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Introduction

One afternoon during the broiling hot summer of 1995, I sat in a tiny attic apartment on Chicago’s West Side talking with Bethany Grant, a thirty-four-year-old divorced African American mother.¹ Bethany was living with the youngest three of her five children and, temporarily, with her friend Sheena and Sheena’s children. The two-bedroom apartment was cramped for such a large number of people, and stifling hot, but the trees surrounding its windows made it feel like a tree house. Bethany’s willowy frame and flair for creating fashionable outfits from even the simplest of clothes gave her a certain grace. Just like her tree-house home, Bethany seemed to float above the stark reality of her meager resources.

Bethany spoke calmly while reporting her struggles as a single mother experiencing financial hardship. By the time she paid for rent, gas, and electricity, she had almost no money left to get through the month. She had no cushion to soften the blow of any unforeseen setbacks. As a result, she was keenly aware of the risks involved if her navigation of the welfare system and the low-wage labor market went awry. On the basis of personal experience, she also had a deep skepticism of both the employers and the welfare caseworkers who guarded the gates of entry to resources. Bethany liked working, but whenever she took a job while she was on welfare she felt she risked that her caseworker would cut off her welfare benefits, even the ones to which she was entitled and on which she relied for survival.² Sometimes the hassle of “fighting to get them back” made her think working was “not worth it.” Once, Bethany and her kids almost ended up homeless after she took a part-time job and reported it to the welfare office. Her earnings from the job were so low that she still qualified for a portion of her welfare benefits as well as food stamps and Medicaid coverage for herself and her children,³ but her caseworker “messed up” her case by mistakenly cutting off the benefits she still was legally allowed.⁴ “Every time I’ve worked, they wind up messing my whole case up. My case was messed up for like almost four months. I didn’t know what I was going to do. It was just by luck I had a friend that gave me a place to stay because my gas was [shut] off during the winter. . . . If he hadn’t been around, I don’t know what, I probably be on the street.”

Bethany also doubted that employers could be trusted to treat her fairly. This distrust, like her distrust of her caseworkers, kept her out of the labor market at times. For instance, her concerns about one work supervisor led her to leave the job and return fully to the welfare rolls before eventually cycling into another job. Bethany’s brother had gotten her the job at the lobby concession stand in the downtown office building where he worked. At first Bethany enjoyed the position and appreciated the new skills it gave her, but as time wore on she became increasingly displeased with her boss’s shirking of duties while talking on the phone and requests that Bethany run personal errands for her. Bethany was happy to work hard running the cash register and stocking the shelves, but she felt disrespected when her boss insisted that Bethany do tasks like picking up prescriptions for her at the pharmacy. The last straw came when Bethany was accused of stealing on the job.

People were stealing out of the safe. Things was missing out the storage room. People’d walk off with candy or whatever. . . . Then me and . . . this other coworker, we was like new to the job, so it was like . . . trying to point the finger at us. And it’s like, “Wait a minute! Hold up, I’m not going through this!” I told my brother, “I’ll leave the job before I sit up here and be ridiculed like that.” And we come to find out it was two people that had been working there all along. We was like, “See?”

When the true culprits were apprehended, it was too late for Bethany. The incident cemented her belief that she would never be treated fairly by her supervisor. She quit. Bethany’s distrust in people in two separate settings—the welfare office and the workplace—conspired to pull her out of steady employment and back toward the welfare system.

As the scholar Francis Fukuyama points out, trust is a “lubricant” for action, while distrust stalls it.⁵ If persons or institutions are indeed trustworthy (a condition that often seems unmet in Bethany’s world), trust in them opens up opportunities and distrust closes off opportunities. For low-income mothers like Bethany, distrust is a barrier to taking the actions the wider society wants them to take—voluntarily leaving welfare, finding work, using child care, getting married, involving their children’s fathers in family life, and relying on kin rather than government for support. Low-income families who frequently face material and other hardships are in great need of the opportunities that trusting might bring, such as gaining a foothold in the labor market, accessing nurturing child care services, or partnering with those who may share the challenges of raising children in poverty. And yet, as it turns out, they find themselves in circumstances that do not promote trust. While they need trust’s benefits, they are unlikely to trust. Distrust can be a powerful force in guiding key life decisions. But this factor, with its profound and wide-ranging consequences for low-income mothers, has been too long overlooked.

