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Chapter 1

Legislating the Personal Responsibility of Poor Mothers

Early in the political wrangling over welfare reform, Congresswoman Patsy Takemoto Mink (D-Hawaii) warned her colleagues of a persistent bias they appeared not to have noticed. “The brunt of our criticism, the brunt of the burden of the debate,” she argued, “is being heaped upon women in this society.”¹ While the controversy raged, Mink gathered scores of Democratic lawmakers to remind President Clinton and the Republicans that their proposals would create more poverty. She led a much smaller group that underlined what she termed the “gender issue” framing the whole conversation about welfare.²

Politicians and many researchers still understate the importance of sex, gender, marriage, and reproduction in the politics of the 1990s and the years that followed. But Representative Mink was right: women and gender were, indeed, at the center of welfare reform and the debate that preceded it. When they voted in favor of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), a bipartisan majority of Congress pledged to change the behavior of mothers and fathers who were living at the edge of economic survival.

Declaring that “marriage is the foundation of a successful society,”³ the welfare overhaul made mothers’ marital status, fathers’ financial child support, and childbearing by young women newly paramount in antipoverty policy.⁴ The promise of the law was that by limiting access to benefits, pressuring women to have fewer children, requiring men to support biological children, and persuading biological mothers and fathers to marry one another, the U.S. government would reduce the need for welfare more effectively than it had done in the previous six decades. Virtually lost in this framework for privatized, patriarchal poverty mitigation was the role of government in stanching the effects of extreme economic need or fostering the conditions for economic security.

This chapter explores the major features and implications of the 1996 welfare law and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program it created. The primary method here is statutory analysis of Title I of the law, which established TANF. At the time we are writing, the TANF provision of PRWORA remains controlling law, although legislation reauthorizing the program in 2006 added mechanisms to advance goals for labor market participation, marriage, and fatherhood. In later chapters we use a variety of methods to explore the origins of TANF and changes over its history, changes that have not altered its basic structure or purposes. Here, we examine what Congress actually said in 1996 to illuminate the major features of the policy legislators designed and that President Bill Clinton endorsed. Before we can appreciate the history of welfare reform and its impact, we must first understand what it is, what it means, and why it matters.

Our reading of the welfare reform statute underlines the need for contemporary feminism and gender analysis in public policy. Because the 1996 law singles out low-income women—single mothers, disproportionately of color—for regulation and discipline, we find it imperative to bring to the subject an intersectional gender and reproductive justice perspective that we have developed alongside many academic colleagues. Intersectional feminism insists on the formative and ongoing political significance of differences among women’s experiences of gender based on their race, class, sexual identity, immigration status, and disability circumstance. It summons solidarity across the diverse ways in which women endure sexism, gender discrimination, and subordination, but it cautions specificity in designing remedies for inequality.⁵ A reproductive justice approach impels us to analyze public policy by considering its impact on all people’s ability—including their economic ability—to bear and raise children, as well as to avoid child-bearing when that is their preference.⁶

The gender dimensions of TANF were in plain view in the 1996 welfare reform statute. The law’s authors made frequent mention of the negative effects of childbirth by single women, especially teens; the perils imposed on children when they are raised by poor single mothers; and the urgency of conditioning poor women’s childbearing and child rearing on marriage and fathers’ family role.⁷ The structure and terms of TANF encourage the privatized dependency of women on men, not only by incentivizing heteromarital family formation but also by ending poor families’ entitlement to cash assistance and time-limiting eligibility for TANF participation. This withdrawal of the safety net closed off reliable access to income support in hard times for the overwhelmingly female population of adult welfare participants. In a backhanded, if intended, way, this end to welfare amplified the pressure on mothers to seek income support from individual men who are biological fathers of their children.

If the 1996 welfare law was explicitly gendered, its gendered logic was inseparable from social and economic class, and from the deeply racialized assumptions and stereotypes it deployed. TANF was simultaneously racialized, gendered, and class-specific in the impacts it wrought. The welfare policy created by PRWORA was predicated on a specific understanding of the relationship between the individual and the government, with the individual in question not an abstraction or universal but a specifically gendered low-income woman, implicitly understood to be an African American, a Latina, an Asian immigrant, or a socially marginal white person.⁸ The statute drew ethical and regulatory lines between mothers and fathers, the married and unmarried, wealthy and poor, older and younger, “legitimate” and “illegitimate,” disabled and able-bodied, those employed in the waged labor market and those not employed, immigrants and the native-born. The implications of the statute far exceed its own text or even the lives it immediately shaped: as Representative Mink feared they might, the arguments policy makers inscribed in PRWORA affected the cultural and political environment in which all women, all mothers, all communities of color, and all economically vulnerable or exploited people in the United States lived in the years after the statute’s passage.

Racist Myths and Misogynist Stereotypes: The Preface to the New Welfare Law

The debate leading up to the 1996 welfare law, as well as the law itself, followed from policy makers’ refusal to hear feminist critiques of welfare reform proposals and their neglect of mothers who bore witness to poverty and the need for welfare. While grassroots welfare groups did raise their voices, as did allied feminist social justice activists, these voices did not reverberate in the legislative process. Quite the opposite. As we shall see in the law’s opening section, policy makers treated welfare reform as a paternalistic project—policy change from above to fix the individual failings of single mothers in need of aid.

