women's welfare essay

Essay on Women’s Welfare

Students are often asked to write an essay on Women’s Welfare in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Women’s Welfare

Introduction.

Women’s welfare refers to the overall well-being of women, including health, education, and rights. It is crucial for societal progress as women constitute half of the world’s population.

Importance of Women’s Welfare

Women’s welfare is important for achieving gender equality. It ensures women have access to healthcare, education, and employment opportunities, enabling them to contribute to societal development.

Challenges in Women’s Welfare

Despite progress, women often face issues like domestic violence, discrimination, and limited access to education. These challenges hinder women’s welfare and need urgent attention.

Promoting women’s welfare is essential for a balanced and progressive society. It requires collective efforts from governments, organizations, and individuals.

Also check:

• 10 Lines on Women’s Welfare

250 Words Essay on Women’s Welfare

Women’s welfare is a broad topic that encompasses numerous aspects of women’s lives, including their health, education, employment, and social protection. It is an essential component of societal development, as it directly impacts the overall health and well-being of communities and nations.

Health and Education

The welfare of women is intrinsically linked to their health and education. Women’s access to quality healthcare and education not only improves their personal lives but also has a ripple effect on their families and communities. When women are educated, they are more likely to make informed decisions about their health, contribute to their families’ income, and raise educated children.

Economic Empowerment

Economic empowerment is another critical aspect of women’s welfare. Ensuring that women have equal opportunities for employment and entrepreneurship leads to economic growth and reduces poverty. Moreover, when women have control over their income, they are more likely to invest in their children’s education and health, further enhancing societal welfare.

Social Protection

Social protection measures such as laws against gender-based violence, policies promoting gender equality, and social safety nets are vital for women’s welfare. They protect women from harm, provide them with equal opportunities, and ensure they have a safety net in times of crisis.

In conclusion, women’s welfare is not just about women; it is about the health and prosperity of societies and nations. By investing in women’s health, education, economic empowerment, and social protection, we can create a better world for everyone.

500 Words Essay on Women’s Welfare

Women’s welfare is an issue of paramount importance, not only for the development of women themselves but also for the progress of society as a whole. It concerns the overall well-being of women, encompassing aspects such as health, education, economic empowerment, and social rights. Despite the significant strides made over the years, a lot more needs to be done to ensure women’s welfare globally.

The Importance of Women’s Welfare

Women’s welfare is integral to the sustainable development of any society. It is a fundamental human right and a cornerstone of social justice. Ensuring women’s welfare means providing them with equal access to resources, opportunities, and services. This includes quality education, healthcare, employment opportunities, and the right to participate in decision-making processes. The welfare of women has a direct impact on the development of families, communities, and nations.

Challenges to Women’s Welfare

Despite the importance of women’s welfare, numerous challenges persist. Gender discrimination, violence against women, socioeconomic disparities, and cultural norms often hinder the advancement of women’s welfare. These challenges are not only detrimental to women but also to society as a whole. For instance, gender discrimination in education and employment hampers economic growth, while violence against women is a gross violation of human rights.

The Role of Education in Women’s Welfare

Education plays a crucial role in promoting women’s welfare. It equips women with the knowledge and skills necessary for their personal and professional development. Education enhances women’s ability to make informed decisions, access opportunities, and contribute to society. Furthermore, it is a powerful tool for breaking the cycle of poverty and promoting gender equality.

Economic Empowerment and Women’s Welfare

Economic empowerment is another key aspect of women’s welfare. It involves providing women with the means to be economically independent, such as access to decent work, equal pay, and financial services. Economic empowerment not only improves women’s welfare but also contributes to economic development.

The Way Forward

Promoting women’s welfare requires concerted efforts from all sectors of society. Governments, NGOs, and individuals must work together to eliminate gender discrimination, violence against women, and socioeconomic disparities. This can be achieved through legal reforms, awareness campaigns, and programs aimed at empowering women. Furthermore, education and economic empowerment should be prioritized to ensure the overall welfare of women.

In conclusion, women’s welfare is a critical issue that warrants more attention and action. While significant progress has been made, there is still a long way to go. By addressing the challenges to women’s welfare and prioritizing education and economic empowerment, we can create a world where all women can thrive.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

• Essay on Women’s Reservation Bill
• Essay on Women Safety
• Essay on Women in Armed Forces

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

Happy studying!

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

• Anti-Abortion Movement
• Women’s History
• Film & TV
• Gender Violence
• #50YearsofMs

More Than A Magazine, A Movement

• Money & Jobs

Welfare Is a Women’s Issue (Spring 1972)

To pay tribute to five decades of reporting, rebelling and truth-telling,  From the Vault  includes some of our favorite feminist classics from the last 50 years of  Ms .  For more iconic, ground-breaking stories like this, order  50 YEARS OF Ms.: THE BEST OF THE PATHFINDING MAGAZINE THAT IGNITED A REVOLUTION  (Alfred A. Knopf)—a stunning collection of the most audacious, norm-breaking coverage  Ms . has published.

Society needs women on welfare as ‘examples’ to let every woman, factory workers and housewife workers alike, know what will happen if she lets up, if she’s laid off, if she tries to go it alone without a man.

From the Spring 1972 issue:

I’m a woman. I’m a Black woman. I’m a poor woman. I’m a fat woman. I’m a middle-aged woman. And I’m on welfare.

In this country, if you’re any one of those things you count less as a human being. If you’re all those things, you don’t count at all. Except as a statistic.

I am 45 years old. I have raised six children. There are millions of statistics like me. Some on welfare. Some not. And some, really poor, who don’t even know they’re entitled to welfare. Not all of them are Black. Not at all. In fact, the majority—about two-thirds—of all the poor families in the country are white.

Welfare’s like a traffic accident. It can happen to anybody, but especially it happens to women.

And that’s why welfare is a women’s issue. For a lot of middle-class women in this country, Women’s Liberation is a matter of concern. For women on welfare, it’s a matter of survival.

Survival. That’s why we had to go on welfare. And that’s why we can’t get off welfare now. Not us women. Not until we do something about liberating poor women in this country.

Because up until now we’ve been raised to expect to work, all our lives, for nothing. Because we are the worst-educated, the least-skilled and the lowest-paid people there are. Because we have to be almost totally responsible for our children. Because we are regarded by everybody as dependents. That’s why we are on welfare. And that’s why we stay on it.

Welfare is the most prejudiced institution in this country, even more than marriage, which it tries to imitate. Let me explain that a little. Ninety-nine percent of welfare families are headed by women. There is no man around. In half the states, there can’t be men around because A.F.D.C. (Aid to Families With Dependent Children) says if there is an “able-bodied” man around, then you can’t be on welfare. If the kids are going to eat, and the man can’t get a job, then he’s got to go.

Welfare is like a super-sexist marriage. You trade in a man for the man. But you can’t divorce him if he treats you bad. He can divorce you, of course, cut you off anytime he wants. But in that case, he keeps the kids, not you. The man runs everything.

In ordinary marriage, sex is supposed to be for your husband. On AFDC, you’re not supposed to have any sex at all. You give up control of your own body. It’s a condition of aid. You may even have to agree to get your tubes tied so you can never have more children just to avoid being cut off welfare.

If you found this article helpful, please consider supporting our independent reporting and truth-telling for as little as $5 per month.

The man, the welfare system, controls your money. He tells you what to buy, what not to buy, where to buy it, and how much things cost. If things—rent, for instance—really cost more than he says they do, it’s just too bad for you. He’s always right.

That’s why Governor [Ronald] Reagan can get away with slandering welfare recipients, calling them “lazy parasites,” “pigs at the trough,” and such. We’ve been trained to believe that the only reason people are on welfare is because there’s something wrong with their character. If people have “motivation,” if people only want to work, they can, and they will be able to support themselves and their kids in decency.

The truth is, a job doesn’t necessarily mean an adequate income. There are some ten million jobs that now pay less than the minimum wage, and if you’re a woman, you’ve got the best chance of getting one. Why would a 45-year-old woman work all day in a laundry ironing shirts at 90-some cents an hour? Because she knows there’s some place lower she could be: She could be on welfare.

Society needs women on welfare as “examples” to let every woman, factory workers and housewife workers alike, know what will happen if she lets up, if she’s laid off, if she tries to go it alone without a man. So these ladies stay on their feet or on their knees all their lives instead of asking why they’re only getting 90-some cents an hour, instead of daring to fight and complain.

Maybe we poor welfare women will really liberate women in this country. We’ve already started on our own welfare plan. Along with other welfare recipients, we have organized so we can have some voice. Our group is called the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). We put together our own welfare plan, called Guaranteed Adequate Income (GAI), which would eliminate sexism from welfare. There would be no “categories”—men, women, children, single, married, kids, no kids—just poor people who need aid. You’d get paid according to need and family size only and that would be upped as the cost of living goes up.

As far as I’m concerned, the ladies of NWRO are the frontline troops of women’s freedom. Both because we have so few illusions and because our issues are so important to all women—the right to a living wage for women’s work, the right to life itself.

Liberating Capital: The Impact of Providing Guaranteed Income for Black Women in The South

Want to Pass Guaranteed Income Policy in the U.S? Start With Black Women.

Why Increasing the Minimum Wage Could Help Close the Gender Wage Gap

About Johnnie Tillmon

You May Also Like:

How Derivatives Blew Up Our Economy—And Just Might Again

Small Donor Public Financing Can Help More Women Get Elected

• Women, the State, and Welfare

In this Book

• Edited by Linda Gordon
• Published by: University of Wisconsin Press

Table of Contents

• Title Page, Copyright
• pp. vii-viii
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Introduction: How to Read This Book
• 1. The New Feminist Scholarship on the Welfare State
• 2. The Gender Basis of American Social Policy
• 3. The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780- 1920
• 4. The Lady and the Tramp: Gender, Race, and the Origins of the American Welfare State
• 5. The Origins of the Two-Channel Welfare State: Workmen's Compensation and Mothers' Aid
• pp. 123-151
• 6. Representations of Gender: Policies to "Protect" Women Workers and Infants in France and the United States before 1914
• pp. 152-177
• 7. Family Violence, Feminism, and Social Control
• pp. 178-198
• 8. Struggle Over Needs: Outline of a Socialist-Feminist Critical Theory of Late-Capitalist Political Culture
• pp. 199-225
• 9. The Dialectic of Rights and Politics: Perspectives from the Women's Movement
• pp. 226-249
• 10. Ideology and the State: Women, Power, and the Welfare State
• pp. 250-264
• 11. Welfare Is Not/or Women: Why the War on Poverty Cannot Conquer the Feminization of Poverty
• pp. 265-279
• 12. Black Women and AFDC: Making Entitlement Out of Necessity
• pp. 280-300
• pp. 301-311

Additional Information

Project MUSE Mission

Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide. Forged from a partnership between a university press and a library, Project MUSE is a trusted part of the academic and scholarly community it serves.