In 2005, ten years after my interview with Bethany, I visited Susan Schiller’s brick row house in a Chicago low-rise public housing project. Her living room was painted a peeling dark greenish-brown. Its first-floor windows, which were immediately adjacent to the sidewalk and unadorned by curtains or shades, afforded no privacy. While Susan and I talked, several neighbors stuck their heads right into one of the windows to say hello as they walked by. Susan, a white woman in her early forties and the single mother of four children (only two of whom were still under eighteen), had decorated the room with her children’s sports trophies. At five foot ten, she was tall and attractive, though she complained about all the weight she had put on over the years. Her fourteen-year-old daughter, who was even taller than Susan, popped in and out of our conversation in order to affectionately tease her mom.

Susan, like Bethany, had a long work history interrupted by several stints on welfare. She had left her most recent job in a desperate but failed attempt to gain control over her fifteen-year-old son, who had gotten caught up in gang activity and was now incarcerated. She was looking for work and scraping by with help from her oldest son, a twenty-four-year-old who worked as a medical assistant and lived in his own apartment nearby, and her boyfriend, who made under $10 an hour as a forklift driver.⁶ Luckily, since she lived in public housing, her rent was dropped to zero during the times she had no earnings.

Susan also did not place much faith in caseworkers. She suspected that a caseworker’s main goal was to “cut [people] totally off,” and since she felt caseworkers made it as unpleasant as possible to be on welfare, her wariness led her to try to avoid welfare as long as she could. She wanted to save the months she had remaining on her time-limited welfare clock because “Who’s to say when hard times will come?” (She defined these potential hard times as worse than now, when she was “hurting” but still had “a roof over [her] head.”) But that left her dependent on jobs in which she also at times distrusted both her supervisors and her coworkers and her supervisors distrusted her. As with Bethany, Susan’s distrust in the workplace served to interrupt periods of employment. Susan had been fired from a job selling food at a large arena after being accused of stealing a hot dog. Susan denied stealing the hot dog and suspected that really her boss wanted to get rid of her after she had refused to spy on a coworker who she feared would retaliate.

They don’t screen their employees. Anybody can work there. You can just get out of prison and work there. . . . So they have a lot of people who rob them. That’s just constant. So, what they’ll do is they’ll spy on you. . . . [There was] this girl that was a couple registers down from me, and [my supervisor] said that she knows she’s stealing and she wanted me to watch, and I said, “It is not my job. I’m not watching her and telling you nothing.” That could cause a lotta stuff [meaning retribution]. Because, like I said, they’ll hire anybody. “If you know she’s stealing, then you have somebody else watch her. That’s what you have . . . supervisors for. . . .” Then she got mad.

It is hard to know what exactly happened at the arena and who was at fault for what, but it seems fairly clear that mutual distrust played some role.

Bethany Grant and Susan Schiller are just two of the ninety-five women I spoke with about raising children and making do in poverty. Many of the other women also brought up the topic of distrust in caseworkers and work supervisors and described how it related to their welfare and work outcomes. But lack of trust played a role beyond welfare receipt and employment patterns. Other women talked about distrust in relation to other outcomes, such as whether they signed up for child care, got married, allowed their kids’ fathers into their kids’ lives, or relied on their family and friends for help. In fact, there did not seem to be any important outcomes in their lives that the women discussed without referencing how their trust or distrust in others played a role.

When I interviewed Bethany in the mid-1990s, I was a doctoral student writing a dissertation on how attention to the full context of low-income mothers’ lives helps us understand how women in poverty make decisions about welfare use and getting jobs. I explored women’s experiences not only in welfare offices but also in workplaces, and with child care providers, boyfriends and husbands, and family and friends. When I conducted these mid-1990s interviews, I was not looking for the presence of distrust and I did not ask specifically about it. I simply wanted to know how various settings, such as welfare offices or child care markets, influenced women’s choices about welfare and employment. But once the interviews were completed, I was struck by how many women talked about their suspicions of others’ unreliability and by how these suspicions arose in almost every area of women’s lives. While each of the contexts I studied had its particular impact on the women’s experiences, I came to see a familiar pattern: the women distrusted many of those whom they encountered, and their distrust was a key ingredient in shaping their behaviors.

A year after I completed the 1990s interviews, and hence between the time I talked with Bethany and the time I met Susan, a major piece of federal legislation designed to change low-income women’s decision making was passed. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), or welfare reform, as it is more commonly known, was signed into law by President Bill Clinton on August 22, 1996, and was implemented in 1997. Its goals were (and continue to be) to promote quick exits from the welfare rolls, employment, marriage, paternal involvement, and reliance on kin rather than government. To do so, it created time limits on welfare benefits (hence Susan’s concern over her welfare “clock”), work requirements, and funding streams for child care subsidies and marriage promotion programs. It removed disincentives to marry and made paternity establishment mandatory for the receipt of benefits.

