfare law, why were there no candlelight vigils like
there were against O.J. Simpson?Why were there no marches
like there have been to defend Roe v. Wade?Why were no boy-
cotts waged like there were against the film The People vs.
LarryFlynt?
These questions are the fruit of my frustration as a welfare
activist. They have renewed my scholarly attention to the rela-
58 GwendolynMink

tionship between welfare and equality, on the one hand, and

between welfare and feminism, on the other. Out of these con-
cerns has emerged a new scholarly project... a new book.6The
book is a broadside against the Personal Responsibility Act,
culminating in defense of welfare. It is also a call to middle-
class feminists to practice true "sisterhood":by upholding poor
mothers' rights as we do our own.
Although the Personal Responsibility Act deserves bound-
less criticism for its seismic practical consequences-for driving
a million more children into poverty, for example-my book is
concerned less with the economic than with the political im-
pact of welfare reform.The new welfare law distinguishes poor
single mothers as a separate caste, subject to a separate sys-
tem of law. Poor single mothers are the only people in America
forcedby law to work outside the home. They are the only peo-
ple in America whose decisions to bear children are punished
by government. They are the only people in America of whom
government may demand the details of intimate relationships.
And they are the only mothers in America compelledby law to
make room for biologicalfathers in their families.
Based on lessons drawn from eighteen months of struggle
against the Personal Responsibility Act, one of my goals in the
book is to defend welfare as an affirmative right of poor single
mothers, a right backed up by the reproductive, associational,
family, and vocational rights assured to all persons under the
Constitution. Towardthis end, I argue that welfare (by which I
mean income support for caregivers) is a condition of women's
equality (by which I mean full and independent citizenship).
Without welfare, mothers who work inside the home are de-
prived of equal citizenship, for they alone are not paid for their
labor. Moreover,lacking earnings for their economic and social
contributions,women who work full- or part-time as caregivers
for their children are ideologicallyunequal in a political culture
that prizes income-producingwork as the currency of virtue.
Further, unwaged mothers do not have marital freedom:lack-
ing the financial means to exit marriages, they lack the free-
dom to choose to stay in them. When they do dare to exit or
avoid marriage, mothers do not enjoy vocational liberty:unpaid
for their work in the home, they are forced either by law or by
economiccircumstanceto choose wages over children.
 Mink
Gwendolyn 59

We should not think of welfare as a subsidy for dependence

but as insurance for the rights that comprise independence.
Nor should we think of welfare as an income substitute for the
wage earned by breadwinners-fathers-in the labor market.
Rather, we should reconceive welfare as the income owed to
persons who work inside the home caring for, nurturing, and
protecting children-mothering.
The idea that welfare should support mothers in their care-
giving roles should not be terribly controversial.This was a core
premise of mothers'pension programs early in the century and
a justification for including Aid to Dependent Children in the
New Deal's Social Security Act.7The problem is that the care-
giving work performedby poor mothers has lost its luster over
the past thirty years; who welfare mothers are explains why.
In the popular imagination, welfare participants are reck-
less breeders who bear children to avoid work. Such vintage
stereotypes have bipartisan roots and were popularizedbegin-
ning in the 1960s by Republican Richard Nixon, southern De-
mocrat Russell Long, and sometime Democrat George Wallace.
Even LyndonJohnson, often credited for expanding welfare as
part of his War on Poverty, shared these views: he called for
limits on payments to nonmarital children and complained
that their mothers "sit around and breed instead of going out
to work."'Into the 1990s, the racial mythology of welfare cast
the welfare mother as Black, pinned the need for reform on her
character,and at least implicitly defined Black women as other
peoples' workers rather than their own families' mothers.9
Racially charged images of lazy, promiscuous, and matriarchal
women have dominated welfare discourse for quite some time,
inflaming demands that mothers who need welfare-although
perhaps not their children-must pay for their improvident be-
havior through work, marriage, or destitution.10
If racism has permitted policymakers to negate poor single
mothers as mothers, middle-class feminism has providedthem
an excuse. New attitudes about wage earning by mothers am-
plified by successful feminist challenges to employment dis-
crimination have turned work outside the home into a rhetori-
cal resource for critics of welfare. 1Middle-classfeminists' em-
phasis on women's right to work outside the home also has in-
flected welfare politics among women, diminishing the scale of
60 GwendolynMink