2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218

+1 (410) 516-6989 [email protected]

©2024 Project MUSE. Produced by Johns Hopkins University Press in collaboration with The Sheridan Libraries.

Now and Always, The Trusted Content Your Research Requires

Built on the Johns Hopkins University Campus

This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless.

Facts and figures: Economic empowerment

• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to LinkedIn
• Share to E-mail

Explore key data and facts on the economic empowerment of women. From income disparities and workforce trends to entrepreneurship and access to financial resources, these statistics spotlight the critical role of economic empowerment in advancing gender equality and driving sustainable development.

Benefits of women’s economic empowerment

Current status of women, women and the world of work, care work (unpaid and paid work), climate change and the environment, sustainable energy.

• Women migrant wokers

Financing for gender equality

• Women’s economic empowerment is essential to achieving women’s rights and gender equality.  Women’s economic empowerment means ensuring women can equally participate in and benefit from decent work and social protection; access markets and have control over resources, their own time, lives, and bodies; and increased voice, agency, and meaningful participation in economic decision-making at all levels from the household to international institutions.  
• Promoting women’s economic justice and rights in the economy and closing gender gaps in the world of work are key to achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development  and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals [1] .
• When more women work, economies grow.  Women’s economic empowerment increases economic diversification and income equality for shared prosperity [2] . It is estimated that closing the gender gap could give the global economy a USD 7 trillion boost [3] .
• Increasing women’s and girls’ educational attainment contributes to women’s economic empowerment and more inclusive, environmentally sustainable economic growth.  Education, upskilling, and re-skilling—especially to keep pace with rapid technological transformations affecting jobs—are critical for women’s and girls’ health and wellbeing, as well as their income-generation opportunities and participation in the formal labour market.  
• Women’s economic equality is good for business.  Companies greatly benefit from increasing employment and leadership opportunities for women, which is shown to increase organizational effectiveness and growth. It is estimated that companies with three or more women in senior management functions score higher in all dimensions of organizational performance [4] .
• One in every 10 women is living in extreme poverty  (10.3 per cent). If current trends continue, by 2030, an estimated 8 per cent of the world’s female population – 342.4 million women and girls – will still be living on less than $2.15 a day. Most (220.9 million) will reside in sub-Saharan Africa   [5] .
• Women are less likely to have access to social protection.  Gender inequalities in employment and job quality result in gaps in access to social protection acquired through employment, such as pensions, unemployment benefits, or maternity protection. Coverage of women lags behind men by 8 per cent (34.3 per cent and 26.5 per cent, respectively). Globally, an estimated 73.5 per cent of women in wage employment do not have access to social protection [6] .
• Women are more food insecure than men . Gender gaps in food insecurity have grown from 1.7 per cent in 2019 to more than 4 per cent in 2021, with 31.9 per cent of women moderately or severely food insecure compared to 27.6 per cent of men. This is even more acute for older and indigenous women, women of African descent, gender-diverse persons, persons with disabilities, and those living in rural and remote areas [7] .
• Women and girls suffer most from the dearth of safely managed water and sanitation . Women and girls are responsible for water collection in 70 per cent of households without access to water on premises. Menstrual hygiene management is difficult in the absence of water, soap, and gender-responsive sanitation facilities, whether at home, school, or work [8] .
• Women are less likely than men to have access to financial institutions or have a bank account.  The gender gap in bank account ownership has dropped in 2021 after years of stagnation, although rates vary across economies. In developing economies, the gender gap stands at 6 per cent per cent while globally it sits at 4 per cent with 78 per cent of men reporting having an account at a formal financial institution compared to 74 per cent of women [9] .
• The digital divide remains a gendered one  with 37 per cent of women globally not using the internet, meaning 259 million fewer women have access to the internet than men [10] .
• Gender differences in laws affect both developing and developed economies, and women in all regions.  Globally, over 2.7 billion women are legally restricted from having the same choice of jobs as men. Of 190 economies assessed in 2023, more than one-third (69 economies) have laws constraining women’s decision to work, and 43 economies have no laws on sexual harassment in the workplace [11] .
• Women remain less likely to participate in the labour market than men around the world . Globally, the gender gap in labour force participation has hovered at 30 per cent since 1990, with men’s participation at around 80 per cent and women’s at 50 per cent. Labour force participation rates for women aged 25-54 in 2022 was 61.4 per cent compared to 90.6 per cent for men. Women in the same age group with at least one child under six experience a “motherhood penalty” as the gap widens from 29.2 per cent to 42.6 per cent, with female participation at 53.1 per cent and male participation at 95.7 per cent [12] .
• Women are slightly more likely to be unemployed than men but experience a much larger jobs gap.  In 2022, global unemployment rates for women and men stood at 5.7 per cent and 5.8 per cent respectively. This is projected to remain relatively unchanged in 2024. In 2022, the jobs gap rate for women was 15 per cent compared with 10.5 per cent for men, meaning an additional 153 million women have unmet need for employment compared with 115 million men [13] .
• Women are over-represented in informal and vulnerable employment.  Nearly 60 per cent of women’s employment globally is in the informal economy, and in low-income countries, it is more than 90 per cent, according to the latest research from 2018 [14] .
• In the agricultural sector, women are overrepresented in seasonal, informal, part-time, and low-wage work with limited access to social protection  [15] . Globally, 36 percent of working women compared to 38 percent of working men work in agrifood systems as of 2019 ,  but this may exclude self-employed and unpaid family workers. Differences across countries and regions are striking. In sub-Saharan Africa, 66 per cent of women’s employment is in agrifood systems, compared with 60 per cent of men’s employment while in southern Asia, 71 per cent of women workers are engaged in agrifood systems, compared with 47 per cent of men workers [16] .
• Women farmers have significantly less access to, control over, and ownership of land and other productive assets compared to their male counterparts.  For example, less than 15 per cent of agricultural landholders globally are women, although this varies widely across countries. Closing the gender gap in farm productivity and the wage gap in agrifood-system employment could increase global gross domestic product by 1 per cent – that’s nearly USD 1 trillion [17] .
• Women are paid less than men.  The gender wage gap is estimated to be 20 per cent. This means that women earn 80 per cent of what men earn, though these figures understate the real extent of gender pay gaps, particularly in developing countries where informal self-employment is prevalent [18] . Women also face the motherhood wage penalty, which increases as the number of children a woman has increases [19] .
• Women are less likely to be entrepreneurs and face more disadvantages starting businesses.   In 2022 women’s start-up activity in 2022 was 10.1 per cent, or 80 per cent of the rate of men at 12.6 per cent. However, the established business rate for women was 5.5 per cent, or 68 per cent of the rate of men at 8.1 per cent. This means that the gender gap is greater later in the entrepreneurship cycle, demonstrating women face many barriers not only starting a business but also maintaining it due to the inequality they face [20] .
• High rates of entrepreneurship are often observed among women in lower- and middle-income countries  where decent job options are scarce, underscoring the important linkages between employment and entrepreneurship [21] .
• Violence and harassment in the world of work affect women regardless of age, location, income, or social status.  The economic costs to the global economy of discriminatory social institutions and violence against women is estimated to be approximately USD 6 trillion annually [22] .
• Unpaid care work is essential to the functioning of the economy  but often goes uncounted and unrecognized [23] .
• Women shoulder a disproportionate share of unpaid care and domestic work.  Globally, women—particularly those from low-income, migrant, and racialized groups—perform more than three-quarters of unpaid care and domestic work [24] .
• By 2050 women globally will still be spending almost 2.5 more hours per day on unpaid care work than men , on the current trajectory [25] .
• If women’s unpaid work were assigned a monetary value, it would exceed up to 40 per cent of GDP  in some countries based on conservative estimates [26] .
• Women constitute the majority of paid care workers , including in health, education, and paid domestic work. Despite being essential, this paid care work is underpaid, considered unskilled, and often insecure [27] . An estimated 80 per cent of domestic workers worldwide are women, with 90 per cent not having access to social security and more than half with no limits on their weekly working hours [28] .
• Closing existing care policy gaps and expanding care services with decent care work could create almost 300 million jobs by 2035 , which would contribute to reducing gender inequalities in employment and yield significant economic and social returns [29] .
• Around 70 to 90 per cent of jobs created by investing in care infrastructure will benefit women [30] .
• Studies show that investment in the care sector could create almost three times as many jobs as the same investment in construction  and produce 30 per cent less greenhouse gas emissions [31] .
• Environmental degradation and climate change have disproportionate impacts on women and children . Women often bear the brunt of coping with climate-related shocks and the health effects of indoor and urban pollution, which add to their time spent caring for people and the planet. As land, forest, and water resources are increasingly compromised, privatized, or “grabbed” for commercial investment, local communities, and indigenous peoples, particularly women, whose livelihoods depend on them, are marginalized and displaced.   
• More than 1.2 billion jobs, or 40 per cent of the global labour force, that are directly or heavily dependent on the environment and ecosystems are at serious risk [32] .
• Women will be severely at risk of job losses due to their high participation in sectors prone to climate change impacts , such as agriculture [33] .
• Climate change could push up to 158.3 million more women and girls into poverty by 2050  (16 million more than the total number of men and boys) under a worst-case climate scenario. Food insecurity is projected to affect as many as 236 million more women and girls than today, compared to 131 million more men and boys [34] .
• As countries pursue a just transition, 24 million new jobs could be created worldwide by 2030   [35] .
• But more than 80 per cent of the new jobs created, primarily through the phaseout of coal mining and coal-fired power, will be in sectors currently dominated by men. Only 20 per cent of these new jobs will be created in sectors where women are the majority [36] .
• Globally, women are 14 times more likely than men to die during a disaster [37] .
• Sustainable, clean, and affordable energy can accelerate gender equality, poverty alleviation, and social norms transformation, but many women remain without it . By 2030, an estimated 341 million women and girls will still lack electricity, if current trends continue; 85 per cent will reside in sub-Saharan Africa [38] .
• Universal access to electricity could help end poverty for 185 million women by 2050 [39] .
• Access to clean cooking fuels and technology also remains out of reach for many women . By 2030, coverage is projected to be only 23 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa and 17 per cent in Oceania (excluding Australia and New Zealand) [40] .
• By 2050, the transition to modern cookstoves could result in 6.5 million fewer deaths from indoor air pollution [ [41] .
• Women and girls are more likely to carry the burden of energy poverty and experience the adverse effects of a lack of safe, reliable, affordable, and clean energy.  Indoor air pollution from using combustible fuels for household energy caused 3.2 million deaths in 2020, an issue that disproportionately affects women and children [42] .