The centrality of gender, the narrowing of debate, and the absence of direction from affected communities are all evident from the very start of the welfare reform statute. Notwithstanding proponents’ drumbeat for “work, not welfare,” gender, marriage, and motherhood held pride of place in the text of the law. Title I of PRWORA, the TANF provision, opened with a preamble that consisted of a list of “findings.” These commingled data from testable hypotheses, untestable value statements, and familiar welfare myths. Although offered as uncontroversial first principles, they represented a specific perspective on sex, gender, intimacy, and parenting.

The first three findings that undergirded TANF policy were the least empirical and most normative: “(1) Marriage is the foundation of a successful society. (2) Marriage is an essential institution of a successful society which promotes the interests of children. (3) Promotion of responsible fatherhood and motherhood is integral to successful child rearing and the well-being of children.”⁹ The last finding, number ten, was that “prevention of out-of-wedlock pregnancy and reduction in out-of-wedlock birth are very important Government interests.”¹⁰ Then followed language elevating these principles in a transformed welfare policy. Amending established welfare law and replacing the prior program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the congressional majority created TANF to “address the crisis” in marriage, childbearing, and child rearing by low-income women. Changing the purpose of welfare policy to align with heteromarital, patriarchal, and eugenic gender preferences, the 1996 TANF law declared among its purposes the goals of discouraging nonmarital childbearing, encouraging two-parent family formation, and promoting marriage.¹¹

By emphasizing marriage and a supposedly traditional model of gender roles, TANF policy represented an intervention into a long-standing debate over “the black family.” In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many white and African American social scientists pointed to the disparity in marriage rates between families of European descent and those of African descent.¹² They interpreted this statistic as a cause, rather than, as might be more appropriate, a symptom, of poverty among African American adults and children. At regular intervals, they went further, to posit a causal chain from adult marital patterns, to family economic well-being, to various social phenomena, such as children’s achievement in school, their likelihood to serve time in prison or jail, and mothers’ and children’s need for public assistance over their lifetimes.

The “Moynihan Report” of 1965, a product of President Lyndon Johnson’s Department of Labor, publicized one pole of the debate over “the black family.” The report muddled causes and effects, suggesting that the history of white supremacy (slavery and Jim Crow), the modern economy, and women’s economic and familial roles had all produced “black family” poverty—a poverty whose most immediate causes or symptoms allegedly were the bad behavior and limited employment prospects of African American men. Was the solution, then, a major macroeconomic intervention by the government to create more jobs, and a policy to direct such jobs to nonwhite men? Or was it a cultural program to reduce African American women’s autonomy and give men opportunities to, in the report’s ineffable phrase, “strut” like cocks in the farmyard? The report made the answer to this question unclear, perhaps deliberately so.¹³

Feminist, civil rights, antipoverty, and welfare rights activists successfully challenged the Moynihan Report, but their success did not last. That the ideas popularized in the report were disreputable for twenty years within some liberal and Democratic circles was a remarkable achievement, given the intellectual and political forces arrayed on their behalf. However, these ideas were recuperated and mobilized in debates over national welfare policy beginning in 1985 with a series of lectures the report’s author gave at Harvard University. The resurrected theories about the relationship between marriage and poverty in the preamble to PRWORA did not explicitly refer to the Moynihan Report; they subsumed it. And so the new welfare law gave legislative standing to ideas about poor people’s gender behavior that feminists and welfare rights activists had refuted as long ago as 1965.¹⁴

When we argue that TANF is centrally concerned with gender, we do not mean to suggest that adult women or mothers are its sole subjects or objects. Gender as an analytic tool encompasses all people. It serves as an interpretive guide to public policy by calling attention to ways in which policy incorporates assumptions about maleness and femaleness, masculine and feminine behavior, and the two-option gender system itself.¹⁵ As in the reference above to the promotion of “responsible fatherhood and motherhood,” the members of Congress who voted for PRWORA mobilized negative masculine stereotypes and endorsed policies that aimed to change men who came under the law’s jurisdiction, even as they also suggested that women should relinquish their claims for self-sovereignty and focus on marriage instead.¹⁶ So, for example, the fourth finding in the TANF preamble directed attention to the fathers of poor children. Here, policy makers offered quantitative data about the percentages of families who had child support orders and received payments under them.¹⁷ This emphasis on child support, calling to mind the stereotype of the so-called deadbeat dad, ushered in extensive changes under PRWORA to the national child support system Congress had established in 1974 and enhanced under the welfare reform of 1988.¹⁸ Likewise, the seventh finding revisited the subject of masculine behavior by dredging up the stereotype of the “statutory” rapist, the man who has consensual intercourse with a woman below the legal age of consent, placing her at risk of becoming a teenage mother. The authors of TANF insisted that a fix to the problem of teenage pregnancy “must address … male responsibility” for statutory rape and the “sexual and physical abuse” of young women.¹⁹

The preamble to TANF policy illustrates the place of age as a component of gender and sexual politics. Age as a category of analysis has not received the attention it perhaps deserves from scholars of public policy. But a few feminist scholars have illuminated the ways in which gendered and sexual tensions have crystallized into anxieties about young people. Tensions about young women’s sexuality, in particular, have provoked repeated “moral panics” about the state of the country since World War II.²⁰ These tensions have driven legislation and judicial decisions on abortion, adoption, and teenage pregnancy.²¹ In the welfare context, the association between teenage child-bearing and nonmarital motherhood excited anxieties about the failure of younger women to assimilate white, middle-class, marital norms, while the connection between single motherhood and poverty seemed to support theories about the high cost of teen parenting.

