Chamber of welfare reform.

• Author: Ehrenreich, Barbara
• Position: Flip Side - Unemployment and the United States

It was hard to miss the racism and misogyny that helped motivate welfare reform, which is about to come up for reauthorization by Congress. The stereotype of the welfare recipient--lazy, overweight, and endlessly fecund--had been a coded way of talking about African Americans at least since George Wallace's 1968 Presidential campaign.

As for misogyny, where to begin? The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 bears within it the assumption that families headed by single mothers are inherently defective, and not only on account of their relative poverty. In the rhetorical build-up to welfare reform, Republicans also sought to "restigmatize" out-of-wedlock births as "illegitimate," implying that only a male--the father--could confer respectability on a child. Bush's recent proposal for the reauthorization of welfare reform takes the gender politics to a lurid new low: $300 million would be allocated to encourage recipients to get married--to someone, anyone, as soon as possible.

One could not help but note, in the original arguments of welfare reform ideologues like author George Gilder and the Heritage Foundation's Robert Rector, an Obsessive fascination with female sexuality, especially the sexuality of women of color. In the reformers' view, welfare recipients were moral outlaws, and they were this way because welfare supported them in their slovenly, sexually indulgent ways. Even welfare itself was sexualized in the reformers' overheated imaginations: It had "cuckholded" black men, usurping their rightful place as breadwinners, leaving them emasculated and demoralized.

But there was always a more rational, economically calculating motivation behind welfare reform, represented by business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which hailed the 1996 legislation as a reaffirmation of "America's work ethic." By supporting mothers to stay home with their children, welfare had supposedly been undermining this ethic--never mind that raising children in poverty is itself a tricky and exhausting job, or that most welfare recipients, even before "reform," held jobs on and off to supplement their meager benefits. The business supporters of welfare reform wanted regular, paid employment to be understood as the only form of work worthy of respect and recognition.

The rhetoric surrounding welfare reform helped establish this extremely narrow, and, one might say, anti-family, point of view. People without jobs--paid...