Black & White & Noir by Paula Rabinowitz

Author:Paula Rabinowitz [Rabinowitz, Paula]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Film & Video, Performing Arts, History & Criticism, Social Science, Popular Culture, General
ISBN: 9780231114813
Google: iiRgvARI6TcC
Amazon: 0231114818
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2002-07-14T12:00:00+00:00

Rabinowitz CH 06 3/18/02 5:00 PM Page 163

s o c ia l w o rk e rs a s p ri va t e e yes

f i g u re 34. Esther Bubley, “A sign.” Washington Courthouse, Ohio, September 1943.

education and job training. Along with the Interstate Highway Act (1956), these social welfare programs for building a postwar middle class (by 1946, for the first time in U.S. history, more than 50 percent of Americans lived in their own homes) masked massive welfare expenditures to the upwardly mobile new residents of suburbia as cold-war defense spending. Throughout the mid-twentieth century, welfare expenditures were considered crucial to national security. In the 1930s, they maintained democracy and freedom (not to mention capitalism) through relief, especially through Aid to Dependent Children (precursor to today’s Aid to Families with Dependent Children [AFDC]). Then during World War II, they helped defend the nation. Finally, during the cold war, they functioned to secure 163

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White: Work and Memory

the peace. In short, welfare was not just a women’s issue as welfare rights activists in the 1960s asserted.

Relief, freedom, security, defense: the large-scale fulfillment of human needs was obviously a task for the federal government, one intimately connected to the economic and military goals of American stability and democracy. In the wake of postwar neo-domesticity, what became understood as welfare returned to earlier constructions of mother’s aid, even when President Johnson launched the War on Poverty, again invoking the military metaphor to achieve the goal FDR’s Vice-President Henry A. Wallace outlined in 1942:

“freedom from want.” The language of welfare returned to dependence as AFDC with its suggestion of weakness, both personal and political, dominated welfare debates. The feminization of welfare insured its demise as “a national issue” to be addressed positively and shifted its visibility from heroic efforts to preserve democracy to shameful handouts to the undeserving. Since the 1960s, as the picture of poverty appeared increasingly nonwhite and the cities emptied of well-paying jobs, leaving the only laissez-faire capitalist enterprise—drug dealing—in their place, welfare became localized within deteriorating neighborhoods. By the 1980s, what had once been touted as national defense became personal dependence. The shift resurrects ideas of deviancy and delinquency, not as temporary social and economic results of altered family structures during depression and war, but as the inevitable result of the perennial culture of dependence fostered by “the chains of welfare,” as Representative Bill Archer called it.50 In a classic Orwellian move, freedom (from want) now became a prison.

Welfare as we know it means AFDC the incarnation of 1930s relief programs, among them ADC, itself a federally instituted program building on early twentieth-century “mothers’ pensions,” which repeated late nineteenth-century charity work by the “friendly visitor.”51 Early twentieth-century social welfare workers responded to

“sex delinquency” among girls by inspecting the households of their poor mothers. In 1972, welfare rights activist Johnnie Tillmon pro-claimed “welfare is a women’s issue,” forcing feminism to address poverty, but also indicting a policy that cordons poor mothers off as a “cancer,” the “undeserving poor.

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