TANF legislation reads like the result of a profound moral panic over gender, age, sexuality, and social risk. The sixth finding, for example, opened with a claim about an overall increase in nonmarital births but then shifted to data on “non-marital teen pregnancy”: the congressional drafters failed to note that pregnancies terminated by a safe abortion posed little challenge to the welfare system or the public fisc, or that teen moms and their children were a miniscule fraction of the welfare caseload.²² The eighth and ninth findings enumerated dozens of negative effects of being born into or raised in single-mother homes if the single mother is poor and never married. These findings warned of low cognition and low educational attainment, increased delinquency and criminality, and higher rates of intergenerational welfare dependency among children born out of wedlock into fatherless families that need welfare. In the findings as elsewhere in the statute, TANF’s authors outlined the supposed deficiencies of poor single mothers while underlining the special value of biological fathers. Nowhere in TANF policy is there mention of the importance of mothers.

“No Individual Entitlement”

The introductory assertions about gender, sexuality, and parenting in the “findings” to TANF policy skewed the policy’s emphasis toward privatized, individualized, moral prescriptions. They pointed away from reforming labor market opportunities, educational and employment conditions and work supports, or racist and sexist social structures.²³ The two overarching disciplinary mechanisms in the law were the elimination of an entitlement—an enforceable legal claim—to assistance, and the imposition of a lifetime time limit on TANF eligibility. Proponents of PRWORA chose punishing women for needing welfare over reducing their poverty; disciplining them through rules and sanctions rather than increasing their access to remunerative jobs or enlivening educational opportunities; and conditioning their well-being on attachment to men rather than blazing pathways to genuine self-sovereignty and independence.

The withdrawal of the welfare entitlement was the boldest change from established policy toward poor mothers and their children, the essence of what candidate Bill Clinton had termed “end[ing] welfare as we know it.”²⁴ The end of the entitlement to welfare meant that impoverished mothers and children (and a few fathers), whom the government had for decades assured at least a minimal level of aid if they met specific eligibility criteria, could no longer count on such aid.²⁵ The statutory entitlement to public assistance in the United States was never ideal or tantamount to what activists and theorists understood as robust “welfare rights.” This form of entitlement, because it was based on a statute, an act of the legislature, was always shaky and subject to potential reversal by that same legislature, as well as to interpretations by a bureaucracy that could vary dramatically depending on who was in charge. The girth of the entitlement also varied by jurisdiction, as each state could determine just how much assistance it was willing to offer, which, in turn, determined how much the federal government would contribute to a particular state. Nonetheless, the entitlement was meaningful, and so was its loss.

The removal of a reliable and accessible welfare benefit in TANF policy undid by means of national law a set of Supreme Court precedents that had guaranteed a minimal level of access to and fairness in the welfare system. The watershed opinion, written for a unanimous court by Chief Justice Earl Warren, was King v. Smith (1968).²⁶ Mrs. Sylvester Smith, an African American single mother, challenged Alabama’s decision to terminate her welfare benefits because her nonmarital sexual relationship with a man violated the state’s “substitute father” rule.²⁷ Under that rule, any man who frequented a woman’s home for conjugal purposes could bear responsibility for the economic support of her children, whether or not he was biologically related to them. Smith and welfare rights advocates initially argued that the substitute father rule violated the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution—an argument that, if successful, would have barred use of arbitrary moral criteria to decide poor families’ eligibility for aid.²⁸ King v. Smith did not accomplish this end because Smith’s appellate attorneys and, ultimately, the Court, framed the case on statutory, not constitutional, grounds, and therefore did not establish access to welfare irrespective of sexual behavior as a matter of fundamental legal equality.²⁹ Even so, the case was a strong response to the sexually regulatory, race-conscious deprivations of welfare benefits by individual states and established that the welfare statute—the old AFDC provision of the Social Security Act—did not intend to punish children for the sexual conduct of their mothers. This ruling, in combination with Supreme Court decisions in Shapiro v. Thompson and Goldberg v. Kelly, girded the welfare entitlement with rights against arbitrary state action—for so long as the federal program was an entitlement.³⁰