coalitions for welfare justice-especially by comparisonto coali-

tions for abortion rights or against rape or domestic violence.
This created something of a vacuum in the defense of poor
mothers'political and economicrights.
Part of the problem, I think, is that white and middle-class
feminists-who are the mainstream of the women's movement-
view mothers who need welfare as mothers who need femi-
nism. They see welfare mothers as victims-of patriarchy,may-
be of racism, possibly of false consciousness.They don'tsee wel-
fare mothers as feminist agents of their own lives-as women
who are entitled to and capable of making independent and
honorable choices about what kind of work they will do and
how many children they will have and whether they will
marry. As a result, when many white, middle-class feminists
weighed into the welfare debate, it was to prescribe reforms to
assimilate welfare mothers to white feminists' own goals-prin-
cipally,independence through paid employment.
Most of the policy claims made by Second-Wave feminists
have emphasized women's right to participate in men's world
and have made work outside the home a defining element for
women's full and equal citizenship. Middle-class feminists re-
sponded to their particular historical experiences, experiences
drawn by an ethos of domesticity which confined middle-class
women to the home. From this perspective, the home is the
site of oppression for women, while the labor market is poten-
tially liberating. But when middle-class women moved into the
labor market, they did not trade in their caregiving obliga-
tions. Now doubly taxed by the dual responsibilities of earning
and caring, many feminists have demanded labor market poli-
cies to address the family needs that fall disproportionatelyon
women-parental leave and childcare, for example." However,
they have been less interested in winning social policies to sup-
port women where we meet our family responsibilities: in the
home. In the absence of widespread feminist attention to the
social value of the childraising and home management work
mothers do, poor mothers' right to do motherwork has been
only faintly defended.
The popular feminist claim that women earn independence,
autonomy,and equality through wages historically has divided
feminists along class and race lines, as women of color and
GwendolynMink 61

poor white women have not usually earned equality from

sweated labor. To the contrary.Especially for women of color,
wage work has been a mark of inequality: expected by the
white society for whom they work; necessary because their
male kin cannot find jobs or cannot earn family-supporting
wages; and exploitative because their earnings keep them poor.
Thus, the right to care for their own children-to work inside the
home-has been a touchstone goal of their struggles for equality.
The fact that women are positioned divergently in the nexus
among caregiving,wage earning, and inequality separated fem-
inists one from another on the welfare issue and separated em-
ployed middle-classfeminists from mothers who need welfare.
Out of the middle-class feminist emphasis on winning rights
in the workplace has emerged, sotto voce, an expectation that
women ought to work outside the home and an assumption
that any job outside the home-including caring for other peo-
ple's children-is more socially productive than caring for one's
own. Feminists in Congress betrayed this bias, voting unfazed
to require poor single mothers to work outside the home both
as a condition of welfare and as a consequenceof time limits.
Although feminism is fundamentally about winning women
choices, our labor market bias has put much of feminism not on
the side of vocational choice-the choice to work inside or out-
side the home-but on the side of wage earning for all women.
Thus, most congressional feminists, along with many feminists
across the country, have conflated their right to work outside
the home with poor single mothers' obligation to do so. This is
an obligation of no small significance for poor single mothers,
who are conscriptedinto wagework under the new welfare law.
Most single mothers work outside the home, and most single
mothers who receive welfare want to. The question is whether
social policy should dictate that they must. Poor single mothers
already shoulder a double burden in parenting: should social
policy require them to performyet anotherjob?
Except for a few young men in my classes who insist that
mothering is love, not work, I think most people understand
that the caregiving mostly provided by mothers is work. Dis-
agreements arise over whether that work is worth anything if
it is performed for one's own family. Or, more accurately, dis-
agreements arise over when that work is worth something and
in what kinds of families.
62 GwendolynMink

When Republicans and Democrats have wanted to, they

have acknowledgedmothers' caregiving work in public policy:
they've even remunerated it. The very week it negated the
motherwork of poor single women by giving final approval to
the Personal ResponsibilityAct, Congressaffirmed the mother-
work of middle-class homemakers by granting them rights to
their own IRAs.12 Representative Nancy Johnson hailed the
measure as forwardingequality for homemakers. Others hailed
it for honoringthem. Viewed alongside welfare reform,IRAs for
homemakers deepened existing differentiationsin law between
married and unmarried mothers, between white women and
women of color,and between rich women and poor. It also cre-
ated a distinction between poor single mothers'activities in the
home and married, middle-class mothers' work there. IRAs,
after all, are an untaxed portion of earned income.
Clearly, legislators do understand that what (some) domes-
tic mothers do is not pass the time but work. The challenge,
then, is to lead policymakers to give poor mothers' caregiving
work the dignity it is due by providingit an income. Payments
for mothers' caregiving work ought not to be too difficult to
calculate, for much of the work done by caregiving mothers al-
ready has a market price if performedfor someone else's fami-
ly. We pay teachers, for example, as well as psychologists,
nurses, accountants, chauffeurs, launderers, housecleaners,
cooks, waitresses, even personal shoppers.'3
To some extent we can derive a right to a caregiver'sincome
through constitutional reasoning: a socially provided income
guarantee ought to be a conditionof reproductive,marital, fam-
ily, and vocationalfreedoms-as well as a matter of equal protec-
tion. Although the Constitutiondoes not oblige us to providefor
one another's economic security, it does permit us to imagine
different ways to enforce its meaning legislatively: the Four-
teenth Amendment gives Congress the responsibility to enact
laws that enforce its provisions, including its clause promising
"equal protection of the law."Moreover,the Constitution per-
mits us to defend rights with remedies, including remedial so-
cial supports-legal assistance for poor criminal defendants, for
example-without which the rights of some citizens would dis-
appear.
Welfare remedies poor single mothers' inequality, specifically
 Mink
Gwendolyn 63