Women migrant workers 

• It is estimated that women represent 48 per cent of the 281 million international migrants.  Women who migrate as workers face various challenges, including potential gender discrimination in the job market and a lack of support networks in a foreign country. Many women migrate as family members rather than solely for employment opportunities. These factors can lead to fewer women being represented among migrant workers [43] .
• Women migrant workers remit substantial portions of their earnings, sending as much or even more than men,  despite limited disaggregated data on remittances, gender inequalities in the labour market, and gender wage gaps globally [44] .
• Women migrant workers are more likely than men to remit regularly owing to women’s stronger links to family members  and self-insurance motives to financially protect themselves and their families [45] , underlining the link between a woman’s caregiving role in the household and her increasing propensity to remit [46] .
• Women migrant workers populate informal, low paid, and unregulated work . As of 2021, the main sectors in which women migrant workers are employed are: services (79.9 per cent), industry (14.2 per cent), and agriculture (5.9 per cent). More women migrant workers than men work in service-related jobs, often owing to an increasing demand for workers in the care industry, such as healthcare and domestic work [47] .
• Of the more than 67 million domestic workers over the age of 15, 80 per cent are women and one in five is a migrant worker [48] .
• In 2021-2022, 43 per cent of bilateral allocable Official Development Aid (ODA)—which is aid that is paid directly from official government sources to recipient countries— had gender equality as a policy objective (USD 64.1 billion), down from 45% in 2019-2020.   
• Of this aid, only 4 per cent was dedicated to programmes with gender equality as the principal objective , a similar share from the previous period.  
• In 2020, an OECD survey looked at blended finance funds and facilities. These funds use development finance strategically to attract more money for sustainable development in developing countries. The survey found that only 1 per cent of these assets under management was allocated to gender equality and women’s empowerment as the main objective [49] .

[1] UN Secretary General’s High Level Panel on Women’s Economic Empowerment, Leave No One Behind: A Call to Action for Gender Equality and Women’s Economic Empowerment. Available at: https://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2018/01/hlp-wee-reports-and-toolkits

[2] International Monetary Fund (2018). Pursuing Women's Economic Empowerment. Available at:  https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/Policy-Papers/Issues/2018/05/31/pp053118pursuing-womens-economic-empowerment  

[3] Moody’s Analytics, Close the Gender Gap to Unlock Productivity Gains , March 2023. Available at: https://www.moodysanalytics.com/-/media/article/2023/Close-the-Gender-Gap-to-Unlock-Productivity-Gains.pdf   

[4] UN Women, Progress of the World’s Women 2015-2016 . Chapter 2, p. 69. 

[5] UN Women, Progress on the Sustainable Development Goals: The gender snapshot 2023 . Available at: https://www.unwomen.org/sites/default/files/2023-09/progress-on-the-sustainable-development-goals-the-gender-snapshot-2023-en.pdf   

[6] International Labour Organization (ILO), World Social Protection Report 2020–2 . Available at: https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/@ed_protect/@soc_sec/documents/publication/wcms_817572.pdf   

[7] FAO, The State of food security and nutrition in the world , 2022. Available at: https://www.fao.org/3/cc0639en/cc0639en.pdf   

[8] Unicef, Progress on household drinking water, sanitation and hygiene 2000-2022: Special focus on gender . Available at: https://data.unicef.org/resources/jmp-report-2023/  

[9] The World Bank, The Global Findex Database 2021: Financial Inclusion, Digital Payments, and Resilience in the Age of COVID-19. (Washington, D.C., World Bank, 2021). Available at: http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/187761468179367706/pdf/WPS7255.pdf  

[10] The International Telecommunications Union’s Facts and Figures 2022 on global connectivity amid economic downturn . Available at: https://www.itu.int/en/mediacentre/Pages/PR-2022-11-30-Facts-Figures-2022.aspx 

[11] World Bank, Women, Business and the Law 2023. (Washington, D.C., 2023). Available at: https://wbl.worldbank.org/en/wbl  

[12] Statistics on women – ILOSTAT. Available at: https://ilostat.ilo.org/topics/women   

[13] International Labour Organization (ILO), World Employment and Social Outlook: Trends 2023. Available at: https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---inst/documents/publication/wcms_865332.pdf .  And ILO Spotlight on Work Statistics n°12 (March, 2023). Available at: https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---stat/documents/publication/wcms_870519.pdf   

[14] International Labour Organization (ILO), Third edition Women and men in the informal economy: A statistical picture, 2018. Available at: https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---dcomm/documents/publication/wcms_626831.pdf      

[15] ILO and FAO (2021),  Extending social protection to rural populations , ILO and FAO, Geneva. Available at: Extending social protection to rural populations (fao.org)  

[16] FAO, The status of women in agrifood systems (Rome, 2023) Available at: https://www.fao.org/3/cc5343en/cc5343en.pdf   

[17] FAO, The gender gap in land rights (Rome, 2018). Available at: https://www.fao.org/3/I8796EN/i8796en.pdf [18] FAO, The status of women in agrifood systems (Rome, 2023) Available here: https://www.fao.org/3/cc5343en/cc5343en.pdf   

[18] International Labour Organization (ILO), Pay transparency legislation: Implications for employers' and workers' organizations (June, 2022). Available at: https://www.ilo.org/travail/info/publications/WCMS_849209/lang--en/index.htm  

[19] Damian Grimshaw and Jill Rubery, The motherhood pay gap: A review of the issues, theory and international evidence , International Labour Organization, Conditions of Work and Employment Series No. 57 , (Geneva, 2015). Available at: http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/@dgreports/@dcomm/@publ/documents/publication/wcms_348041.pdf  

[20] Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (2021). GEM 2022/2023 Women’s Entrepreneurship: Challenging Bias and Stereotypes. Available at: https://www.gemconsortium.org/report/gem-20222023-womens-entrepreneurship-challenging-bias-and-stereotypes-2   

[21] Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (2021). GEM 2020/2021 Women’s Entrepreneurship Report. Thriving through crisis . Available at:  https://www.gemconsortium.org/file/open?fileId=50841   

[22] OECD Social Institutions and Gender Index 2019 Report. Available at: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/development/sigi-2019-global-report_bc56d212-en   

[23] Diane Elson, Labor markets as gendered institutions: Equality, efficiency and empowerment issues , World Development, vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 611–627 (1999). 

[24] UN Women, Forecasting time spent in unpaid care and domestic work: Technical brief, 2023. Available at: https://www.unwomen.org/sites/default/files/2023-10/technical-brief-forecasting-time-spent-in-unpaid-care-and-domestic-work-en.pdf   

[25] UN Women, Progress on the Sustainable Development Goals the Gender Snapshot 2023 . Available at: https://www.unwomen.org/sites/default/files/2023-09/progress-on-the-sustainable-development-goals-the-gender-snapshot-2023-en.pdf   

[26] Measuring unpaid domestic and care work - ILOSTAT. Available at: https://ilostat.ilo.org/topics/unpaid-work/measuring-unpaid-domestic-and-care-work/   

[27] Statistics Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, The World’s Women 2020: Trends and Statistics . Available at: https://www.un.org/en/desa/world%E2%80%99s-women-2020   

[28] Oxfam International, Not all gaps are created equal: the true value of care work. Available at: https://www.oxfam.org/en/not-all-gaps-are-created-equal-true-value-care-work   

[29] International Labour Organization (ILO), Care at work: Investing in care leave and services for a more gender equal world of work, 2022. Available at: https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---dcomm/documents/publication/wcms_838653.pdf   

[30] UN Women Issue Paper, Investing in free universal childcare in Sub-Saharan Africa: Côte D’Ivoire, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal and The United Republic of Tanzania: Estimating spending requirements, gendered employment effects and fiscal revenue , 2021. Available at: https://www.unwomen.org/sites/default/files/2021-12/Issue-paper-Investing-in-free-universal-childcare-in-sub-Saharan-Africa-en_0.pdf   

[31] Women’s Budget Group, A green and caring economy: Final report , 2022. Available at: https://wbg.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/A-Green-and-Caring-Economy-Report-FINAL.pdf      

[32] International Labour Organization (ILO), The future of work in a changing natural environment : climate change, degradation and sustainability, 2018. Available at: https://ilo.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/fulldisplay/alma995018692802676/41ILO_INST:41ILO_V2  

[33] International Labour Organization (ILO) Policy brief, Just Transition Policy Brief: Gender equality, labour and a just transition for all, 2022. Available at: https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---ed_emp/---emp_ent/documents/publication/wcms_860569.pdf   

[34] UN Women, Progress on the Sustainable Development Goals: The gender snapshot 2023 . Available at: https://www.unwomen.org/sites/default/files/2023-09/progress-on-the-sustainable-development-goals-the-gender-snapshot-2023-en.pdf   

[35] International Labour Organization (ILO), World employment social outlook: Trends 2018. Available at: https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---dcomm/---publ/documents/publication/wcms_615594.pdf   

[36] International Labour Organization (ILO), Jobs in a net-zero emissions future in Latin America and the Caribbean, 2020 . Available at: https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---americas/---ro-lima/documents/publication/wcms_752069.pdf   

[37] UN Women, SDG 13: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts. Available at: https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/in-focus/women-and-the-sdgs/sdg-13-climate-action   

[38] UN Women, Progress on the Sustainable Development Goals: The gender snapshot 2023 . Available at: https://www.unwomen.org/sites/default/files/2023-09/progress-on-the-sustainable-development-goals-the-gender-snapshot-2023-en.pdf  

[39] Ibid. 

[40] Ibid. 

[41] Ibid. 

[42] World Health Organization, Household air pollution: Key facts published in December 2023. Available at: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/household-air-pollution-and-health#:~:text=Each%20year%2C%203.2%20million%20people,air%20pollution%20data%20for%20details  

[43] International Labour Organization (ILO), Global Estimates on International Migrant Workers: Results and Methodology Third edition , 2021. Available at: https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---dcomm/---publ/documents/publication/wcms_808935.pdf   

[44] UN Women, Migrant women and remittances: Exploring the data from selected countries , 2020. Available here: https://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2020/06/policy-brief-migrant-women-and-remittances-exploring-the-data-from-selected-countries  

[45] Maelan Le Goff, Feminization of migration and trends in remittances , January 2016. Available at: https://wol.iza.org/uploads/articles/220/pdfs/feminization-of-migration-and-trends-in-remittances.pdf?v=1 . 