With breezy definitude, Congress in 1996 declared “No Individual Entitlement” to welfare.³¹ The decision to end the entitlement to public assistance was inseparable from TANF policy’s concerns about marriage, sex, and gender. The resolution of the gendered “crisis” legislators outlined in the law’s findings lay, in part, in ending families’ ability to rely on government to help supply their basic needs when they were unable to afford these needs on their own. This may appear an odd argument. However, implicit within it were assumptions about the gendered ordering of a good society. The starting assumption appears to have been that mothers sometimes resisted marrying the fathers of their children because they knew government help was available to pay at least a portion of their bills. According to research, this assumption did not explain overall trends in marriage; however, some women did resist marrying men they found unreliable, unhelpful, or abusive, and others resisted marrying because they thought it came with obligations that they were too poor to afford.³² Examined through low-income mothers’ eyes, secure government aid in the form of an entitlement increased a woman’s bargaining power with men in her life. It may therefore have enabled her greater happiness, her ability to avoid or escape abuse, and opportunity to build a better intimate partnership when she chose to enter one.³³ Reliable and accessible government assistance also assigned social worth to the family work poor mothers did as primary parents, while recognizing the impossible double burden of wage work and care work that so many faced in an inflexible, low-wage labor market.

For promarriage critics of welfare, relatively secure public assistance blunted the force of women’s traditional incentives to marry, especially the economic vulnerability that risked their children’s well-being. On this theory, entitlement to welfare reduced marriage rates among the poor by mitigating poverty in families with children. The idea that welfare supported poor unmarried mothers’ independence apparently drove the urge to transform welfare from a reliable and accessible income supplement to temporary and conditional alms. Pushing single mothers toward marriage by intensifying their economic insecurity, the elimination of the welfare entitlement by PRWORA was inextricable from the gendered agenda of its supporters.

By the 1990s, the very word “entitlement” had acquired a negative cast.³⁴ Welfare reform demeaned the term even more profoundly and associated it in the lexicon of public policy ever more with stigmatized racial and gender identities. In its changing public meanings, “entitlement” resembled “welfare” before it, a term that came into wide use specifically to capture the expanded scope of economic citizenship in the twentieth century.³⁵ The concept of entitlement indicated the degree to which people no longer had to beg private charities for help when they experienced distress but had something like “title,” a property right, to “welfare,” basic well-being, from the governments to which they gave their allegiance. Decades earlier, legal theorist Charles Reich identified this entitlement idea as a key part of modern American governance in a renowned article about the “new property” interest all individuals acquired in the economically valuable benefits generated by the post–New Deal state—everything from broadcast licenses granted by the Federal Communications Commission, to professional licenses granted or regulated by state agencies, to old-age pensions and mothers’ benefits under the Social Security statute.³⁶ By the time Congress passed TANF, few disputed the rights of workers in covered jobs to claim benefits in old age. But the economic invisibility of parental care work and pejorative ideas about mothers and children who need welfare made the idea of “entitlement” for single-mother families seemingly indefensible.

In TANF policy, the loss of entitlement meant that no individual or family, no matter how destitute or deserving, no matter how moral a mother or nondeadbeat a father, could make a legally enforceable claim for assistance just because they were poor. If the state ran out of TANF money or if the family did not meet ongoing conditions for receiving aid, then the family would be left to sink or swim on its own. Further, absolute lifetime time limits for TANF participation added a chronological condition of assistance, marking a point in time beyond which families could not receive aid ever again, no matter their behavior, attitudes, or needs.³⁷

TANF law included a national cumulative time limit of five years during which families could get help. State governments were explicitly permitted to shorten these limits, and many have done so. By statute, additional conditions a parent must meet vary from state to state. They are enforced by sanctions ranging from partial welfare benefit cuts for a period of time to a family’s complete loss of aid. Conditions that expose families to sanctions include mandatory paternity establishment and cooperation with child support enforcement by mothers, work requirements, and regular school attendance by school-age children in TANF families.³⁸

In contrast to this approach, consider the principles foregrounded in legislation Representative Mink introduced to Congress during initial debates over welfare reform in 1993–94, a similar version of which she reprised after Republicans began to formulate PRWORA in 1995. Mink argued that if mothers wanted to work for wages, then “there must be opportunities to work” via training and education, up to and including opportunities to attend college. She argued that these mothers must be able to secure child care, financial aid, and other supports to make education and training truly accessible.³⁹ Moreover, she argued, “if people have small children, they should be able to take care of their children, at home”—a choice to which she believed all primary parents should have access. In this regard, she wrote, as in all others, “a poor family is no different from a rich family.”⁴⁰

Cutting Cash and Caseloads

Title I of the welfare reform law allowed the prerogatives of individual states to billow. To be sure, TANF legislation charged states with new duties, in cluding enforcement of new program rules. Further, TANF provisions required states to meet certain program participation goals in exchange for federal funds. Also, the new funding formula, block grants to states, capped federal funding to each state and required states to maintain a financial contribution to overall welfare spending under a “maintenance of effort” provision. Still, within the punitive paradigm, states were given wide disciplinary discretion over how to spend those funds—discretion wider than they had had at any time since the implementation of federal public assistance in the 1930s and 1940s.⁴¹

Under the 1996 law, individual state governments can turn away applicants for aid even if they meet every criterion of eligibility. If, for example, certain people have the misfortune to apply after state funds and the federal block grant have been exhausted, officials can legitimately turn them away. States also can discourage TANF enrollment even if funds are available, as many have done through “diversion” programs that direct applicants to exhaust all possible private aid before turning to public welfare. Indeed, caseload reduction incentives in the TANF law, combined with sanctions provisions and capped funding, have pushed states to constrict TANF participation even as the need for aid has failed to abate.