In the immediate post-reform era, a flurry of research activity sprang up to examine welfare reform. Although I had moved on to work on other topics, I followed the new welfare reform literature with interest, eager to see how the experiences of women navigating the worlds of welfare and low-wage work since reform differed from those of the women I had studied before reform. As time wore on, however, I came to see that little comparable work was being produced. There were many quantitative studies designed to identify the effects of reform,⁷ and some key qualitative studies had looked at specific aspects of reform—how post-reform welfare offices delivered services or how low-income mothers patched together child care services, for instance⁸—but with only one or two notable exceptions, little qualitative work had examined low-income women’s lives holistically in the post-reform era.⁹

In the mid-2000s, I decided to write a book on the subject, and in order to do so I set out to conduct a new round of interviews with a different group of women now living in the post-reform world. These women were at a similar stage in their life course to that of the women I had interviewed ten years earlier, meaning that they had children young enough to be eligible for welfare and that they either were receiving welfare or had received it in the past few years. The interviews with this new group of women coupled with the interviews conducted with the other group of women interviewed earlier would form the basis of the book.

While of course it would be interesting to know how my original interviewees were doing, they most likely had long moved on from straddling the border between welfare and work—either because their children would now be too old to be eligible for welfare or simply because only a tiny minority of women use welfare benefits for that long. In the pre-reform era, the average woman who entered the welfare system received assistance for just about four and a half years before stopping.¹⁰ Reinterviewing the original group of women would thus have entailed major problems. It could not have addressed the question that interested me, namely how women at the same point in their lives (i.e., with minor children and current or recent welfare usage) were faring after reform and whether distrust in each of the contexts I had studied earlier still played a role in the actions of women at this life stage.

I expected to see enormous differences after reform, and of course, I did see some. Welfare reform heralded important changes. These changes are reflected in the fact that Bethany faced no work requirements and hence could hesitate to take a job and keep getting welfare benefits. By contrast, Susan was driven to eschew welfare in order to save the limited time she could draw on benefits for when “hard times” might strike. The women I interviewed in the mid-2000s knew they would have to find child care and try to find work or make do without the welfare benefits, which required work activity. Most of the women I interviewed, like so many other low-income women in America since reform, tried to stay off welfare as much as possible. Indeed, the mass exodus of low-income mothers from the welfare rolls in the aftermath of reform represents the near elimination of one piece of the U.S. welfare state.¹¹

But my other expectations about differences across the two time periods were not met. I had assumed that after reform women would no longer feel they could afford the luxury of acting upon their suspicions of others. For instance, I thought that no mother would leave a job because of questions about her supervisor’s fairness, since she could no longer count indefinitely on welfare to support her. Nor did I expect distrust to play as much of a role in blocking women’s actions in any of the contexts I studied. The new policy gave women voluntary incentives to leave the welfare rolls before mandatory ones hit, to find and stay in jobs, to find and maintain child care arrangements, to get married, to get help from children’s fathers, and to rely on friends and family for support, and I had presumed that these would override mothers’ feelings of distrust when they made decisions. But instead, I was mostly struck by the similarities across time. Women interviewed in the mid-2000s described the same problems and the same distrust in much the same ways as women interviewed in the mid-1990s. In fact, until I became so familiar with my interview transcripts that I immediately recognized the details of a case, I often could not tell whether I was reading one from the pre- or post-reform time period. They did not really differ. Yes, the details of how welfare policy operated had shifted, but the women’s struggle to keep their families afloat and the impact of their lack of faith in others in the five contexts studied remained remarkably stable.

The post-reform interviews echoed the theme of the pre-reform interviews: the contexts I studied and the interactions within them were often marked by distrust. And that suspicion, the wariness that so many women described, functioned in the same way at both time periods: it kept women from taking risks. Distrust kept them from believing that the “carrots” in policies designed to voluntarily entice them into the labor market were real (though it also led them to be certain that the mandatory “sticks” that forcibly pushed them to work were real). It led them to quit jobs at the first sign a boss might not treat them fairly. It encouraged them to yank their children out of child care arrangements they questioned. It made them hesitant to marry or to become too close to their romantic partners. It gave them pause about involving their children’s fathers in their lives. And it kept them from exchanging goods and support with certain friends and family members. In other words, it kept them from doing many of the very things welfare reformers wanted them to do.