[46] Mónika López-Anuarbe and others, More than altruism: cultural norms and remittances among Hispanics in the USA , Journal of International Migration and Integration, vol. 17, No. 2 (May 2016). Available at: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12134-015-0423-3  

[47] ILO Global Estimates on International Migrant Workers: Results and Methodology Third edition , 2021. Available at: https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---dcomm/---publ/documents/publication/wcms_808935.pdf  

[48] IOM Releases Guidelines for Labour Recruiters of Migrant Domestic Workers , (September, 2020). Available at: https://www.iom.int/news/iom-releases-guidelines-labour-recruiters-migrant-domestic-workers  

[49] Development finance for gender equality and women’s empowerment. Available at: https://www.oecd.org/development/gender-development/development-finance-for-gender-equality-and-women-s-empowerment.htm#:~:text=In%202021%2D2022%2C%2043%25,USD%2058.3%20billion%20(39%25 ).   

[Last updated February 2024]

Learn more on economic empowerment

FAQs: Economic empowerment

Five things to accelerate women's economic empowerment

Why investing in women is a human rights issue

2016 Reports

Social Welfare: Women and Gender Issues

Maloof, David Louis ; Smith, Raymond Arthur

The intersection of gender and social welfare in the United States can be primarily understood through policies that affect single mothers, and because single mothers are so disproportionately impoverished (including incredibly low incomes, rates of healthcare, and higher education completion) social welfare programs critically affect them in outsized ways. The incommensurate effects on this vulnerable group make the welfare policy discussion inherently gendered, even when it does not appear to be, and the shockingly low living standards of single mothers in the US point to need for significant reform in our welfare programs.

• Single mothers
• Public welfare
• Single mothers--Economic conditions
• Social status
• Gender identity
• Women's studies

More About This Work

• DOI Copy DOI to clipboard

• Search Menu
• Browse content in Arts and Humanities
• Browse content in Archaeology
• Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Archaeology
• Archaeological Methodology and Techniques
• Archaeology by Region
• Archaeology of Religion
• Archaeology of Trade and Exchange
• Biblical Archaeology
• Contemporary and Public Archaeology
• Environmental Archaeology
• Historical Archaeology
• History and Theory of Archaeology
• Industrial Archaeology
• Landscape Archaeology
• Mortuary Archaeology
• Prehistoric Archaeology
• Underwater Archaeology
• Urban Archaeology
• Zooarchaeology
• Browse content in Architecture
• Architectural Structure and Design
• History of Architecture
• Residential and Domestic Buildings
• Theory of Architecture
• Browse content in Art
• Art Subjects and Themes
• History of Art
• Industrial and Commercial Art
• Theory of Art
• Biographical Studies
• Byzantine Studies
• Browse content in Classical Studies
• Classical History
• Classical Philosophy
• Classical Mythology
• Classical Literature
• Classical Reception
• Classical Art and Architecture
• Classical Oratory and Rhetoric
• Greek and Roman Epigraphy
• Greek and Roman Law
• Greek and Roman Archaeology
• Greek and Roman Papyrology
• Late Antiquity
• Religion in the Ancient World
• Digital Humanities
• Browse content in History
• Colonialism and Imperialism
• Diplomatic History
• Environmental History
• Genealogy, Heraldry, Names, and Honours
• Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing
• Historical Geography
• History by Period
• History of Agriculture
• History of Education
• History of Emotions
• History of Gender and Sexuality
• Industrial History
• Intellectual History
• International History
• Labour History
• Legal and Constitutional History
• Local and Family History
• Maritime History
• Military History
• National Liberation and Post-Colonialism
• Oral History
• Political History
• Public History
• Regional and National History
• Revolutions and Rebellions
• Slavery and Abolition of Slavery
• Social and Cultural History
• Theory, Methods, and Historiography
• Urban History
• World History
• Browse content in Language Teaching and Learning
• Language Learning (Specific Skills)
• Language Teaching Theory and Methods
• Browse content in Linguistics
• Applied Linguistics
• Cognitive Linguistics
• Computational Linguistics
• Forensic Linguistics
• Grammar, Syntax and Morphology
• Historical and Diachronic Linguistics
• History of English
• Language Acquisition
• Language Variation
• Language Families
• Language Evolution
• Language Reference
• Lexicography
• Linguistic Theories
• Linguistic Typology
• Linguistic Anthropology
• Phonetics and Phonology
• Psycholinguistics
• Sociolinguistics
• Translation and Interpretation
• Writing Systems
• Browse content in Literature