the inequality of economicdisfranchisement.Mothers'economic

disfranchisement comes from our failure to impute economic
value to the work that they do. In marriages, mothers who
work inside the home surrender their economic personhoodto
husbands and occupy the legal status of dependent. Such mar-
ried mothers' lack of their own economic resources-earnings-
skew power relations in the family; some mothers may feel
tethered to husbands because they could not survive the eco-
nomic consequences of leaving them. Single mothers, mean-
while, must accept destitution as a conditionof caring for their
children. Unpaid and disdained, they are expected to forswear
childraising for full-time wage earning. Full-time caregiving
mothers, then, are disproportionatelydependent on men if mar-
ried and disproportionatelypoor,if not. These private inequali-
ties have public effects, foreclosing mother-workers'indepen-
dent citizenship.
We would begin to redress these inequalities by providing
caregivers who are parenting alone an income in recognitionof
their family work. A socially provided income for solo parents
who bear the dual responsibilities of providing care for their
children and financing it, welfare is a condition of equality in
the family, in the labor market, and in the state. As such, wel-
fare should be a right, not an entitlement-a claim backed by
law and courts that should be irresistible, or at least impossi-
ble for a rogue Congress to deny. Unless we can establish a
right to welfare, we cannot cure inequality where it is most
gendered-in sexual, reproductive,and family relations.
A right to income support in return for poor single mothers'
caregiving work tackles the neglected side of the gender divide,
the side that has defined women as the legal and economicde-
pendents of men. But although a caregiver'sincome would ad-
dress the gender divide, it need not reproduce that divide.
Rights that accommodate mothers' caregiving work need not
ascribe motherworkto all women, nor only to women: men can
mother, too. Nor need rights that accommodatemothers' care-
giving work disparage women's choices and equality claims in
the labor market. Such rights should widen options for solo
caregivers of either gender by backing up the choice to work
outside the home with the means not to. Ending welfare by re-
defining it in this way will enable equality-in the safety net, be-
tween the genders, among women, and under the Constitution.
64 GwendolynMink

NOTES
1. "Lady and the tramp" refers to my essay, "The Lady and the Tramp: Gender,
Race, and the Origins of the American Welfare State," in Women, the State, and
Welfare,ed. Linda Gordon (Madison:University of WisconsinPress, 1990), 92-122.
2. Gwendolyn Mink, The Wages of Motherhood:Inequality in the Welfare State,
1917-1942 (Ithaca: CornellUniversity Press, 1995).
3. The Republicaninitiative (H.R. 4) was first introduced in January 1995. Passed
by the House in March and by the Senate in the late summer, the bill died with the
1995 budget impasse. In 1996, the Congress passed and the president signed a new
bill, H.R. 3734, or P.L. 104-193. The new law repealed the Aid to Families with De-
pendent Children program.
4. This was the Castle-Tanner substitute amendment to H.R. 3734. See Congres-
sional Record, 18 July 1996, H7907-7974.
5. Felicia Kornbluh,"Feministsand the Welfare Debate: Too Little? Too Late?"Dol-
lars and Sense, November/December1996, 25.
6. Mink, Welfare'sEnd (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998). Some material in
this article is taken from this book with the permission of the publisher.
7. Mink, Wagesof Motherhood,chap. 6.
8. President Lyndon Johnson to his budget director, LBJ White House telephone
tapes, CNN MorningNews, 18 Oct. 1996.
9. Dorothy Roberts, "TheValue of Black Mothers'Work,"ConnecticutLaw Review
26 (spring 1994): 871-73; Lucy A. Williams, "Race,Rat Bites, and Unfit Mothers:
How Media Discourse Informs Welfare Legislation Debate," Fordham Urban Law
Journal 22 (summer 1995): 1159-96.
10. See, e.g., Charles Murray, Losing Ground:American Social Policy, 1950-1980
(New York:Basic Books, 1984).
11. See, for example, Barbara Bergman and Heidi Hartmann, "A Welfare Reform
Based on Help for WorkingParents,"Feminist Economics 1 (summer 1995):85-91.
12. The IRAs for homemakers provisionwas part of the Small Business Job Protec-
tion and MinimumWage Increase Act, H.R. 3448 (104th Congress, 2d session).
13. In 1972, Chase Manhattan Bank economists concludedthat the weekly value of
a family caregiver'swork was at least $257.53, or $13,391.56 a year (1972 dollars).
See Ann Crittenden Scott, "TheValue of Housework:For Love or Money?"Ms., July
1972, 56-59.