Ensuring Poverty. Felicia Kornbluh

       Preface

      In a study published in February 2015, researchers reported that the 1996 welfare reform law shortens women’s lives. Public health scholars studied two states, Florida and Connecticut, and compared the old, pre-1996 welfare program with the later one. They discovered that the new policy, authorized by the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), shortened recipients’ lives by nearly six months (0.44 years).¹ It also saved governments approximately $28,000 per recipient over her lifetime. An earlier study by the same research group found that, in Florida alone, the death rate for participants in the post-1996 welfare program was 16 percent higher than for people who had received welfare in earlier decades. “The message of the finding,” according to a scholar who was not one of its authors, “is that there is a very small but statistically significant difference in the measured death rates between these two populations.”²

      This book is an effort to explain how we ended up with a national policy that promotes the death of mothers. To grasp the politics and policy making that gave us the cruel program unironically called “welfare,” we ask readers to consider welfare policy in the broad intersectional context of gender, race, poverty, and inequality. The subject of welfare reform always has been single mothers, its animus always has been race, and its currency always has been inequality. Yet public conversations about poverty and welfare, even in current times, rarely acknowledge the nexus between racialized gender inequality and the economic vulnerability of single-mother families. We hope this book will broaden how we talk about the safety net and welfare justice. We offer a feminist chronicle and assessment of the contested history of welfare reform, including the alternative arguments advanced by feminists and proposals for welfare initiatives that actually would help mothers achieve independence for themselves and economic security for their families. We assess policy debates and decisions, examining voices engaged as well as those not heard.

      Overall, we mean to restore to the past and present a sense of what historians call contingency, that is, a sense that things could have been different in the past and can change dramatically today. Our reading of the once-robust political debate over welfare reform salvages a “usable past” for people today who wish to change the terms of debate over gender, families, welfare, and poverty. Our evidence about the effects of welfare reform provides the case for action and the reason for urgency behind such a change.

      The authors of this book, Gwendolyn Mink and Felicia Kornbluh, have studied and done advocacy work on social welfare in the United States for over twenty-five years. We met in 1993 at a congressional symposium on welfare reform that was organized by Gwendolyn Mink’s mother, the late congresswoman Patsy Takemoto Mink (D-Hawaii). Both of us were members of the Women’s Committee of 100, a coalition of writers and scholars who opposed the legislative proposals that ultimately prevailed in PRWORA. We lobbied Congress in an effort to stop the proposals before they became law and worked together again during the reauthorization process, beginning in 2000. Under the leadership of Representative Mink, we participated actively in efforts to redefine work under the law to include the work low-income mothers do to raise their children, and to amend the law in other ways to restore women’s reproductive rights and a measure of their economic security.

      Welfare reform was the fulcrum of the wide-ranging 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which overhauled safety net programs. Among the programs targeted for revision or replacement was the sixty-year-old Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, which was replaced by Temporary