Bibliography

• Children's Literature Studies
• Literary Studies (Asian)
• Literary Studies (European)
• Literary Studies (Eco-criticism)
• Literary Studies (Modernism)
• Literary Studies (Romanticism)
• Literary Studies (American)
• Literary Studies - World
• Literary Studies (1500 to 1800)
• Literary Studies (19th Century)
• Literary Studies (20th Century onwards)
• Literary Studies (African American Literature)
• Literary Studies (British and Irish)
• Literary Studies (Early and Medieval)
• Literary Studies (Fiction, Novelists, and Prose Writers)
• Literary Studies (Gender Studies)
• Literary Studies (Graphic Novels)
• Literary Studies (History of the Book)
• Literary Studies (Plays and Playwrights)
• Literary Studies (Poetry and Poets)
• Literary Studies (Postcolonial Literature)
• Literary Studies (Queer Studies)
• Literary Studies (Science Fiction)
• Literary Studies (Travel Literature)
• Literary Studies (War Literature)
• Literary Studies (Women's Writing)
• Literary Theory and Cultural Studies
• Mythology and Folklore
• Shakespeare Studies and Criticism
• Browse content in Media Studies
• Browse content in Music
• Applied Music
• Dance and Music
• Ethics in Music
• Ethnomusicology
• Gender and Sexuality in Music
• Medicine and Music
• Music Cultures
• Music and Religion
• Music and Culture
• Music and Media
• Music Education and Pedagogy
• Music Theory and Analysis
• Musical Scores, Lyrics, and Libretti
• Musical Structures, Styles, and Techniques
• Musicology and Music History
• Performance Practice and Studies
• Race and Ethnicity in Music
• Sound Studies
• Browse content in Performing Arts
• Browse content in Philosophy
• Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art
• Epistemology
• Feminist Philosophy
• History of Western Philosophy
• Metaphysics
• Moral Philosophy
• Non-Western Philosophy
• Philosophy of Science
• Philosophy of Action
• Philosophy of Law
• Philosophy of Religion
• Philosophy of Language
• Philosophy of Mind
• Philosophy of Perception
• Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic
• Practical Ethics
• Social and Political Philosophy
• Browse content in Religion
• Biblical Studies
• Christianity
• East Asian Religions
• History of Religion
• Judaism and Jewish Studies
• Qumran Studies
• Religion and Education
• Religion and Health
• Religion and Politics
• Religion and Science
• Religion and Law
• Religion and Art, Literature, and Music
• Religious Studies
• Browse content in Society and Culture
• Cookery, Food, and Drink
• Cultural Studies
• Customs and Traditions
• Ethical Issues and Debates
• Hobbies, Games, Arts and Crafts
• Lifestyle, Home, and Garden
• Natural world, Country Life, and Pets
• Popular Beliefs and Controversial Knowledge
• Sports and Outdoor Recreation
• Technology and Society
• Travel and Holiday
• Visual Culture
• Browse content in Law
• Arbitration
• Browse content in Company and Commercial Law
• Commercial Law
• Company Law
• Browse content in Comparative Law
• Systems of Law
• Competition Law
• Browse content in Constitutional and Administrative Law
• Government Powers
• Judicial Review
• Local Government Law
• Military and Defence Law
• Parliamentary and Legislative Practice
• Construction Law
• Contract Law
• Browse content in Criminal Law
• Criminal Procedure
• Criminal Evidence Law
• Sentencing and Punishment
• Employment and Labour Law
• Environment and Energy Law
• Browse content in Financial Law
• Banking Law
• Insolvency Law
• History of Law
• Human Rights and Immigration
• Intellectual Property Law
• Browse content in International Law
• Private International Law and Conflict of Laws
• Public International Law
• IT and Communications Law
• Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law
• Law and Politics
• Law and Society
• Browse content in Legal System and Practice
• Courts and Procedure
• Legal Skills and Practice
• Primary Sources of Law
• Regulation of Legal Profession
• Medical and Healthcare Law
• Browse content in Policing
• Criminal Investigation and Detection
• Police and Security Services
• Police Procedure and Law
• Police Regional Planning
• Browse content in Property Law
• Personal Property Law
• Study and Revision
• Terrorism and National Security Law
• Browse content in Trusts Law
• Wills and Probate or Succession
• Browse content in Medicine and Health
• Browse content in Allied Health Professions
• Arts Therapies
• Clinical Science
• Dietetics and Nutrition
• Occupational Therapy
• Operating Department Practice
• Physiotherapy
• Radiography
• Speech and Language Therapy
• Browse content in Anaesthetics
• General Anaesthesia
• Neuroanaesthesia
• Browse content in Clinical Medicine
• Acute Medicine
• Cardiovascular Medicine
• Clinical Genetics
• Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics
• Dermatology
• Endocrinology and Diabetes
• Gastroenterology
• Genito-urinary Medicine
• Geriatric Medicine
• Infectious Diseases
• Medical Oncology
• Medical Toxicology
• Pain Medicine
• Palliative Medicine
• Rehabilitation Medicine
• Respiratory Medicine and Pulmonology
• Rheumatology
• Sleep Medicine
• Sports and Exercise Medicine
• Clinical Neuroscience
• Community Medical Services
• Critical Care
• Emergency Medicine
• Forensic Medicine
• Haematology
• History of Medicine
• Browse content in Medical Dentistry
• Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery
• Paediatric Dentistry
• Restorative Dentistry and Orthodontics
• Surgical Dentistry
• Medical Ethics
• Browse content in Medical Skills
• Clinical Skills
• Communication Skills
• Nursing Skills
• Surgical Skills
• Medical Statistics and Methodology
• Browse content in Neurology
• Clinical Neurophysiology
• Neuropathology
• Nursing Studies
• Browse content in Obstetrics and Gynaecology
• Gynaecology
• Occupational Medicine
• Ophthalmology
• Otolaryngology (ENT)
• Browse content in Paediatrics
• Neonatology
• Browse content in Pathology
• Chemical Pathology
• Clinical Cytogenetics and Molecular Genetics
• Histopathology
• Medical Microbiology and Virology
• Patient Education and Information
• Browse content in Pharmacology
• Psychopharmacology
• Browse content in Popular Health
• Caring for Others
• Complementary and Alternative Medicine
• Self-help and Personal Development
• Browse content in Preclinical Medicine
• Cell Biology
• Molecular Biology and Genetics
• Reproduction, Growth and Development
• Primary Care
• Professional Development in Medicine
• Browse content in Psychiatry
• Addiction Medicine
• Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
• Forensic Psychiatry
• Learning Disabilities
• Old Age Psychiatry
• Psychotherapy
• Browse content in Public Health and Epidemiology
• Epidemiology
• Public Health
• Browse content in Radiology
• Clinical Radiology
• Interventional Radiology
• Nuclear Medicine
• Radiation Oncology
• Reproductive Medicine
• Browse content in Surgery
• Cardiothoracic Surgery
• Gastro-intestinal and Colorectal Surgery
• General Surgery
• Neurosurgery
• Paediatric Surgery
• Peri-operative Care
• Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery
• Surgical Oncology
• Transplant Surgery
• Trauma and Orthopaedic Surgery
• Vascular Surgery
• Browse content in Science and Mathematics
• Browse content in Biological Sciences
• Aquatic Biology
• Biochemistry
• Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
• Developmental Biology
• Ecology and Conservation
• Evolutionary Biology
• Genetics and Genomics
• Microbiology
• Molecular and Cell Biology
• Natural History
• Plant Sciences and Forestry
• Research Methods in Life Sciences
• Structural Biology
• Systems Biology
• Zoology and Animal Sciences
• Browse content in Chemistry
• Analytical Chemistry
• Computational Chemistry
• Crystallography
• Environmental Chemistry
• Industrial Chemistry
• Inorganic Chemistry
• Materials Chemistry
• Medicinal Chemistry
• Mineralogy and Gems
• Organic Chemistry
• Physical Chemistry
• Polymer Chemistry
• Study and Communication Skills in Chemistry
• Theoretical Chemistry
• Browse content in Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Architecture and Logic Design
• Game Studies
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Mathematical Theory of Computation
• Programming Languages
• Software Engineering
• Systems Analysis and Design
• Virtual Reality
• Browse content in Computing
• Business Applications
• Computer Security
• Computer Games
• Computer Networking and Communications
• Digital Lifestyle
• Graphical and Digital Media Applications
• Operating Systems
• Browse content in Earth Sciences and Geography
• Atmospheric Sciences
• Environmental Geography
• Geology and the Lithosphere
• Maps and Map-making
• Meteorology and Climatology
• Oceanography and Hydrology
• Palaeontology
• Physical Geography and Topography
• Regional Geography
• Soil Science
• Urban Geography
• Browse content in Engineering and Technology
• Agriculture and Farming
• Biological Engineering
• Civil Engineering, Surveying, and Building
• Electronics and Communications Engineering
• Energy Technology
• Engineering (General)
• Environmental Science, Engineering, and Technology
• History of Engineering and Technology
• Mechanical Engineering and Materials
• Technology of Industrial Chemistry
• Transport Technology and Trades
• Browse content in Environmental Science
• Applied Ecology (Environmental Science)
• Conservation of the Environment (Environmental Science)
• Environmental Sustainability
• Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Environmental Science)
• Management of Land and Natural Resources (Environmental Science)
• Natural Disasters (Environmental Science)
• Nuclear Issues (Environmental Science)
• Pollution and Threats to the Environment (Environmental Science)
• Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Environmental Science)
• History of Science and Technology
• Browse content in Materials Science
• Ceramics and Glasses
• Composite Materials
• Metals, Alloying, and Corrosion
• Nanotechnology
• Browse content in Mathematics
• Applied Mathematics
• Biomathematics and Statistics
• History of Mathematics
• Mathematical Education
• Mathematical Finance
• Mathematical Analysis
• Numerical and Computational Mathematics
• Probability and Statistics
• Pure Mathematics
• Browse content in Neuroscience
• Cognition and Behavioural Neuroscience
• Development of the Nervous System
• Disorders of the Nervous System
• History of Neuroscience
• Invertebrate Neurobiology
• Molecular and Cellular Systems
• Neuroendocrinology and Autonomic Nervous System
• Neuroscientific Techniques
• Sensory and Motor Systems
• Browse content in Physics
• Astronomy and Astrophysics
• Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics
• Biological and Medical Physics
• Classical Mechanics
• Computational Physics
• Condensed Matter Physics
• Electromagnetism, Optics, and Acoustics
• History of Physics
• Mathematical and Statistical Physics
• Measurement Science
• Nuclear Physics
• Particles and Fields
• Plasma Physics
• Quantum Physics
• Relativity and Gravitation
• Semiconductor and Mesoscopic Physics
• Browse content in Psychology
• Affective Sciences
• Clinical Psychology
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Cognitive Psychology
• Criminal and Forensic Psychology
• Developmental Psychology
• Educational Psychology
• Evolutionary Psychology
• Health Psychology
• History and Systems in Psychology
• Music Psychology
• Neuropsychology
• Organizational Psychology
• Psychological Assessment and Testing
• Psychology of Human-Technology Interaction
• Psychology Professional Development and Training
• Research Methods in Psychology
• Social Psychology
• Browse content in Social Sciences
• Browse content in Anthropology
• Anthropology of Religion
• Human Evolution
• Medical Anthropology
• Physical Anthropology
• Regional Anthropology
• Social and Cultural Anthropology
• Theory and Practice of Anthropology
• Browse content in Business and Management
• Business Strategy
• Business History
• Business Ethics
• Business and Government
• Business and Technology
• Business and the Environment
• Comparative Management
• Corporate Governance
• Corporate Social Responsibility
• Entrepreneurship
• Health Management
• Human Resource Management
• Industrial and Employment Relations
• Industry Studies
• Information and Communication Technologies
• International Business
• Knowledge Management
• Management and Management Techniques
• Operations Management
• Organizational Theory and Behaviour
• Pensions and Pension Management
• Public and Nonprofit Management
• Strategic Management
• Supply Chain Management
• Browse content in Criminology and Criminal Justice
• Criminal Justice
• Criminology
• Forms of Crime
• International and Comparative Criminology
• Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice
• Development Studies
• Browse content in Economics
• Agricultural, Environmental, and Natural Resource Economics
• Asian Economics
• Behavioural Finance
• Behavioural Economics and Neuroeconomics
• Econometrics and Mathematical Economics
• Economic Systems
• Economic Methodology
• Economic History
• Economic Development and Growth
• Financial Markets
• Financial Institutions and Services
• General Economics and Teaching
• Health, Education, and Welfare
• History of Economic Thought
• International Economics
• Labour and Demographic Economics
• Law and Economics
• Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics
• Microeconomics
• Public Economics
• Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics
• Welfare Economics
• Browse content in Education
• Adult Education and Continuous Learning
• Care and Counselling of Students
• Early Childhood and Elementary Education
• Educational Equipment and Technology
• Educational Strategies and Policy
• Higher and Further Education
• Organization and Management of Education
• Philosophy and Theory of Education
• Schools Studies
• Secondary Education
• Teaching of a Specific Subject
• Teaching of Specific Groups and Special Educational Needs
• Teaching Skills and Techniques
• Browse content in Environment
• Applied Ecology (Social Science)
• Climate Change
• Conservation of the Environment (Social Science)
• Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Social Science)
• Natural Disasters (Environment)
• Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Social Science)
• Browse content in Human Geography
• Cultural Geography
• Economic Geography
• Political Geography
• Browse content in Interdisciplinary Studies
• Communication Studies
• Museums, Libraries, and Information Sciences
• Browse content in Politics
• African Politics
• Asian Politics
• Chinese Politics
• Comparative Politics
• Conflict Politics
• Elections and Electoral Studies
• Environmental Politics
• European Union
• Foreign Policy
• Gender and Politics
• Human Rights and Politics
• Indian Politics
• International Relations
• International Organization (Politics)
• International Political Economy
• Irish Politics
• Latin American Politics
• Middle Eastern Politics
• Political Methodology
• Political Communication
• Political Philosophy
• Political Sociology
• Political Theory
• Political Behaviour
• Political Economy
• Political Institutions
• Politics and Law
• Public Administration
• Public Policy
• Quantitative Political Methodology
• Regional Political Studies
• Russian Politics
• Security Studies
• State and Local Government
• UK Politics
• US Politics
• Browse content in Regional and Area Studies
• African Studies
• Asian Studies
• East Asian Studies
• Japanese Studies
• Latin American Studies
• Middle Eastern Studies
• Native American Studies
• Scottish Studies
• Browse content in Research and Information
• Research Methods
• Browse content in Social Work
• Addictions and Substance Misuse
• Adoption and Fostering
• Care of the Elderly
• Child and Adolescent Social Work
• Couple and Family Social Work
• Developmental and Physical Disabilities Social Work
• Direct Practice and Clinical Social Work
• Emergency Services
• Human Behaviour and the Social Environment
• International and Global Issues in Social Work
• Mental and Behavioural Health
• Social Justice and Human Rights
• Social Policy and Advocacy
• Social Work and Crime and Justice
• Social Work Macro Practice
• Social Work Practice Settings
• Social Work Research and Evidence-based Practice
• Welfare and Benefit Systems
• Browse content in Sociology
• Childhood Studies
• Community Development
• Comparative and Historical Sociology
• Economic Sociology
• Gender and Sexuality
• Gerontology and Ageing
• Health, Illness, and Medicine
• Marriage and the Family
• Migration Studies
• Occupations, Professions, and Work
• Organizations
• Population and Demography
• Race and Ethnicity
• Social Theory
• Social Movements and Social Change
• Social Research and Statistics
• Social Stratification, Inequality, and Mobility
• Sociology of Religion
• Sociology of Education
• Sport and Leisure
• Urban and Rural Studies
• Browse content in Warfare and Defence
• Defence Strategy, Planning, and Research
• Land Forces and Warfare
• Military Administration
• Military Life and Institutions
• Naval Forces and Warfare
• Other Warfare and Defence Issues
• Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution
• Weapons and Equipment

• < Previous chapter
• Next chapter >

21 Women, Gender, Race, and the Welfare State

Rhonda Y. Williams is professor of history and John L. Seigenthaler Chair in American History at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles against Urban Inequality (2004) and Concrete Demands: The Search for Black Power in the 20th Century (2015). She is also coeditor of Teaching the American Civil Rights Movement.