Welfare reform recused states from the scrutiny and pressure they would have faced under an entitlement-based antipoverty system. Before 1996, state officials were subject to greater oversight by officials in Washington, who at least occasionally threatened “conformity hearings” to investigate whether they were following national law. State governments would risk losing the federal portion of their budgets for public assistance if, for example, they turned eligible applicants away.⁴²

In contrast, PRWORA grants state officials leeway to decide whether and how to meet the needs of poor families, as long as state practices advance the goals of the TANF program—principally marriage, the reduction of nonmarital childbearing, and labor market participation. Yet despite the discretion permitted under TANF, state governments are not free to be generous: they may not extend federally funded benefits for most participants past the national time limit, relax paternity establishment and child support enforcement rules, or dilute work requirements.⁴³ PRWORA gave states new flexibility but tethered all states to the new fundamentals of welfare.

When the TANF framework gave states new discretion to regulate and discipline poor parents, it invited states to deploy ostensibly neutral levers of effectively race-based discrimination. Studies have shown, for example, that the greater the density of African Americans in the potential TANF population, the more likely a state is to police recipients with a “family cap” that denies benefits to a child born while his or her mother is receiving TANF aid, and with full-family sanctions that withdraw all the support to a family in retaliation for a mother’s failure to follow all the program’s rules.⁴⁴

Another dimension of the assault on welfare rights embodied in TANF policy was a retreat from the principle of cash assistance that had formed the core of the federal welfare program since its creation during the New Deal of the 1930s. Under the New Deal welfare policy, means- or income-tested aid was provided to mothers without wage-earning male partners. New Deal assistance to poor single-mother families comprised cash grants, primarily—an income substitute for poor families in which male heads of household and their earnings were missing. In a paradigm shift away from the hoary idea that poverty indicated moral failing, New Dealers abjured the morals tests that local charities had long applied to sift the undeserving from the deserving poor. Further, they ruled out moralistic controls on the spending choices of poor mothers that had been routine in private charity and in some local welfare efforts.⁴⁵

But although cash assistance was the shining core of federal welfare policy, it was vulnerable almost from the start. For one thing, the level of cash benefit, determined by individual states, was often set so low as to prolong the immiseration of poor families rather than set a course out of poverty. For another, states invented morals tests as add-ons to the federal policy—such as Alabama’s “substitute father” rule that Smith challenged successfully in 1968, some thirty years after federal policy had officially declined to employ moral gauges and levers. Finally, the federal embrace of cash aid for poor mothers did not signal an end to the popular view that poor people either had to prove their moral worthiness or pay for aid by submitting to moral regulation.

The cash principle came under sustained attack when the national government and advocates challenged state and local strategies to keep poor people off the welfare rolls and public assistance became increasingly associated with never-married mothers and African Americans.⁴⁶ Amendments to the Social Security Act in 1962 specifically allowed for compromises of this principle.⁴⁷ Civil and welfare rights activists saw a further compromise of the cash principle in the expansion of food stamps under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, which occurred alongside widening gaps between what state governments calculated as the “standard of need,” or amount people needed to live decently, and cash welfare grants.⁴⁸ Why, poor people wondered, could the food stamps not simply be cashed out and added to the AFDC totals of hungry mothers and children? State governments and individual caseworkers made increasing use of noncash benefits, including “vouchers” for rent or food. In the late twentieth century, the national government used noncash programs, such as food stamps and rent supplements, to meet an ever larger share of the needs of the nonworking and underpaid poor.

Congress enacted TANF against the background of these compromises to the cash assistance principle and took a huge leap further away from that New Deal principle. TANF policy opened the floodgates for states to divert funds from cash to noncash purposes, including to services like marriage promotion. Not all of TANF’s noncash provisions were as valuable to recipients as the cash would have been; some may not have been of any value to them at all. What’s more, some of TANF’s noncash services were not dedicated to poor families: for example, marriage promotion activities, though paid for by TANF, typically are open to anyone who wants to participate.⁴⁹ PRWORA permitted states to use the TANF funds they received from the national government “in any manner that is reasonably calculated to accomplish the purpose” of the TANF program.⁵⁰ In addition, TANF policy gave states explicit “authority to use [a] portion of [the block] grant for other purposes” than providing direct assistance to impoverished parents and children, including up to 30 percent of their TANF funds in a year for child care, the creation of electronic benefit (EBT) systems, employment programs chosen by state administrators, or other social service programs that might not reach the poorest mothers or fathers at all.⁵¹

PRWORA allowed and incentivized a dramatic drop in the cash aid available to impoverished families, overwhelmingly mothers with young children in desperate circumstances. The law promoted this outcome by cutting the overall aid available and by limiting poor people’s access to cash in particular. The incentives worked: in 1996, approximately sixty-eight of every one hundred poor families received cash benefits under the AFDC program, but by 2013, only twenty-five of every one hundred families in poverty were receiving cash assistance. Overall, the number of families receiving welfare under AFDC or TANF plunged 70 percent between 1994 and 2013.⁵²