The more I compared the interviews conducted at the two different time periods, the more the book became about continuity rather than change. What started as a book about how welfare reform played out in the lives of low-income mothers became a book about the consistency of distrust in low-income mothers’ lives as they managed the same old struggles. Despite the controversy and hyperbole that accompanied the development and passage of welfare reform of the 1990s, the legislation fell short of addressing root causes of many of the problems of those in poverty.¹²

Welfare reform strove to “fix” the individual behavior of low-income mothers, who were seen as unduly dependent on government funding and personally averse to mainstream family norms. Reform held such mothers accountable for their own plights and aimed to encourage their “personal responsibility” by creating a set of incentives and mandates designed to promote behaviors such as welfare exit, employment, and avoidance of nonmarital fertility. These incentives achieved some success for some groups of women but left other women’s lives unchanged or changed for the worse.¹³ Reform had a greater impact on outcomes related to work and welfare use than on those related to marriage and childbearing.¹⁴ And the initial positive effects of reform slowed over time both as economic recession hit and as the most advantaged recipients left the rolls, leaving behind those who were less likely to fare well without more support.¹⁵

Why were reform’s benefits limited in these ways? One reason is that basing reform legislation on a single-minded conception of low-income women as autonomous actors ignores the ways low-income women’s actions are constrained by their social environment. This approach fails to grasp a fundamental social science finding: social contexts profoundly influence individuals’ behavior. A host of social experiments make this fact abundantly clear. For instance, the Asch conformity experiments show that people will correctly answer questions about the lengths of lines drawn on cards if they are alone but will answer incorrectly if they are in a group of people who give incorrect answers.¹⁶ They succumb to peer pressure and conform to others’ answers even when they know the answers are incorrect. An even more dramatic example is the Stanford prison experiment conducted by Philip Zimbardo.¹⁷ In this study, Stanford University students were randomly assigned to perform the role of either “guard” or “prisoner.” In the course of just a few days, the simulated prison context of the experiment led the guards to behave sadistically toward the prisoners, and the prisoners, traumatized by the experience, to become submissive to the guards’ authority and depressed.

It is not enough to try to change individual behaviors; we also need to understand the individual’s reaction to her surrounding contexts. Contexts where key people—such as caseworkers, employers, or boyfriends—act in erratic, irresponsible, or untrustworthy ways can produce a form of distrust in individuals that in turn affects their behavior. Distrust and the behaviors influenced by distrust were often a response to the conditions the women I interviewed found (or expected to find) in various social contexts.

If we really want to understand low-income mothers’ welfare, employment, and family choices and outcomes, we need to look beyond the mothers themselves to the social contexts in which mothers find themselves.¹⁸ These contexts affect low-income mothers’ impressions of what will happen if they take the actions the reformers hoped for. The women I interviewed reported that they did not trust the people and the institutions in their environment to follow through on promises and to treat them with respect. This lack of trust constrained their actions. It protected them when people around them proved untrustworthy, but it could cause them to forego or misperceive potential opportunities that would improve their situations. No policy that ignores the forces that produce distrust will truly change the lives of low-income mothers and their children.

These women’s distrust appeared to arise from several sources. They learned it through direct experience with those who prove untrustworthy. Experiences with one caseworker, boss, or romantic partner taught them that others were not reliable, and they then carried over that distrust to new caseworkers, bosses, and boyfriends. They absorbed wariness from others in their community whose experiences taught them to be suspicious of the motives and reliability of various actors and institutions. They used distrust as armor to preemptively protect themselves from those who might disappoint or mistreat them.

In all of these situations, the women’s subordinate position in contexts such as the welfare office and the low-wage workplace—and even sometimes romantic relationships marked by violence or intimidation—was likely to be at the root of their distrust. This structural position brought with it a degree of powerlessness. Relative powerlessness vis-à-vis those around them made the women vulnerable to mistreatment by those who did not share their interests.

The women’s limited power also left them with few tools in their arsenals, other than distrust, with which to confront the indignities of their position. Others might be in control, but the women retained the power to withhold trust. Without deep changes—much deeper ones than those offered by welfare reform—that would actually alter their relative position of power in interactions or at least provide some guarantee that others would share their interests or would reliably make good on promises, distrust and the barriers to action it creates would prevail.