• Published: 10 September 2018
• Cite Icon Cite
• Permissions Icon Permissions

This chapter examines the modern US welfare state, social welfare, and social citizenship. It focuses on four broad and interconnected themes: (1) The origins of the US welfare state, with an emphasis on race, the roles of women, and gender as an analytical framework; (2) the fissures of democracy made visible through social struggles, such as the antipoverty, black liberation, and welfare rights movements; (3) the relationship between the historical roots and late twentieth-century political battles that gave rise to the dismantling of federal social entitlement programs; and (4) the relationship between notions of the public welfare state and the hidden welfare state, which have served to reinforce the stigmatization of poor people by obscuring the ways in which the middle class and the very wealthy also have benefited from the US welfare state.

In 1969, Kiilu Nyasha, known then as Pat Gallyot, became a member of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. She did so after her position was phased out from what she called the “so-called War on Poverty.” Assigned to a government facility, the Teen Center, in the predominantly black Newhallville neighborhood of New Haven, Connecticut, Gallyot had taken seriously her job to “organize the community involving practically every issue relevant to the needs of the residents.” She attended neighborhood meetings, met “welfare moms,” and focused on hunger and poverty, healthcare, lead poisoning, substandard housing, and education. However, her commitment to organizing against systems of inequality as an antipoverty worker, she contended, ultimately resulted in the loss of this War on Poverty job. 1

Nyasha recalled that once she lost her job, “I quickly discovered there was no safety net for me and my son (nine years old in ’69).” 2 Despite having worked for educational and antipoverty organizations, she was ineligible for unemployment insurance. In dire straits—she needed to support her son and pay her $80-a-month rent—Nyasha turned to the public assistance department for help. When offered a mere $25 a week, she recalled thinking, “Well what am I supposed to do with this?” 3 Having met members of the Black Panther Party, who had set up a free breakfast program at Teen Hall, and aware of the Panthers’ efforts serving the community, Nyasha joined the New Haven chapter. As a Panther, she and other party women, including those who received Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), pooled their resources to support their families. She also worked with the free breakfast program and arranged community and legal support for the liberation of incarcerated party members. Such social welfare initiatives established by activists like the Panthers starkly exposed black people’s and poor people’s dire economic, health, educational, and legal needs that were not being met by the state.

The history of Nyasha and other Black Panther women uncovers what—and how—we have come to know what we know about the modern US welfare state, social welfare, and social citizenship. Indeed, this brief sketch of Nyasha’s experiences begs us to consider the continuum of recognizable and hidden programs, complicated operations, and political protests generated as a result of the US welfare state. Her personal testimony introduces us to AFDC, unemployment compensation, and antipoverty programs. Her community work documents the voices of marginalized women and their political use of the state. Her activism memorializes grassroots interventions to secure power and economic equality in the United States. In these ways, Nyasha’s journey—and the bottom-up historical focus it represents—is evocative of the breadth and limits of the social safety net and the modern US welfare state. It also demonstrates that women’s lives, as well as societal ideas about gender and race, were at the heart of debates over social welfare and economic equality.

Scholarship on the origins of the US welfare state, with a specific emphasis on the roles of women and gender as an analytical framework, has revealed how the US economy has been deeply linked to race and gendered relationships between women and men in a heterosexual paradigm. Social insurance and means- and morals-tested public assistance programs during the New Deal and Great Society institutionalized many tiers and inequities through the welfare state. That included the uneven creation, reach, growth, and transformation of US welfare policies and programs and their differential impact on the social citizenship among women and between women and men. 4

A second scholarly trend lays bare the fissures of democracy made visible through social struggles, such as the antipoverty, black liberation, and welfare rights movements. These studies emerged not only as part of a parallel scholarly intervention that focused attention on black women’s battles for rights and power but also in response to the absence of women social welfare recipients’ and grassroots activists’ voices in welfare state scholarship. The focus on welfare warriors, the politics of public housing, women fighting their own wars on poverty, and movements without marches expanded historical understanding of state-based inequality, the politicization of social welfare programs, and struggles for social citizenship. Centering primarily low-income black women’s voices and experiences, scholars increasingly examined the individual and collective battles against stingy discriminatory government institutions. In doing so, these studies further exposed the racialized and gendered logics of the welfare state, thereby helping to unmask the caricatures of women of color, particularly black single mothers, later deployed to dismantle social entitlements, establish punitive policies, and ultimately undermine the economic security of poor and working-class people. 5

By the 1990s, during the era of aggressive welfare reform, scholars who were alarmed by threats to “end welfare as we know it” examined the relationship between the historical roots and contemporary political battles that gave rise to the dismantling of AFDC as a federal entitlement program. Other studies examined the relationship between the public welfare state and the hidden welfare state. Tax-supported programs have subsidized a larger number of people and private entities than has been acknowledged. This unknown fact has served to reinforce the stigmatization of poor people by obscuring the ways in which the middle class and the very wealthy also have benefited from the US welfare state. In all these ways, scholarship focused on women, race, and gender ideology exposes that US capitalism and social welfare programs rested on a very specific vision of economic relations and social citizenship.

Many Tiers and Inequities

The US welfare state, at its core, was built on inequalities of race, class, and gender. The welfare state therefore conjures and reaffirms the earliest structures of public relief in colonial British North America. After the American Revolution with the expansion of slavery, industrialization, and urbanization, the rise of poverty and dependency wrought tremendous anxieties in the new nation. Economic inequality, race, and gender shaped notions of moral character, dependence, citizenship, and worthiness. The practice of blending immorality and economic hardship foreshadowed a persistent ideology of blaming the poor for their destitution and unequal status while masking how capitalism and social discrimination fueled inequality. 6

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this ideology continued to affect public welfare programs, which reinforced divisions between those deemed worthy and unworthy. Poorhouses and outdoor relief (payments to poor people who did not live inside institutions) linked unemployment to irresponsibility and dependency. Civil War soldiers’ and widows’ pensions supported primarily “deserving” white men and white widows and their children. The establishment of mothers’ pensions for deserted wives and widows in the early 1900s affirmed the male-breadwinner model. Mothers’ pensions also reinforced the idea of a home as a private female space, but without valuing all mothers equally or considering mothering to be work meriting remuneration. Unlike their white counterparts, black male veterans and widows consistently had to fight to secure such access to government benefits. 7 This moral ideology based on race, gender, and labor shaped social welfare policy and pervaded the US welfare state that emerged in direct response to the Great Depression following the stock market crash of 1929.

The worst financial crisis in history caused by laissez-faire capitalism run amok, the crash bankrupted millions of people and catastrophically disrupted their lives. Poverty, joblessness, homelessness, hunger, migration, anxiety, and suicide increased. Demands to respond to these catastrophes and human misery proliferated from families, workers, reformers, and capitalists, all of whom sought the safeguarding of their interests in a time of great economic instability.

Under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the New Deal established a number of federal public works programs and institutions to ease a citizenry suffering in the wake of the Depression, jumpstart the economy, and address corporate fears about socialism in an era ripe with labor organizing. Federal New Deal programs included the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) begun in 1933, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) begun in 1934, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) begun in 1935, and the establishment of public housing through the US Housing Act of 1937. These particular programs provided income, jobs, or housing supports within a heteronormative or “straight” family economy that privileged heterosexual men as laborers and family breadwinners and women as dependents and caregivers. 8

Among the New Deal–era programs that also built on a heterosexual family economy was the Social Security Act of 1935—an early and indispensable cornerstone of the US welfare state. However, the segregated framework of the Social Security Act was not inevitable, as history makes clear. Of the competing bills to propose a federal social safety net during the 1930s, the Social Security Act was the least publicly popular and most conservative. It redistributed the least amount of wealth, covered the most limited categories of workers, tied benefits to employment, and reaffirmed racial and heterosexual privileges. The alternative Lundeen Bill, in contrast, proposed providing unemployment compensation to all workers despite “age, sex, race, color, religious or political opinion or affiliation” by taxing wealthy citizens, but it failed. 9

Instead, liberal white government experts and female social reformers devised and pushed through the Social Security Act based on a white, industrial laborer, male-breadwinner model also known as the family-wage system. This family-wage system had emerged in the nineteenth century as men left households for factories and businesses to earn wages. It purported to allow some men to earn enough to support a wife and children who did not work for pay. In this system, laboring white men were deemed deserving and independent, white wives and children were deserving and dependent, and African Americans, Native Americans, Latina/os, and other racial minorities of either gender were primarily undeserving and dependent. Under this system, the full measure of women’s work—reproductive or productive, paid or unpaid, in or outside a household—went unacknowledged or was undervalued. 10 Intersecting hierarchies of economic worth linked to race, gender, and labor categorically constituted US social citizenship and democracy—and still do. 11

The Social Security Act followed this long-standing logic, establishing federal old-age benefits and providing grants to states for “aged persons, blind persons, dependent and crippled children, maternal and child welfare, public health, and the administration of their unemployment compensation laws.” 12 The Social Security Act also created a federal public assistance program for needy mothers, Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), that would become popularly known as welfare. It was on this program, and others concerning children’s welfare, that women social reformers focused their attention. Under Title IV of the Social Security Act, the federal government through matching funds directly funded existing state-based mothers’ aid and pension laws. 13 Under the Social Security Act, then, unemployment compensation designed with a male breadwinner in mind alongside ADC reflected a gender-based two-channel or two-tiered welfare system. 14

Moreover, ADC only went to some women, exposing still other hierarchies and exclusions. Since their creation, mothers’ pension programs targeted primarily white widows with children with the goal of providing income necessary for them to stay at home and out of the paid labor force in order to raise future white citizens. Women of color, deemed employable, were not eligible for mothers’ pensions and ADC because reformers and politicians presumed they should and could work in domestic and agricultural jobs. 15 In other words, mothers’ pension programs and ADC upheld more than industrial labor relations and male power; they also supported white supremacy and clearly discriminated against Latinas and black women. These practices expose how race and gender affected not only welfare state development but also the quality of life, inclusion, and freedom of women of color in the United States. 16

As champions of the Progressive Era, white middle-class and elite women reformers, who had crafted mothers’ pensions, did not harbor an egalitarian zeal along the lines of race or gender. 17 Operating from their assumed position of moral superiority and white privilege, they lobbied for the nationalization of pension programs to provide state protection for mothers and children. Access depended on recipients’ perceived deservedness or worthiness. Both depended on notions of pristine femininity and policed the racial and ethnic boundaries of social belonging. In this way, worthiness operated as what Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham called a “metalanguage of race” that reaffirmed the primacy and power of race to define other social identities, labor, and citizenship. 18

The “-isms”—racism, ethnocentrism, classism, sexism, and heterosexism—that demarcated social inclusion of beneficiaries also influenced the very structure of the US welfare state and upheld racially discriminatory policies. 19 White men and women reformers as policymakers, from the North and South, not only inscribed gender inequities linked to notions of work and dependency but also engaged in what scholars have described as racialized state-building and produced a racialized gendered state. 20

In the earliest days of ADC, the typical public assistance recipient was a native-born white mother with children. Similarly, when public housing first opened on a segregated basis in the 1930s, it served a higher percentage of white tenants than it did black tenants. While this would change, the public presumption that ADC (whose name was changed to AFDC in 1962) and public housing were created to serve primarily poor black people is historically inaccurate—a popular (mis)understanding that has served reactive, conservative political ends. 21

The Social Security Act also promoted racial and gender inequality in its other titles beyond ADC. Social insurance programs such as unemployment compensation afforded white men, deemed the “natural” family breadwinners, greater guarantees and opportunities for independence. Unemployment relief was rooted in the 1920s—a time when some 5.7 million people were jobless in 1921—and developed to safeguard political institutions and “the nation’s masculine essence.” 22 White men, the jobs they held, and their economic power remained the principal concerns. 23 The Social Security Act, then, not only created a maternalist welfare state, built on a set of policies advanced by women reformers to protect and provide for mothers, but also a paternalist welfare state built on the preservation of patriarchal power.