Thanks to TANF policy and national and state rules consistent with it, by 2006 only thirty-two out of one hundred poor families received welfare assistance. In 2011, when the United States was still in recession and unemployment was at historic highs, the number had dropped to twenty-seven. In other words, as economic uncertainty, unemployment, poverty, and inequality all worsened, the nation’s main program of cash aid for needy people did progressively less.⁵³ The ratio of poor families served by TANF dropped even further in later years, faster than has the number of poor families. In 2015, only twenty-three of every hundred impoverished families received TANF overall. All the states did less for TANF recipients than they had done for needy mothers and children in the public assistance regime that existed before 1996.⁵⁴

The loosening of certain forms of national oversight made the divergences between states dramatic: In 2012–13, there were still two states (California and Vermont) that served over 60 percent of families that fell under the federal poverty line. Although both states were less responsive to poor people than they had been in the pre-TANF era, on a national scale they were leaders in reducing family poverty.⁵⁵ At the other end of the scale, ten states in those years reached less than 10 percent of impoverished families.⁵⁶ In 2015, the “TANF-to-Poverty” ratio ranged from four in Louisiana to sixty-five in California, and the number of states whose TANF programs served fewer than one in ten poor families had risen to fourteen.⁵⁷ Perhaps most disturbing, TANF covered fewer people who were in what researchers from the World Bank call “deep poverty”—the kind we often think we do not have in this country, poverty that makes the United States compare poorly with countries across the globe ($2.00 per day or less in income). Prior to President Clinton’s signing of PRWORA, welfare lifted 62 percent of children who lived in “deep-poverty” families from that deep poverty. By 2010, the percentage had dropped to 24 percent.⁵⁸ And by 2015, forty-six U.S. states had more families living in deep poverty than they did receiving public assistance under TANF.⁵⁹

Alongside dramatic cuts in overall aid to impoverished families were equally dramatic shifts in how states directed that aid, that is, cuts in cash available to poor and extremely poor people. Legislation reauthorizing TANF, which President Bush signed in 2006, accelerated the shift away from cash aid for poor people by inviting states to spend increasing percentages of their block grants on social and moral services.⁶⁰ By 2013, states spent on average only 25 percent of their TANF funds on cash assistance; some states spent much less on cash aid, reaching only seven out of every one hundred poor families.⁶¹ As mentioned above, PRWORA mandated “maintenance-of-effort” by states on TANF, but effort could be maintained through spending on services favored by states rather than on cash needed by families. TANF permitted state administrators to channel increasing shares of their TANF funds to other programs and services for impoverished families and for people who were not necessarily poor or TANF clients. Every dollar taken from the TANF block grant for marriage promotion, for example, reduced the funds available for income or supports specifically for impoverished parents and children. According to a report released by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in 2015, “because states can spend TANF funds for a broad range of activities, they can shift funds that they have previously used to provide assistance directly to families to plug state budget holes—and many states have taken that option.”⁶²

Legislating Inequality

The complex politics of gender and the relevance of a reproductive justice approach appear most indelibly in TANF policy at those points where child-bearing and poverty meet. Members of Congress who voted in favor of the statute specifically affirmed a policy that impaired women’s reproductive rights by punishing families in which mothers bear children while receiving welfare. Enacted by individual states in the years immediately preceding 1996, the so-called family cap, or child exclusion, refuses public assistance to any child born to a mother while she is receiving aid. While PRWORA does not require states to adopt the family cap, it endorses states’ decision to do so.⁶³ In further reproductive regulation of poor mothers, PRWORA created incentives and funding streams for states actively to deter pregnancy and childbearing among poor women. Consistent with the rhetoric in the TANF “findings” section about young women’s childbearing, the law allows states to spend TANF funds to discourage teen childbearing through pregnancy prevention programs and the enforcement of strict and discouraging eligibility rules for TANF participation by unmarried teen mothers. Further, the law includes an “illegitimacy bonus,” prize money to the top five states that reduced the number of nonmarital births while also reducing the abortion rate below 1995 levels.⁶⁴ A separate section of PRWORA allocated funds to promote abstinence before marriage through sex education programs that instruct restraint from sexual activity among “those groups which are most likely to bear children out-of-wedlock.”⁶⁵

The aspect of PRWORA that appears most responsive to women’s claims is its language about family violence. The law permitted state governments to gain federal certification “to ensure that the state will screen for and identify domestic violence” and recuse victims and potential victims of violence from TANF requirements, including time limits.⁶⁶ A growing body of research in the 1990s had tied women’s poverty to misogynistic violence: The leaders in the field were Ellen Bassuk and her colleagues, who discovered that virtually all the women who were part of the new “family homelessness” were victims of physical and sexual violence, and Jody Raphael, who argued that violence was a leading source of women’s need for welfare.⁶⁷ The downside of this Family Violence Option was that it was merely an option: a voluntary program state governments could choose to create, possibly to help family violence survivors or possibly to relax performance standards states have to meet under TANF (or both); a discretionary program states could mount with the assistance of experts from the domestic violence support community, or not; an also-ran in a law whose mandatory sections cast suspicion on low-income mothers and increased their economic vulnerability.⁶⁸

