| Book Review | Law and History Review, 25.1

Book Review

Jennifer Mittelstadt, From Welfare to Workfare: The Unintended Consequences of Liberal Reform, 1945–1965, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Pp. xiii + 267. $49.95 cloth (ISBN 0-8078-2922-6); $19.95 paper (ISBN 0-8078-5587-1).

With the passage of the 1996 reform act, politicians proclaimed a revolution in "welfare as we know it." Now, they said, recipients would have to get off of welfare and join the work force. But as Jennifer Mittelstadt's engrossing study shows, the concept of "workfare" is about as old as the standard criticisms of welfare that it was designed to end. From Welfare to Workfare: The Unintended Consequences of Liberal Reform, 1945–1965 delivers on what its title promises. Mittlestadt, who teaches history and women's studies at Penn State, demonstrates that reformers sought to change both welfare policy and how Americans viewed it. She also shows that what liberal reformers intended and what resulted proved far different, and why.

Given the richness of the material, to attempt to summarize everything between the covers would be folly; to discuss only some of it means excluding other information. But the central figure in these pages, Wilbur Cohen, worked in the Social Security Administration in its early days, became active in the American Public Welfare Association (APWA), led several important studies of poverty in the 1950s, then had the opportunity to convert their findings into reality in the 1960s as a key administrator in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

With Cohen alternately studying, making, and proposing policy, liberal reformers sought to reshape welfare. In the 1940s, APWA researchers and lobbyists began moving away from support for "comprehensive social welfare" and toward a focus on particular public assistance or social services programs, especially Aid to Dependent Children. Aiding dependent children might have seemed uncontroversial. But as Mittlestadt writes, "Those clients were poor women without husbands, and it was their behavior—or the perception of their behavior—around which the new ethos of welfare-as-services would be defined" (39). And that clientele was evolving from white widows to include women who often were divorced and/or of color.

This presented problems for welfare policymakers. As early as 1942, the liberal New Deal coalition was cracking under the strain of expanding government and increasing taxes, with conservative Democrats increasingly allying with Republicans—obviously, a long-term, profoundly important trend. Anti-tax conservatives and liberals trying to save their plans and programs proposed to wean welfare recipients off of the dole by reducing dependency and promoting rehabilitation. Cohen and his closest allies concluded from their research that "situational poverty"—temporary unemployment—had become less of a problem than "fundamental poverty," which extended to such issues as health care and lack of education. The group that attracted more of Cohen's attention than any other was single mothers. Welfare professionals reasoned that the problem began at home and sought to repair whatever it was about the home that was broken. Thus, Mittelstadt writes, "the individualized perspective on poverty and welfare in the 1950s was created and shaped by gendered assumptions. In pursuing rehabilitative services, welfare reformers determined what roles women should play in society and how the state should intervene to help them or force them to play those roles"—changing them from homemakers to breadwinners (123). While gender was crucial, so was race: too many Americans increasingly associated welfare with African Americans, especially after the Great Migration to northern cities. Welfare advocates reacted by playing down racial issues, thereby hoping to avoid the wrath of conservative whites but incurring the displeasure of African American leaders.

Not even the New Frontier and Great Society solved these conundrums. Indeed, success—the federal battle against poverty and passage of civil rights legislation—fanned the flames. With Cohen's guidance, John F. Kennedy's New Frontier led to the passage of legislation that emphasized rehabilitative welfare—assisting the families of unemployed fathers, not just mothers, and providing job training. HEW Secretary Abraham Ribicoff explained these policies with the acronym SPIRIT, but, Mittelstadt notes, "nowhere in 'Services, Prevention, Incentives Rehabilitation, Independence, and Training' did the words 'Family' or 'Mother' or 'Children' appear. Instead, the elements of SPIRIT were clearly directed at encouraging welfare clients to work" (128). Thus, workfare was central to welfare policy long before conservative Republicans of the 1980s and 1990s used welfare as a political piñata.

All of this barely does justice to Mittelstadt's multi-layered work. She has tied up issues of race, gender, public policy, and modern American politics in a package far neater as history than as the reality we confront daily. Granted, From Welfare to Workfare is not light reading; not only is there the occasional cumbersome sentence, but the emphasis on policy means limited attention to the practical politics involved in welfare reform and the personalities of these welfare reformers, which also might have helped to explain the "unintended consequences of liberal reform." But this is a minor criticism of a major work that historians of law and policy, recent America, race or gender will find indispensable, and that those of us who proudly wear the label "liberal" will read with regret and thoughts of what might have been.

Michael S. Green

Community College of Southern Nevada

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