Welfare's End.

• Author: Abramovitz, Mimi

This brief but highly informative book shows how the welfare "reform" act of 1996 harms women and children. Gwendolyn Mink is a professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Cruz, co-chair of the Women's Committee of One Hundred (which fought to derail the punitive legislation), and daughter of Congresswoman Patsy Takemoto Mink, Democrat of Hawaii, another opponent of the welfare law. With this background, Mink is in a good position "to illuminate the unique inequalities endured by poor single mothers in welfare law, and to suggest what welfare justice could be like if we made poor single mothers' equality as citizens and as women our priority"--the goals she sets out for herself in this book.

Mink takes on some of the knottiest welfare problems. Throughout, she identifies welfare as a women's issue, and she adds an important rights-based argument to the debate.

She effectively argues that the new law violates the basic rights of poor single mothers. She shows how the welfare law denies them the same protections granted to other citizens, undermines their constitutional and human rights to make their own decisions about marriage, family life, and procreation, and limits their full membership in society by keeping them poor. Indeed, Mink stresses that without a fundamental right to economic security provided by some kind of income guarantee, women cannot achieve equality in the family, the labor market, or the state.

At first glance, it seemed that the 1996 welfare debate dwelled mostly on the need for welfare mothers to work. Conservatives insisted that mothers on welfare get and hold down a job. Liberals tried to soften the blow by pushing for job training, transitional child care, and Medicaid benefits.

Mink argues that all the attention on work obscured the other stated goals of the welfare law: to promote marriage and the two-parent family. Lacking any research support, but fueled by rising rates of single motherhood among women in all walks of life, legislators charged that the old welfare system caused the upsurge in single-parent families. They blamed single motherhood for many of the nation's woes, ranging from school drop-outs and drive-by shootings all the way to the deficit.

So, the new law included punitive family-values provisions: the child exclusion (or "family cap"), which denies aid to children born to women on welfare; the "illegitimacy" bonus for states that keep down non-marital births without...