Restrictions on immigrants permeate PRWORA, including its TANF provisions. These restrictions illuminate sociologist Ellen Reese’s point that the racial and gender politics of welfare “went beyond just the politics of black and white. Anti-Latino and anti-Asian stereotypes,” too, were integral to the law.⁶⁹ A key part of PRWORA was a five-year bar it included on TANF eligibility for legal immigrants.⁷⁰ Beyond the five-year ban, Title IV of PRWORA, “Restricting Welfare and Public Benefits for Aliens,” gave states authority to deny TANF (and Medicaid) eligibility to legal immigrants altogether, unless they belong to certain protected categories (refugees and asylees; members of the military and veterans; legal immigrants who have resided in the United States for ten years without receiving any public assistance).⁷¹ Nativism, a hatred or fear of national outsiders, was not incidental to the logic of the law or to the historical and political context that gave rise to it. For example, California voters in 1994 affirmed Proposition 187, a ballot measure that promised to deprive undocumented immigrants of public benefits, which the measure’s advocates alleged cost the state $200 million per year. Federal law already excluded undocumented immigrants from public benefits, so it was PRWORA’s provisions restricting program participation by documented immigrants that advanced the nativist cause. In polite company, PRWORA’s nativist provisions were justified on budgetary grounds. But the restrictionist agenda was clear. Speaker of the U.S. House Newt Gingrich carried the agenda forward shortly after PRWORA became law when he argued that undocumented immigrants should lose access to public schooling—notwithstanding the Supreme Court’s 1982 decision that undocumented children enjoy educational rights under the U.S. Constitution.⁷² Gingrich called the demand for educational access an “unfunded mandate” placed on state governments.⁷³

PRWORA went far beyond California’s Proposition 187 by denying or severely restricting assistance to documented immigrants across a range of antipoverty programs. For example, documented immigrants who entered the country after PRWORA was signed into law on August 22, 1996, are denied access to Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and food stamps (SNAP). Documented immigrants who need TANF assistance, whether cash, in-kind, or services, are required to wait five years after their date of entry as “qualified legal alien[s]” to become eligible.⁷⁴ Heightened deeming requirements, under which the immigrant’s sponsor’s income and resources are treated as available to the immigrant, make it more difficult for “qualified immigrants” to meet the means test to enroll in TANF and other programs. Researcher Shawn Fremstad summarized the magnitude of the shift: “Until passage of the 1996 welfare law, legal immigrants were generally eligible for public benefits on the same basis as citizens. The [1996] welfare law conditioned eligibility on citizenship status rather than legal status, extending to most legal immigrants the eligibility restrictions that had traditionally applied only to undocumented immigrants. These unprecedented restrictions effectively redrew the boundaries of social membership in the United States.”⁷⁵

Moving from Welfare to Poverty

The most famous promise of 1990s welfare reformers was that the new policy would “end welfare as we know it” by moving recipients “from welfare to work.” TANF’s work provisions teach the work ethic by requiring labor market engagement but do little to assure recipients that compliance will win them economic security. PRWORA specified new, severe limits on the amount of time a parent who participates in TANF can spend educating herself before being mandated to work in the formal labor market. It makes no provision for improving wage prospects of low-income mothers, by offering paths to training for the relatively high-paying jobs that are typically dominated by men, such as those in construction and the skilled trades.⁷⁶ What’s more, PRWORA did not include an entitlement to child care and deemed that work requirements could be satisfied through unpaid labor—workfare—or through taking care of another recipient’s children. TANF’s work discipline ensures that women with limited education or outdated skills will not be able to get jobs whose wages meet their and their children’s needs.

Accordingly, even as low-income single mothers’ participation in paid employment increased to conform to the requirements of TANF, millions remained in poverty, trapped in low-wage jobs. Assessing the income and security effects of TANF for low-income single-mother families in 2002, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research reported that post-PRWORA, more than three-quarters (78 percent) of employed low-income single parents were concentrated in four typically low-wage occupations, with 44 percent working in services.⁷⁷ The Working Poor Families Project reported in 2014 that the occupational isolation of single mothers in low-wage jobs continues, with many working as cashiers, maids and housekeepers, administrative assistants, and waitresses, while the largest percentage works in home health care.⁷⁸ The TANF regimen of “work for work’s sake”—without attention to living wages, job supports such as paid sick days and child care, and education or training for better paying jobs—tracks low-income mothers, on TANF or “timed-off,” into sex-segregated, low-income, career-ladderless fields such as home health care, which offered a median income in 2016 of $22,600.⁷⁹

Welfare reformers withdrew the lifeline public assistance had provided to poor mothers and their children without offering an alternate path to economic survival. Instead, they enacted an exaggerated performance of discipline for discipline’s sake, aimed at a grotesque caricature of poor single mothers.⁸⁰

