Decades of Distortion - Page 4
Racism And Wage Work
The impact of this rhetoric and its racist underpinnings is evident
in the 1967 amendments to the Social Security Act, which for the first
time placed mandatory work requirements on AFDC recipients. As more white
women moved into wage work, at least on a part-time basis, and that became
more acceptable,94 and as the states
were finally required to open the welfare rolls to women of color,95 the
image of "productive" became more complicated. In the rhetoric
of the Right, "good" (i.e., white) women were still relegated
to their calling as mothers and homemakers;96 although
for many "liberal" women, their self-definition and the resulting
partial societal understanding of them now included a career.
However, African American women had always been expected and required
to do wage work in US society, predominantly as domestic and agricultural
workers.97 Thus
as the new image of welfare recipient was constructed as African American,
it was only to be expected that they (unlike white women) should be required
to work.98 Note
the assertion in Human Events that relief recipients were not
willing to take crop picking work in California.99
Thus the images in the Congressional debate were of unmarried illiterate
women with a massive number of children and a lack of appropriate
parenting skills.100 Most
of these women lived in inner-city slums, particularly the largely
African American neighborhood of Harlem.101
This is only one example of the Right's two-sided attack on women. On
one hand, a woman's "natural place" is in the home; she finds
dignity and security beneath the authority of her husband;102 and
day care is opposed because it keeps children away from their mothers.103 On
the other hand, a woman without a man (i.e., a single mother welfare
recipient) should be in wage work. The implications of these two arguments,
as manifested in welfare policy, are racially based. 104 A
similar tension exists between the Right's commitment to limited government
intervention in individual's lives and the recommendations regarding
welfare policy as a mechanism for economically mandating "intact
marriages."105
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