The women I interviewed were not only in a disadvantaged position in welfare offices, workplaces, and similar local contexts, they were also at the bottom of the hierarchy in U.S. society more broadly. Most notably, they were at the very bottom of the income distribution. In 2005, during my second round of interviews, a single mother of two children in Illinois with no other income than welfare received $4,752 in income for the entire year, unless of course she did not manage to retain benefits for the whole year, in which case she received less. If instead of receiving welfare she worked for minimum wage, which was $5.15 in 2005, she would still make only $10,712. And that would be if she worked forty hours a week, fifty-two weeks a year, without missing a single day. The poverty line for a family with one adult and two children in 2005 was $15,735. Thus the welfare recipient’s income was less than a third of those living at the poverty line figure, and even a full-time minimum-wage worker’s income was only about two-thirds of the poverty line amount.¹⁹

Many of the women I interviewed faced other disadvantages in addition to low income that relegated them to the bottom of the U.S. stratification system. They lived in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty with high crime rates. Their children attended low-performing schools, much like the ones they themselves had attended. Often the men in their lives were incarcerated. They did not have the political voice to sway politicians to address their concerns. The women’s disadvantage and relative powerlessness were thus twofold: they were in subordinate positions both in several of the contexts I studied and in U.S. society at large. These positions of subordination fed their suspicion that others did not share their interests and that it was up to them to protect themselves.

AIN’T NO TRUST’s MAIN FINDINGS AND ARGUMENT

The study documents that most of the low-income mothers interviewed experienced feelings of distrust. This distrust surfaced, not in just one setting, but in all of the arenas studied: welfare offices, workplaces, child care markets, romantic unions, and social networks. The presence and nature of distrust did not change across the two time periods studied. Distrust inhibited the actions of the women during both the pre- and post-welfare reform time periods. Most notably, it often kept women from taking the very actions that welfare reform was designed to promote. These four findings—most mothers experienced distrust, mothers experienced distrust across multiple arenas, distrust did not change across the time periods, and distrust inhibited action at both time periods, even those actions welfare reformers intended to promote—are the main findings of this book.

On the basis of these findings, Ain’t No Trust argues that welfare reform’s effects would have been larger if distrust had not limited women’s response to the incentives that reform created. Other researchers, discussed further in chapter 1, have indeed found that despite the impact of welfare reform, it fell short of achieving all its intended effects and did not universally improve the lives of low-income families.²⁰ Indeed, the stories told by the women interviewed for this study support these findings in that they talked about having nearly identical problems whether they were interviewed before or after welfare. The daily struggles of low-income mothers’ lives sounded no different across time periods.

Welfare reform did not attempt to reduce distrust. It did not address any of the elements that produce distrust in the five settings this book investigates. As scholarship described in chapter 1 shows, it did not change the incentives for caseworkers, working conditions in low-wage jobs, the supply of high-quality child care, the opportunities for low-income men, or the resources to communities in which the members of women’s social networks live.²¹ These are “structural” elements of the five settings. It also did not change the fact that low-income mothers, especially single mothers, still occupy a disadvantaged position in the U.S. social structure at large. For instance, single-mother families have the highest poverty rate of all family types in America.²² William Julius Wilson defines social structure as “the way social positions, social roles, and networks of social relationships are arranged in our institutions, such as the economy, polity, education, and organization of the family.”²³ These patterned arrangements affect both the relationships people have with each other and the opportunities (or barriers to opportunity) people have.

The research is based on a study of low-income women and hence does not directly study these structural factors themselves.²⁴ But we know from the studies discussed in chapter 1 that welfare reform did not make changes in these structural factors. We can see the women reacting to these factors in their reports of why they distrust. As they detail events, we see that the women learn to distrust through direct experience. They learn to distrust because they interact with people they deem untrustworthy. The women report that these people can be unreliable, abusive, unsafe, disrespectful, or destructive in other ways. This perceived untrustworthiness in turn relates to the structural factors that welfare reform left in place. For instance, some mothers share Bethany’s claim that caseworkers cut them off from benefits to which they are entitled. This complaint relates to a structural element of the welfare office: in both time periods, caseworkers have been strongly encouraged to reduce the size of their caseloads and have not been penalized for making bureaucratic errors that cut benefits to eligible recipients.²⁵ It is true that at times some mothers appear to enter into interactions already distrusting. But this preemptive distrust is still structurally undergirded by either the women’s past experiences or their knowledge of others’ experiences.

This book is about the prevalence of distrust in low-income communities. Women of different races, ethnicities, ages, educational levels, and employment histories and from different time periods all report high levels of distrust. The book is about how distrust guides behavior. It is about the costs of learning to distrust the hard way: by placing trust in those who prove untrustworthy. In short, Ain’t No Trust argues that we cannot understand life in poverty without attention to the production and consequences of distrust.

The book uses the case of welfare reform to illustrate the role of distrust in low-income life and to highlight the persistence of distrust when the structural factors that produce it do not change. And by using the case of a policy reform, the book also shows that policies that do not attend to the structures that produce distrust may be able to achieve certain effects but that these effects will be limited in scope.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO TRUST, POVERTY, AND SOCIAL POLICY RESEARCH

The findings in this book contribute to several different literatures. Overall, they suggest that these literatures should incorporate the lessons learned by each other. In this section, I discuss each of these literatures in turn.