When they utilized racialized gender ideology to propel the legislative movement for welfare reform, Democrats and Republicans inflicted long-lasting damage. We will explore the consequences of TANF more fully in later chapters but summarize them here as a way to take the measure of the law: In TANF, policy makers endorsed a mix of racism, sexism, reproductive injustice, and a lack of faith in government capacity that has been subsumed in policy discourse, with disabling effects.⁸¹ PRWORA both reflected and distorted perceptions of the U.S. welfare state and removed poverty from the lexicon of polite policy conversation, even among the fiercest critics of income inequality. Old Democrats, New Democrats, and progressive Democrats alike focus on improving conditions for the middle class, to the exclusion of working to end, or even mitigate, poverty.⁸² Meanwhile, Republicans of all stripes call for reducing government, not poverty—or they claim that reducing government is the way to reduce poverty. Both parties revel in the 1996 bipartisan argument that poor mothers and children should bear responsibility for their own economic vulnerability.

The mechanisms of disdain for poor families that characterize TANF policy now permeate other antipoverty policies. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), also known as the food stamp program, was perhaps most deeply inscribed with the restrictive and demeaning impulses behind “welfare reform.” SNAP benefits were never in cash, always only in food, and therefore not as controversial as income assistance grants under AFDC or, later, TANF.⁸³ But SNAP beneficiaries and TANF participants are subject to similar suspicion, aspersions, and controls. PRWORA instituted new restrictions on this strand of the safety net for impoverished legal immigrants and unemployed able-bodied adults without children at home. This last group is subject to time limits and mandatory work requirements. Childless adults face potential sanctions for nonparticipation in work programs, although they are not granted educational or training services. Unemployed, nonparenting, able-bodied adults are limited to three months of SNAP assistance in a three-year period.⁸⁴ At the height of the recession, this time limit was suspended in many states and localities, and maximum benefits increased somewhat. However, at the end of 2013, although many still faced unemployment or underemployment, the federal government reactivated the draconian terms for program participation.⁸⁵ Unchallenged, the powerful PRWORA paradigm and the invidious discourses that underpinned it strangled debate when the recession that began in 2008 drove the numbers of SNAP beneficiaries skyward.

Blaming the poor for their poverty and disdaining their need was codified in TANF policy and related aspects of PRWORA. Reauthorizing the policy under President George W. Bush in 2006, Republicans expanded the scope of governmental sex and gender regulation, exposed disparaged groups to heightened disciplinary treatment, and further impoverished the poor.⁸⁶ TANF reauthorization escalated marriage promotion and fatherhood incentives; invited states to wither cash assistance even further by spending more on programs that aim to change behavior rather than on income that sustains human dignity; and ratcheted up the work requirements that penalize poor single mothers for remaining single and poor.

Democrats opposed some of the Republican-initiated changes to TANF and voted against the omnibus Deficit Reduction Act that included TANF reauthorization. But as we discuss in later chapters, the return of Democrats to power in 2009 did not temper the harsh practices of welfare reform. Democrats contributed proposals to adjust welfare rules to economic reality but never really deviated from the 1996 TANF paradigm. President Obama, in fact, reprised TANF’s focus on patriarchal family forms by making fatherhood promotion the mainstay of his antipoverty policy.

Even federal programs for disabled people, once thought to be the quintessence of aid to the “deserving poor,” became soft targets in the wake of welfare reform.⁸⁷ Although impoverished parents lost entitlement to TANF with enactment of PRWORA in 1996, disabled adults who met program criteria (some of whom are, of course, parents) remained entitled to assistance through SSI, or, if they had sufficient work histories, Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI). Indeed, the federal government implicitly encouraged those who could not meet TANF work requirements because of impairments to recategorize themselves as disabled in order to get help.⁸⁸

By 2017, the lifeline extended to disabled poor people was in serious jeopardy. President Trump’s proposed domestic budget included a $72 billion cut in programs serving people with disabilities, chiefly SSDI and SSI.⁸⁹ Office of Management and Budget director Mick Mulvaney introduced the proposal with rhetoric strongly reminiscent of 1990s anti-welfare discourse, with a broader but still familiar emphasis on eliminating fraud through a new regime of work requirements to “increase labor force participation” by the severely disabled.⁹⁰ Waving the “work, not welfare” banner, Mulvaney condemned slackers and scammers he seems to think infest basic assistance programs: “If you’re on food stamps, and you’re able-bodied, we need you to go to work. If you’re on disability insurance and you’re not supposed to be—if you’re not truly disabled, we need you to go back to work.”⁹¹

TANF’s disciplinary mechanisms may have infiltrated the safety net more generally, but the indignities of the safety net continue to burden single mothers disproportionately, especially black, Latina, and Native American single mothers. Over a third (35.6 percent) of all single mothers with children under age eighteen live in poverty—and well over a third of black (38.8 percent), Latina (40.8 percent), and Native American (42.6 percent) single mothers. Even as the postrecession poverty rate declined a bit—to 12.7 percent overall in 2016—single mothers and their children remained singularly at risk of economic deprivation and insecurity.⁹²

“Who bears the brunt?” Representative Patsy Mink asked as her colleagues were fashioning welfare reform in the middle 1990s. Ultimately, it is the people who can least afford to.