Frances Fox Piven.

• Author: Ehrenreich, Barbara
• Position: Welfare's reform and future - Interview

Frances Fox Piven is my favorite intellectual role model. An acclaimed political scientist, she is a distinguished professor at the City University of New York graduate center and is the co-author, with her husband, Richard Cloward, of a number of books, including Regulating the Poor and Poor People's Movements. She's also a dedicated activist. With Cloward, she was an initiator of the "Motor Voter" bill to encourage voter registration, especially among low-income groups. But for more than thirty years, her biggest concern has been welfare.

In the 1960s, Piven worked with welfare-rights groups to expand benefits; in the eighties and nineties she has campaigned relentlessly against welfare cutbacks disguised as "reforms."

I met Piven thirteen years ago, when she asked me to help her plan the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, of which she was then president. I agreed only because I was thrilled at the idea of working with her. It was the beginning of an enduring friendship. Recently, I worked with Piven in the Women's Committee of 100 to oppose punitive welfare reform.

I interviewed her in her New York apartment on September 10, a few weeks after President Clinton had signed a bill ending the sixty-year-old federal commitment to welfare.

Q: Since Clinton signed the welfare bill, there seems to have been a change of heart among a lot of people. Suddenly, Joe Klein is aghast, writing in Newsweek that he was wrong to have favored welfare "reform" all this time. In the weeks after the signing, everywhere I looked, someone was denouncing Clinton for abandoning the poor. Could we have lost the policy battle and won the war of ideas?

Piven: Well, maybe a lot of liberals just weren't paying close attention for the last few years. Too many of them accepted the argument that welfare generates all these perverse incentives--making people lazy, encouraging them to have babies out of wedlock, etc. But at the same time, they didn't really want to see people simply get cut off And then they got bored with the issue, reassuring themselves that since Clinton had vetoed two welfare-reform bills, he'd veto a third one, too.

Q: But I do think there's been a sudden opinion shift, at least among a lot of pundits. Instead of redounding to Clinton's favor, the bill is being interpreted as a moral test that he was given and that he failed.

Piven: Well, lots of liberals failed, too. The Beltway organizations--women's groups and social-welfare advocacy groups--restricted themselves to an insider strategy. They seemed to think that, say, having a nice lobbying meeting with Leon Panetta was really doing something. What they needed to do was threaten Clinton with some serious political costs if he signed the bill. I don't think he was sure what the reaction would be, and he may have been waiting to find out. But we didn't threaten him with a wide airing of the issue--especially what the bill will do to children. No one went after him, not even Marian Wright Edelman, until after he had announced he would sign the...