Welfare and the Feminization of Poverty

Gwendolyn Mink’s article changed the way that I think about welfare. Last class we spoke about the feminization of poverty, a concept that I had been exposed to before in sociology and a gender in the economy class, but I never realized that welfare and thus welfare reform is really a poor woman’s issue. Together with the Committee of 100, Mink sought “not to speak for poor mothers but to speak with them” (Mink 56). Frustrated by the lack of feminist outrage against welfare reform, Mink, along with an “awesome collection of women”(Mink 56) spoke out for welfare as a women’s issue, arguing that a war against welfare is a war against poor women, “a war in which many middle-class women participated on the antiwelfare side” (Mink 56). When I first started reading, Mink’s article, I was not clear on why welfare is a poor woman’s issue and not an issue facing poor men and women, or why anti-welfare campaigns essentially compromise the rights of women. Throughout the article, however, Mink makes a good case for why welfare should not be seen as another example of “mothering the poor” but rather an uncontested right essential to alleviating inequality between the genders.

I had always been under the impression, congruent with the second wave middle class notion, that feminist activism meant fighting for women’s equal treatment in the workforce—that fighting for equal access to education, equal pay, and anti-discrimination labor laws was the route to achieving economic equality for women. What Mink has reminded me, however, is that this viewpoint is skewed toward the middle class, to those who can make the choice whether to stay home or whether to work. When we ignore the value of work done in the home, “support for welfare, which supports caregiving wanes and poor mothers are forced to live in poverty or give up having children” (Mink 60). Without welfare, single poor mothers have to face destitution as a consequence of raising their children, and are thus obliged to forego child bearing for paid labor. Married women, also lose from caregiving because they lack their own economic resources and are dependent on their husbands, skewing the power relations in the family. As a result, Mink argues “Full-time caregiving mothers, then, are disproportionately dependent on men if married and disproportionately poor, if not. These private inequalities have public effects, foreclosing mother-workers' independent citizenship”(63). Considering these inequalities for women, welfare, which creates income compensation for poor women working in the home to care for their children, becomes an equalizer that disassociates caregiving and destitution. As such, Mink argues “welfare should be a right, not an entitlement-a claim backed by law and courts that should be irresistible, or at least impossible for a rogue Congress to deny” (63). By establishing welfare as a right, she sees a cure to inequality “where it is most gendered—in sexual, reproductive and family relations” (Mink 63).

I think that Mink makes a compelling argument for the right to welfare and also the need for feminist support in its advocacy. I would like to know more about the laws of welfare reform and how requiring welfare recipients to perform wagework has affected single mothers. I have always considered combining wagework and welfare as a step toward reducing poverty, but now see how it disproportionately harms women. If we recognize that caregiving is itself a job, then it makes sense that welfare be its compensation, and with that logic, as Mink points out: “Poor single mothers already shoulder a double burden in parenting: should social policy require them to perform yet another job” (61).