Ain’t No Trust argues that the literatures on poverty and social policy would benefit from paying more attention to the literature on trust. The trust literature tells us that distrust is more common among low-income and minority populations than other populations.²⁶ It establishes that people are less likely to trust those who hold power over them.²⁷ It shows us that distrust dissuades action.²⁸ Each of these findings has great relevance for understanding both life in poverty and the workings of social policies. And yet these insights are often ignored in scholarship on poverty and social policy. I find that low-income mothers feel plagued by those they believe to be untrustworthy and that their resultant distrust undermines key goals of welfare reform policy. These findings bring home the value of heeding the trust literature’s lessons when studying the struggles of low-income families and the policies that affect them.

At the same time, this book’s findings suggest that the trust literature would benefit from paying more attention to the real-life trust problems that low-income populations face. Much of the trust literature is based on experiments or is theoretical. Actual field-based studies are few and far between.²⁹ The investigation reported here of distrust in a natural setting shows the development and implications of distrust for real lives outside the laboratory.

In addition, the trust literature finds that powerlessness is a barrier to trust, but it has little to say about how powerlessness creates a trust barrier or how that barrier might be overcome.³⁰ Karen S. Cook, a leading scholar on trust, has written about this limitation of the trust literature.³¹ The women interviewed for this book often experienced relative powerlessness vis-à-vis those with whom they interacted. Caseworkers had the power to deny them needed benefits. Bosses had the power to fire them from needed jobs. Boyfriends exerted power over them through physical intimidation or other means. This study provides insights into how the women’s relative powerlessness in these realms produced distrust and what would be needed for them to trust. For instance, women would have greater trust in their caseworkers if they knew that caseworkers were rewarded for avoiding bureaucratic errors and treating them with respect. Women do not trust caseworkers because they do not believe they share their interests. Changing the incentives for caseworkers would realign caseworker interests so that clients would begin to believe their interests were shared, which in turn would promote trust. The detailed examples from this study and similar field studies can begin to move the trust literature toward a theory of trust and powerlessness.

Another lesson of the book for the trust literature is the importance of maintaining a distinction between trust and trustworthiness. The political scientist Russell Hardin makes clear that one’s choice to place trust in another is related to but different from whether the other is indeed worthy of trust.³² Despite Hardin’s highlighting of the importance of the trust versus trustworthiness distinction, much of the trust literature focuses on trust rather than trustworthiness. When the trustworthiness of interaction partners is ignored, it is easy to focus solely on those who do not trust and see “fixing” their inability to trust as the solution. Instead, I attend at all times to the potentiality of untrustworthiness in interaction partners as a producer of distrust. Many of the contexts in which low-income women find themselves are structured in ways that promote the untrustworthiness of others. (The discussion above of caseworkers being rewarded for getting clients off the welfare rolls, even if they do so by making errors, is just one example.) Consequently, getting women to be more trusting is not the solution. Getting their interaction partners to be more trustworthy is.

A final implication for the trust literature relates to a debate in the field over whether trust and distrust stem from a personality trait, set of moral values, or from learned experience in social contexts.³³ This study provides evidence that people learn to trust or distrust through experience. Many women interviewed described trusting, getting burned, and learning to distrust as a result. Women also told stories of not knowing what to expect in a situation and being surprised by the behavior of others, behavior that eventually taught them to distrust. These narratives of learning distrust through experience support experimental evidence that trust and distrust cannot be attributed to a personality trait wholly unrelated to experience and social context.³⁴

The findings in this book also have implications for research on welfare usage and poverty. Many of the quantitative studies of low-income parents’ movement off the welfare rolls look at the impact of individual traits on outcomes. They consider the role of education, work experience, physical and mental health, drug use, car ownership, and similar factors on women’s outcomes in the reform era.³⁵ However, the quantitative literature pays less attention to the role of social context—which this book shows is crucial for understanding low-income women’s behavior and outcomes.

