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Book Review
| Felicia Kornbluh, The Battle for Welfare Rights: Politics and Poverty in Modern America, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Pp. 287. $49.95 cloth (ISBN 0812220250); $24.95 paper (ISBN 978-0812220254).
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| A decade after welfare "reform" significantly contracted the citizenship rights of poor mothers in the U.S. by ending both their entitlement to minimal economic security and their choice (enjoyed by more affluent women) about whether and how to combine employment and care work, it is enlightening to read Kornbluh's analytically astute, inspiring book about the welfare rights movement of the late 1960s–early 1970s. The book shows that poor women and their political allies successfully expanded public assistance benefits and challenged policies that compelled them to accept humiliating human services and/or demeaning jobs. Moreover, the book's careful historical analysis of the conditions that nurtured the movement in the 1960s also helps to make sense of why a mass movement against the most recent version of welfare "reform" post-1996 did not emerge under the much-changed political, economic, and social landscape of late twentieth-century America. |
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The book focuses on the National Welfare Rights Organization (NRWO), the largest membership organization of the poor in U.S. history, focusing particularly on the movement's emergence, development, and struggles in New York City. The NRWO, born in 1966, grew in membership, visibility, chapters, and political impact in the context of the vibrancy of the civil rights movement. By 1974, NWRO had succumbed in the context of the powerful backlash from fiscally strapped urban mayors and the Nixon administration and the racist use of welfare politics by the organized Right as part of their strategy to effect a massive political realignment by attracting millions of white working- and middle-class voters to a rightward-moving Republican Party. |
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Kornbluh's narrative is rich both in the words and actions of the grassroots women, mostly African American and Latina, who provided leadership and massive collective energy to the movement, and in its historical acuity. The movement comes alive in the words, actions, and perspectives of grassroots activists such as Beulah Sanders, Jeanette Washington, Roxanne Jones, and Johnnie Tillmon; descriptions of the political alliances formed between welfare recipients and civil rights activists (e.g., George Wiley and Frank Espada), academics (e.g., Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven), progressive social workers, and lawyers (e.g., Carl Rachlin and Edward Sparer); explanation of how the movement achieved a membership of over twenty thousand in five hundred local chapters; and dissection of NWRO's political and legal strategies. |
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Kornbluh argues that the movement "drew on and transformed Anglo-American legal and political traditions and the rights discourse of the postwar United States" by articulating a "vision of citizenship" that encompassed economic justice (9). She concurs with legal theorist Patricia Williams that "rights language" has political and legal value in contesting and mobilizing the disenfranchisement of poor women and communities of color, and she demonstrates how legal strategies can be empowering and effective when they are closely linked to a broad-based grassroots strategy to transform gender, race, and class relations. For example, the movement pioneered the tactic of using the rarely used language of "minimum standards" in welfare manuals to obtain supplements (furniture, clothing, etc.) to the meager cash grant so that poor families could be brought up to a "minimum standard of health and decency." This tactic brought poor women, welfare advocates, and lawyers together to force welfare departments to honor these claims, at least during the heyday of the movement. |
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Kornbluh's discussion of "legal civil disobedience" may hold particular interest for readers of this journal. In 1967, the NWRO unveiled "fair hearings" as their "'new weapon' in the battle against poverty" (64). This heretofore underutilized provision of the Social Security Act provided redress for clients denied needed assistance by caseworkers. Thousands of welfare recipients pursued these "fair hearings," collectively garnering hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of assistance, straining the human and financial resources of welfare agencies (thus forcing administrators to change practices), and securing a measure of dignity for citizens who found they could use the courts for their own ends. This tactic was effective in the particular context of the expansion of public legal services after 1965, the liberal Supreme (Warren) Court, and the political power of the civil rights movement. |
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Kornbluh weaves together well-contextualized historical detail and an incisive analysis of how gender, race, and class relations shaped both welfare rights activism and the ultimately successful antiwelfare backlash that undermined the movement and fueled two decades of antiwelfare politics that culminated in today's restrictive welfare-to-work policies and the termination of Aid to Families with Dependent Children. But the book also shows what is possible when cross-racial, cross-class coalitions effectively braid together economic, gender, and racial justice as the focus of concerted and intertwined political, legal, and social action. |
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| Sandra Morgen
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| University of Oregon |
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