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REVIEWS
| Backlash Against Welfare Mothers: Past and Present. By Ellen Reese (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005. xvi plus 355 pp.).
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| Mention welfare backlash and most people will think of cuts in social spending that began during the administration of Ronald Reagan or the assault on AFDC during the first half of the 1990s. Historians and those with longer memories will recall the "suitable home" policies of the 1950s designed to restrict Aid to Dependent Children payments or the draconian anti-welfare policies directed at black migrants briefly in place in Newburgh, New York, in 1961. Ellen Reese, a sociologist who teaches at the University of California, Riverside, sees all these episodes as part of a sustained campaign against welfare that began in the 1940s mainly at state and local levels, gathered steam in the following decades, and reached many, if not all, its goals with the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996 (popularly known as "Welfare Reform"). This anti-welfare history, she claims, tracked the larger story of conservatism's emergence, growth, and eventual hegemony in American politics. In the case of welfare, the driving force for restrictive change came from employers of low wage labor and their allies. Reinforcing their case against welfare were racist stereotypes and moral jeremiads about the influence of public assistance on sexual behavior and family stability. Reese states her thesis succinctly. "Since the late 1940s, ideologically conservative and low-wage employers, concerned with protecting their supply of cheap labor and minimizing their taxes, and politicians representing their interests have been on the forefront of campaigns against poor mothers and welfare rights." (199) |
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