The qualitative literature on welfare reform, and low-income mothers more generally, pays much more attention to social context, but most studies focus on a single context. For example, there are excellent studies of what happens in welfare offices or between romantic partners.³⁶ Some of these studies identify distrust as an important explanation of behaviors. But few studies take a holistic approach and look across multiple settings, as this book does. Others have made important contributions by showing the role of distrust in romantic relationships or child care choices or job referrals.³⁷ But in these studies, the investigator is narrowly focusing on the particular context of interest and, in trying to understand women’s experiences in that context, discovers distrust to play a role. This study extends such findings and shows that distrust exists in these isolated settings and more—distrust can be everywhere and has the potential to block action in every direction. Furthermore, the study provides evidence that distrust operates in similar ways in each setting. Since this book takes a more holistic approach and studies multiple contexts of women’s lives, it can create a more generalized view of how distrust and stalled action recur as a social process in almost every area of low-income women’s lives. The problem is not only that distrust blocks action when it comes to interacting with caseworkers or boyfriends. The problem is that distrust blocks action in multiple key arenas of policy concern in which low-income mothers find themselves.

This study also contributes something new to the qualitative literatures on welfare reform and low-income mothers by drawing on interviews from two time periods. Because of this, it is able to show the consistency of distrust in low-income mothers’ lives despite the introduction of a major policy change.

Ain’t No Trust also contributes to the literature on poverty more generally. It is a counterargument to a culture of poverty perspective. Culture of poverty theories posit that low-income populations respond to structural barriers, such as lack of political power or access to education, by adapting their cultural values to match their lack of opportunity. Most importantly, culture of poverty theorists suggest that these altered, and now deficient, values are passed down from parents to children across generations.³⁸ Policy makers or taxpayers who complained that welfare had become “a way of life” and that single mothers lacked “family values” and who looked to welfare reform to change a “welfare culture” were implicitly arguing that welfare programs had unwittingly created or enabled a “culture of poverty.”

My argument joins the early work of Elliot Liebow, who forcefully argued against a culture of poverty in his study of low-income African American men who spent time on a street corner in Washington, D.C., in the 1960s.³⁹ He asserted that the men he observed were not taught by their fathers a pathological set of cultural values that crippled their aspirations for middle-class life. Instead, Liebow argued, these men experienced the same structural barriers that their fathers had encountered, and they adapted to them over time in the same way their fathers had. Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas concluded similarly that low-income women’s failure to marry the fathers of their children is not based on a set of values about marriage different from middle-class values; rather, it reflects low-income women’s strict adherence to middle-class marriage values. Edin and Kefalas argued the women feel they cannot afford marriage because they cannot afford a traditional wedding and because their potential husbands, who face both high unemployment and high incarceration rates, cannot fulfill the traditional male breadwinner role. Although they cannot achieve economic stability in time to marry before having children, they hope to marry one day.⁴⁰

My findings suggest that the structural arrangements of welfare offices, of workplaces and labor markets, and of other contexts in which low-income women interact with others produce their distrust and its resultant stalled action. Many of my respondents indicated that they had at first trusted various others, only to learn themselves through experience over time that this trust was unwarranted. This process indicates that they had not inherited cultural values that led them to reject these outcomes. Instead, they reported that their experience of the structural contexts of the welfare office and other settings had produced their skepticism about whether they could count on caseworkers, bosses, boyfriends, and others to come through for them. Like Liebow’s “streetcorner men” and Edin and Kefalas’s single mothers, for these women structural forces and not cultural values appear to guide the behaviors that those observing from afar have deemed undeserving.⁴¹

THE STUDY AND THE ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK

The findings in this book are based on a total of ninety-five interviews with two different sets of women in Chicago, one before welfare reform and one after.⁴² I interviewed twenty-six women in 1994–95, before reform was passed. Another sixty-nine women were interviewed in 2004–5, after reform was fully in place.⁴³ All of the women had at least one child under the age of eighteen and either were receiving welfare or had received it in recent years. The women varied in age, race and ethnicity, education level, marital history, and number of children. Some had received welfare for long periods, some for only quick stints. Some seemed to have made stable transitions into the labor force, some had made initial forays that seemed less assured of permanence, and for some, finding employment appeared to be only a distant hope. In short, while my qualitative nonrandom samples cannot represent the full population of low-income women in Chicago (and, while one might expect some similarities to other large urban areas, Chicago cannot represent other geographical locales, especially rural ones), I was careful to include a wide variety of women from different backgrounds who were at different points in making welfare-to-work transitions.⁴⁴ This latter variation allowed me to hear about both current welfare and current employment experiences from the women I interviewed. I thus feel confident that I have tapped the experience of a varied group of women in each time period.

I draw primarily on the interviews themselves, but to provide additional information that might help to interpret findings, I and my graduate student assistants did spend more informal time with a handful of women in each time period, allowing for follow-up and more in-depth observation of the challenges they faced in daily life. I was also able to conduct some informal observation at some of the job-training sites and welfare offices where respondents received services and where I also spoke with personnel.⁴⁵

Chapter 1 provides a more in-depth overview of how U.S. policy has addressed low-income mothers over time, what welfare reform actually did, and what we know about reform’s effects. It then moves on to treat trust and distrust in more detail. It concludes by discussing the role of structural factors in creating the circumstances that produce distrust.

