Welfare's End
Book Review, March 1998

The feminist movement has been much criticized, from within and without, for its failure to take up the issues and win the hearts of poor and minority women. In Welfare’s End, UC Santa Cruz Political Science Professor Gwendolyn Mink deepens that critique and offers a path toward its remediation: feminists, she says, should become activists for policies that reflect "the relationship between welfare rights and women’s equality." (p. 2)

"Beginning with Bill Clinton’s famous 1992 campaign pledge to end welfare and throughout four years of debate about how to do it," Mink writes, "hardly a soul worried about the impact of such a momentous change on poor single mothers...Some feminist activists labored to bring attention to how ending welfare would affect poor mothers’ lives and rights. But among policy makers, even the usual champions of gender equality erased mothers from the debate." (p. 2)

Arguing that welfare represents women’s "last-gasp means for economic independence from men," Mink says, "women’s gender equality pivots on poor single mothers’ rights, whether or not all women need to use those rights at any given time." (p. 8)

As a solution, Mink advocates a two-fold policy paradigm shift. First, she says, the civil rights of women on welfare must be protected and expanded. Currently, "Mandatory paternity establishment and child support provision mark poor single mothers as a separate caste, subject to a system of law (which) penalizes their moral choices, prescribes intimate associations that may be unwanted, and infringes rights guarded as fundamental to the personhood of all other citizens." (p. 75)

Second, Mink revives the battle cry that rallied the early feminist movement and echoes on the still-popular bumper sticker, "Every mother is a working mother." Women should be paid for the tasks they perform in the home, Mink says, and feminists should be fighting to embody that right in law.

"Most of the policy claims made by second-wave feminists," Mink writes, "have emphasized women’s right to participate in white men’s world and have made work outside the home a defining element of women’s full and equal citizenship...they have not been so interested in winning social policies to support women...in the home." (p. 24)

More than a rallying cry for the redefinition and rejuvenation of the welfare system,Welfare’s End is also a chronicle of the history of that peculiar institution, from its inception 80 years ago as "an income alternative to a market wage for solo mothers," through its evolution in the New Deal as Aid To Dependent Children, and its transformation in 1939, thanks to a new Social Security benefit that removed white widows from the welfare rolls, thereby changing forever the constituency and the social status of welfare recipients.

"Worthy widows," Mink writes, "who were 61% of ADC mothers in 1939, were mostly white; always mothers of marital children; and blameless survivors of stable marriages...The departure of widows from welfare–only 7.7% of welfare mothers were widows by 1961–transformed welfare into a safety net for morally disdained, racially despised women." (p. 47)

The form of Welfare's Endresembling a tract intended for policymakers as much as a book intended for lay readers–belies both the passion of its author, and the compelling call to action of its contents.

"We do indeed need to end welfare," Mink declares, "but as poor single mothers experience it, not as middle-class moralizers imagine it. Were we to end welfare as poor single mothers know it, we would redefine it. In place of stingy benefits doled out begrudgingly to needy mothers, welfare would become an income (that is)...nationally uniform, paid automatically to categorically eligible care-givers, and impervious to the race, class, and moral judgments society makes of individual women." (p. 134-135)

Addressing the needs of the poorest of poor women is a challenge that has yet to be met by feminists and forward-thinkers of all stripes. By calling attention to that challenge, Welfare’s End contributes to the well-being of the social movements she critiques, as well as the welfare recipients for whom she is such a convincing spokeswoman.