Title III, which covered unemployment compensation, excluded specific types of nonindustrial labor, such as domestic workers in private households and agricultural workers, from its definition of employment. Domestic workers were also excluded from the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which established the forty-hour week, set a minimum wage, and outlawed child labor. 24 A predominant number of black and ethnic Mexican women and men held domestic and agricultural jobs, and these exclusions boded ill for them and anything akin to fair treatment. Protecting black and ethnic Mexican women (or men) from a volatile labor market was not a priority. They were needed as low-wage service laborers. 25

During the 1930s, urban “slave markets” for black domestic day workers (and some sex workers) were regular sights in New York’s Bronx neighborhoods, as documented by the labor journalism of black radical women like Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke. 26 In public exposés, Baker and Cooke reported on the Bronx street-corner markets, whose very existence unmasked the existence and acceptance of segmented labor systems that exploited workers based on their race and gender. This exploitation helps to illuminate why black women and black families resorted to government subsidies to temper poverty. Black men struggled, for the most part unsuccessfully, to earn anything akin to a family wage, stuck as they were in menial, low-paid labor. In this equation, black women’s work, also menial and low paid, was critical for the family’s economic viability and survival.

Social welfare programs replicated gender ideologies and privilege in other ways. Many decades later, the heterosexual male breadwinner model undergirded the “military welfare state” of the 1970s. 27 As the military shifted from conscription to an All-Volunteer Force (AVF) in 1973, the US Department of Defense established an array of social welfare programs to lure men with families, including medical, dental, and housing assistance, educational opportunities, and legal aid. Though the military had offered rewards for military service since the eighteenth century, the multi-billion-dollar-per-year military welfare program in the late twentieth century served to entice primarily men to become military careerists during the 1970s and 1980s. 28 A focus on supporting “stable male-headed families” based on the “soldier-breadwinner model” effectively excluded gay men and lesbian women and stigmatized AFDC and food stamps, which had been established in 1964 as a permanent federal benefit program for needy families to subsidize the buying of food. 29 There was no similar concern for single or married female soldier breadwinners. 30 Military men were seen as contributing to the nation while women heads-of-households were viewed as weakening traditional gender roles, stability, and order. 31

The New Deal stratified citizens and preserved racial segregation in its urban and housing programs as well. Scholarship on the creation of subsidized housing and how low-income women navigated those programs as tenants revealed tiers of unequal access and social status in the US welfare state. 32 The Federal Housing Administration (FHA), as well as federal public housing programs, maintained racial distinctions in service delivery and, by extension, urban space.

Private real estate developers and businesses reinforced the state’s model of preferences for white male breadwinner families in cities undergoing slum clearance and urban renewal. Laws ensured that that low-income housing assistance programs would not “unfairly” compete with their enterprises; they also provided private companies access to prime urban property. Government programs directed public money to bolster private interests through subsidizing redevelopment efforts that rebuilt downtowns while often resulting in “Negro removal” and urban gentrification. Suburban housing and highway projects, supported by federal dollars to support idealized families after World War II, hastened and reinforced racial segregation. In a matter of a half century, however, exclusionary social welfare provisions would face a frontal attack by those who not only sought direct access to the social safety net but also actively struggled for civil rights, women’s equality, and economic justice.

Laying Bare the Fissures

Scholarly studies on social movements and social welfare struggles that center the lived experiences, rights demands, and citizenship claims of low-income women like Nyasha have provided keen insights into unequal social citizenship and by extension unequal freedom in the United States. Kiilu Nyasha’s experiences trenchantly expose not only the difference in access to government programs but also the fissures among democracy, rights, and fairness. Women’s quotidian realities and activist voices, which serve as a critique of the exclusion and mistreatment of black women with regard to the welfare state and the United States, urge a rethinking of what we presume to know about low-income people and the range of welfare state policies that affect their lives.

Like Roosevelt’s New Deal, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society in the 1960s initiated state-based social welfare programs such as Medicaid and Medicare and antipoverty programs serving the poor, including the Community Action, VISTA, and Legal Aid programs. Indeed, Nyasha’s former work and critique of antipoverty programs illuminate the centrality of racial capitalism and a discriminatory state in US society. As an unemployed single black mother who had worked and paid her taxes, there was a meager AFDC stipend, but no real social safety net for her. In addition, her subsequent turn to activism as a Black Panther exposed not only the ongoing reality of dire poverty in the midst of the War on Poverty but also how the War on Poverty actively controlled and, at times, unintentionally opened up pathways for resistance against, market- and state-based economic inequality.

Examining the history of low-income black women’s activism reveals the double standards that perpetuated institutional inequalities. For instance, as a public housing activist in 1960s Baltimore, the tenant Shirley Wise was often labeled a “troublemaker” by housing authority officials, in part, for merely bringing attention to current regulations. A Resident Advisory Board leader, Wise took advantage of government mandates for tenant input to demand representation and decision-making authority in how housing officials spent federal Housing and Urban Development (HUD) modernization money provided to improve conditions in what some people called the “projects.” Known for reading the fine print in HUD policies, Wise poignantly stated: “There’s a set of rules for everybody to operate under. . . . If you follow those rules, wouldn’t be no need for Shirley Wise, the Resident Advisory Board, tenant council, or none of that. But there’s a need, because somebody is not following the rules.” 33

Between the 1940s and 1960s, more black women and single mothers began to gain access to ADC. Their success was due, in large measure, to their activism. During the 1960s, low-income black women led local and national welfare rights struggles for increased access. The National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), which had local chapters throughout the country, represented poor black, white, Latina, and Native American women, though white single mothers and children were among the primary beneficiaries of ADC. Black women such as Beulah Sanders and Johnnie Tillmon sought access to credit and special grants and demanded adequate income to raise families. Tillmon, who also lived in public housing and helped found the Los Angeles Welfare Rights Organization in 1966, eventually become the national face of the NWRO (1966–1975), and she and other low-income women sought political power and dignity for AFDC recipients. 34 Black women’s strident activism, leadership, public presence, and increased access to AFDC dovetailed with, and even fueled, politicians’ desire to eventually end the program.

Local and national welfare rights activists pushed for guaranteed incomes, clothing allowances, access to jobs, and extensions of credit. They also objected to local eligibility requirements, such as “man-in-the-house” rules. Established as early as the 1950s, man-in-the-house rules targeted women’s, particularly black women’s, personal and intimate relationships as a condition of receiving ADC benefits. Under such provisions, women could not receive ADC benefits for their children if they cohabited with an able-bodied man, even if he was not the children’s father. 35 Government officials’ policing of sexual relationships, then, also policed black men’s sexuality, reinforced specific notions of the male breadwinner ideal, and prescribed what morally legitimate intimate contact should look like—heterosexual marriage. 36

The man-in-the-house rule was also one way for governments to withhold cash assistance from single mothers and limit their AFDC costs. It followed in the tradition of desertion bureaus of the early twentieth century, which tried to recoup state costs by making absent fathers or men pay the government for benefits received by the mothers of their children. 37 According to Alabama’s substitute father regulation, successfully contested in the 1960s by lawyers on behalf of Sylvester Smith, a black mother of four in Selma, AFDC recipients had to prove that their relationships had been discontinued by showing evidence of a subsequent marriage, the man’s admittance to a public institution, his proof of residency at another address, or through a notarized statement swearing that the relationship had ended. The case went to the US Supreme Court, as part of a civil rights strategy exposing welfare system deficits. 38 Ruling in King v. Smith (1968), the Supreme Court ruled the “substitute father” regulation unconstitutional. 39

Studies of welfare rights, public housing, and antipoverty struggles that examine how low-income women individually and collectively navigated social welfare programs have expanded the history of welfare. This literature, centering marginalized voices, has proven indispensable to our understanding of low-income women’s lives, as well as the ways race, gender, and class influenced their daily realities and relationships with other women. 40 More such studies are needed both to capture the nuances of how low-income women of different races and ethnicities experienced poverty, marginalization, and welfare state programs, as well as to expose the cultural and economic processes that reinforce oppression.

As with Nyasha and Wise, both black women, the little-examined experiences of Latina AFDC recipients and activists also demonstrate how low-income women’s struggles complicate our understanding of the welfare state and social citizenship. The first Chicana journal, Encuentro Femenil , founded in 1974, expressed the particularities of Chicanas’ struggles and provided poignant examples of Chicanas’ experiences as AFDC recipients.

Adelaida R. Del Castillo, who lived in the Maravilla public housing complex in East Los Angeles, helped cofound the journal with other Chicana feminists. An undergraduate student and single parent at the time, Del Castillo shared her experiences as “a welfare mother.” In March 1974, she wrote, “As a welfare recipient, I have to settle for what they give me and it’s not enough to support me, but somebody’s making a profit out of it.” Then Del Castillo recounted an article that Alicia Escalante wrote for the journal. In that article, Escalante, a single mother of five and organizer of the East Los Angeles Welfare Rights Organization, which was renamed the Chicana Welfare Rights Organization in 1967, shared “a personal account of her experiences with the system.” Del Castillo wrote that Escalante discussed how the welfare system expended more money on administering the program than on recipients. “Not only the government but the citizens, the average citizen, the working citizen, looks at the welfare recipient and says, ‘I’m paying for you,’ ” Del Castillo wrote, continuing, “But one has to consider where most of the money is going to. . . . When [Governor Ronald] Reagan . . . wants to cut down on the welfare programs it hurts the recipient who is already down in the dumps. He doesn’t say, ‘I’m going to just take a couple of executives out,’ or ‘cut down on the paper work.’ ” 41 In referencing the policies of Ronald Reagan as California’s governor before he rose to the US presidency, she provided a narrative bridge between antiwelfare politics of the past and those yet to come, including federal government–based, market-driven priorities that enriched some while deepening the poverty and stigmatization of poor women of color.