The detailed findings of the study are given in chapters 2 through 6, each of which covers one of the five contexts in which I studied distrust. Chapter 2 focuses on women’s interactions with caseworkers in the welfare office. It is through caseworkers that women learn welfare rules and access welfare benefits. The nature of a woman’s relationship with her caseworker determines in part her understanding of welfare rules and whether she believes they will be followed reliably. While some women praised supportive caseworkers, most described caseworkers who paid inadequate attention to their needs and treated them with hostility. As a result of these difficult interactions, many women in both time periods either did not know official welfare rules or suspected that caseworkers honored only the rules that were not in a recipient’s favor. Both the lack of communication of welfare rules and the distrust that they would be properly implemented undermined voluntary incentives designed to entice recipients into the labor market. Distrust thus inhibited women’s positive response to voluntary incentives. Mandatory policies such as time limits, however, were more effective, since they were in line with women’s view of caseworkers as unsupportive.

Chapter 3 explores women’s experiences in the workplace as they interacted with supervisors and coworkers. The workplace is an arena in which both employers and employees face uncertainty. As other scholars in the sociology of work have suggested, but as is not sufficiently recognized in studies of policy, employers do not know which employees will perform reliably and be trustworthy and which will not.⁴⁶ Similarly, employees do not know whether employers will treat them fairly. Women in low-wage jobs often feel their supervisors (and sometimes their coworkers) mistreat them and thus do not trust that they will get a fair shake at work. Surprisingly, this distrust led women to quit their jobs not only before welfare reform, when they could reliably replace wages (at least in part) with welfare benefits, but also after reform, when no such financial guarantee was in place. Quick turnover in jobs was thus due not only to factors outside the workplace, such as insufficient child care or transportation challenges, but also to traits of the workplace itself—in this case, the conditions that produced employee distrust of supervisors.

Chapter 4 investigates the arena of child care. The post-reform group described the same inability to trust the quality of child care providers available as the women interviewed before reform. Women after reform sometimes felt forced by work mandates to use care providers they did not trust, but they tended to stop these arrangements eventually. Women in both time periods interrupted their labor market participation because of their distrust in their children’s care providers.

Chapter 5 treats women’s relationships with the fathers of their children and other romantic partners. Many women reported they could not trust the fathers of their children or other romantic partners. Even though some women were romantically involved with men, they often kept partners at arm’s length, and their suspicions kept them from marrying the men in their lives. Despite welfare reform’s removal of several marriage disincentives and its rhetoric about the value of marriage, distrust still forestalled marriage.

Chapter 6 addresses women’s relationships with members of their kinship and friendship networks. This was the arena in which women trusted people the most. Many women considered family members and friends priceless allies. Still distrust was present. Some friends and family members used drugs and alcohol to excess, others promised to take care of children but went out to party instead, while others constantly asked for money or food or, worse yet, took it without asking. Women who felt they could not trust network members went to great lengths to keep such people out of their lives and away from their children. Untrustworthy network members not only represented a lost source of potential support but could drain households of resources, time, and peacefulness. Chapter 6 also explores whether the kinds of resources that kinship and friendship networks provide women have changed since welfare reform. It shows that women interviewed before reform drew more on their networks for job information that helped them get ahead, whereas women interviewed after reform were more likely to draw on their networks for resources like money or child care that helped them survive day to day. In both time periods, there was a relationship between women’s trust in their networks and their ability to draw support from their networks.

The Conclusion urges reformers to think more broadly and deeply than they have about how distrust is produced and what its consequences are for low-income mothers. It pays particular attention to the ways in which policies designed without regard to the importance of building trust (such as welfare reform) may fall short of their intended goals.

Each of the book’s chapters tells a story of distrust. The details differ depending on the particular arena of low-income women’s lives examined in that chapter, but the general process is strikingly similar throughout. By watching this process play out five times in five separate contexts, we begin to see clues that something about the structure of the context itself—about the incentives and constraints that other people and institutions in it were facing—made the women keenly aware that their interests were not the same as the interests of these others and made them deeply suspicious of the others’ trustworthiness. The women were not uniform in their distrust. Some distrusted only some people in each arena, or only people in certain arenas. And certainly many women did experience trust in others at times. But across all the women and all the contexts, there were distinct patterns of distrust. Welfare reform certainly made changes, but it did not change the circumstances that produced distrust or the inhibiting effects of distrust described by women in poverty.