Public housing also served as a space for low-income organizing along racial, economic, and residential lines after World War II and particularly by the 1960s. With black migration to cities and massive migration of Puerto Ricans stateside (mostly to New York City) between the 1940s and 1960s, black and Puerto Rican people moved into public housing in greater numbers while simultaneously being excluded from homeownership opportunities provided to white tenants in suburbs through government-funded highways and mortgage loans. Black female public housing tenants challenged top-down administrative policies and disrespect by white and black managers. They lobbied for programs that could improve the daily living and economic circumstances of tenants. These included establishing public housing tenant associations, food cooperatives, and even credit unions. In Baltimore, public housing tenant activists, the majority black women, organized one of the first citywide Resident Advisory Boards. Aware of federal mandates requiring tenant representation, they fought for input and decision-making power into how housing officials would spend millions of modernization dollars in their public housing communities. In Detroit, grassroots organizers and residents lobbied for jobs within their public housing complexes, and in St. Louis, they engaged in a rent strike to call attention to ever spiraling rent increases, as well as poor maintenance and grounds upkeep. 42

Low-income black women’s struggles—in their daily lives and as activists—provide ample examples of their exclusion. Whether as AFDC recipients or public housing tenants, black women fought for rights, power, economic justice, dignity, and respect. 43 In Philadelphia, individual low-income black women demanded equitable treatment at the hands of hospital, court, and housing officials. In North Carolina, black women formed mothers’ clubs and challenged evictions. In Memphis, black women as neighborhood aides and antipoverty workers labored to make a dent in infant mortality and positioned healthcare as a matter of self-determination and racial justice. These black women through their community organization MAP-South formed a partnership with St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital to secure funding from the Office of Economic Opportunity and address children’s “hunger-induced malnutrition.” 44 In doing so, they developed a “prototype” that was later adopted by the federal government as the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, the WIC program, in 1972. Their grassroots programs, like the free breakfast programs and public health work of the Black Panther Party and the Puerto Rican Young Lords Party, provided models that expanded the US welfare state’s low-income social safety net. 45

As citizens, mothers, and activists, low-income women took seriously President Johnson’s call for a Great Society and a War on Poverty. Low-income women, including welfare recipients and public housing tenants, strategized to use government programs such as Job Corps, Head Start, Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), and the Model Cities program that were established through the Office of Economic Opportunity under the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. In Las Vegas, black women forged their own war on poverty by combining private fundraising with government resources to transform a garbage-filled abandoned hotel into a community center replete with “one of the nation’s most successful free pediatric clinics, a medical and nutrition center for pregnant and nursing mothers, free breakfast and lunch programs, community anticrime projects, a food stamp distribution office, a day care center, parenting courses, a community newspaper, and a public swimming pool.” 46 Laboring to make those programs achieve their stated goals, low-income women, particularly black women, demanded and struggled for rights, power, representation, voice, land, bread, housing, education, and healthcare—while simultaneously publicizing the private sufferings and harrowing conditions of all poor people in the United States. Economic inequality and social oppression in the richest country stood starkly exposed.

Increasingly, domestic workers organized, plowing new ground in the civil rights and women’s rights movements by challenging the exclusions established during the New Deal era. For instance, they pointed out that the 1974 amendments to the Fair Labor Standards Act still did not ensure social citizenship. 47 The amendments included federal minimum wage protections for domestic workers, but excluded live-in workers, home healthcare aides, and babysitters in private households—who would become an underpaid, exploited, and “invisible workforce” by the 1980s. 48 Moreover, the amendments were limited in that they could not guarantee compliance by employers, or deal effectively with the reality of a new stream of immigrant workers who, because of their legal status, were either unaware of or refrained from pressing for their rights because they feared losing jobs. 49 The reconstitution of low-wage gendered work in the home healthcare, hotel, and other care work industries– as well as household workers’ struggles for inclusion—revealed both familiar and new arrangements of economic injustice in late twentieth-century United States.

Stigma, Welfare State “Deform,” and Inequality

In 1996, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA)—dubbed “welfare deform” by Kiilu Nyasha—ushered in the death of AFDC as a federal entitlement program only sixty-one years after its establishment. Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF), which supplanted AFDC, replaced the federal cash assistance program with state block grants that limited benefits to five years total in one’s lifetime. 50 The dismantling of federal social entitlement programs, which also included public housing, exposed the severe unraveling of the social safety net for low-income families in an era of neoliberalism premised on deregulation, privatization, and profits. But as scholars seeking to understand the roots of punitive welfare reform have shown, the backlash against programs in the 1980s and 1990s was also born of decades-old hostilities against black women. Their increased access to ADC as early as the 1950s generated punitive policies and public virulence, culminating in the racist “welfare queen” stereotype in the 1980s and AFDC’s demise by the 1990s.

By the late 1950s, black women were a disproportionate percentage of public assistance recipients. This reality did not prove inherent inferiority or unworthiness, but rather provided stark evidence of the poverty and economic inequality suffered by black families. Black women’s disproportionate use of public entitlement programs—which they had to fight for through the welfare rights movement and organizing in public housing—fueled racially reactionary responses. When these programs—whether ADC or racially segregated public housing complexes—began to serve those they had not been initially intended for, the stigma and backlash against the programs increased. This was so even though white women still constituted the numerical majority of recipients.

As president of the United States, Ronald Reagan became a deft purveyor of racist and sexist caricatures—and remained a strident advocate for dismantling AFDC as part of his conservative agenda in the 1980s. Reagan popularized the idea of the “welfare queen,” a Cadillac-driving, fur-wearing black woman who, far from needy, deceitfully collected welfare checks and lived a life of luxury. The welfare queen became a potent symbol of black government fraud—too often used to mischaracterize real black women struggling to make ends meet on penurious social welfare subsidies in urban and rural communities well into the 1980s and 1990s. 51 Reagan also instituted more work requirements for welfare recipients. As more black women and Latinas accessed welfare, the assumption that it was better for mothers to stay at home to raise children eroded in the rhetoric about welfare.

Conservative politicians were not, however, the only people who criticized social welfare programs. Liberal reformers and government officials also contributed to critiques that ultimately undermined AFDC and preserved a discriminatory welfare state. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, assistant secretary of labor in President Lyndon Johnson’s administration, blamed black female-headed families for black poverty and asserted the need to stabilize black men as breadwinners—a status long denied them. Other liberal reformers lamented how AFDC and man-in-the-house rules weakened families by keeping men out of the homes, rather than demanding gender-based pay equity, critiquing the concept of a male-breadwinner family wage, or challenging marriage as the appropriate pathway to ensure women’s economic stability. Some rationalized fraud as a logical outcome of stingy benefits, instead of critiquing excessive claims of welfare fraud as fraudulent. Such arguments, while calling attention to meager economic supports, contributed in their own ways to wars on AFDC and its women recipients. 52

Even as Reagan bemoaned means-tested social welfare programs, particularly AFDC, he increased US federal spending. He supported increased resources for the military, including social welfare programs for army families. He increased spending for those deemed the worthy “unfortunate,” such as the elderly and disabled. He also bolstered the market economy by subsidizing categories of employment such as private home-care work that continued the tradition of underpaying low-income women. 53 Starting in the 1970s and 1980s, public money went to primarily home healthcare businesses or women workers as independent contractors or private vendors, thereby removing job security and state responsibility for work conditions, and excluding household workers from benefits that came with civil service jobs. 54 Like Roosevelt and Johnson, Reagan, too, used social policy and tax dollars to further his agenda—in his case to underwrite deregulation and privatization, all the while attacking means-tested social welfare programs and reinforcing race- and gender-based economic inequities.

The effective tool of demonizing the poor—particularly low-income black women and their families—would resurface in 1995 during congressional debates that resulted in the dismantling of AFDC. In particular, the Republican representatives John Mica (Florida) and Barbara Cubin (Wyoming) referred to AFDC recipients as “alligators” and “wolves,” respectively, in what scholars have called a “politics of disgust.” 55

It was not surprising, then, that critical to the late twentieth-century equation for remaking AFDC was praise for marriage, refocused attention on the individualist and moralist prescription of personal responsibility, and mandated work as a condition of benefits. The focus on marriage and male wages as a prescription for female poverty gained new vigorous supporters. Such patriarchal models, however, rang hollow for black women, who, along with black men, historically faced employment discrimination. Moreover, the family wage and male breadwinner industrial labor models, generally, were out of step with changing family structures throughout society. Heightened economic pressures in the face of stagnant real wages meant families with two working parents were the norm in late twentieth-century postindustrial society. 56

Neither was the idea of mandating work or “workfare” new. Early public relief and public works programs, including those existing prior to and established during the New Deal, had work requirements. AFDC, however, did not. Indeed, the entire purpose of AFDC was to provide income so mothers could stay at home. Black women and Latinas, however, historically and consistently were treated disparately. In 1967, the federal government mandated employment with the Work Incentive Program, which set a precedent for requiring work from recipients in exchange for benefits. The consistent expectation was that black women and Latinas worked, but low wages meant that these very same women too often still had to depend on social welfare programs, whether AFDC, housing subsidies, food stamps or medical benefits—thereby defying the presumptive notion that welfare and work were simple and obvious opposites. 57

By the 1990s, when work—most often low-wage labor—became an official condition of receiving TANF, social welfare recipients were recast as beneficiaries of “assistance” and “work experience” opportunities even when employed in low-wage workfare jobs. This latter emphasis on workfare, which is different from “fair work” or valuing such workers as laborers deserving of full benefits, holidays, and other standard employee protections, reaffirmed age-old perceptions of the marginal place of black women, Latinas, and immigrant women in the labor market. Indeed, as early as the 1940s and 1950s with an increasing number of black women, including unmarried single mothers, receiving AFDC, state officials began to formally chip away at the underlying concept of the “stay-at-home” mother by implementing employable mother rules and initial work requirements. 58

While policymakers presented welfare recipients as needing mandatory incentives to work, one of the central demands of the welfare rights movement was the opportunity to work for fair wages and in new employment opportunities to support their families. At the same time, women activists vociferously argued that childrearing, too, was labor even if unpaid. Many decades later, despite the call for jobs with dignity and the battle for support of childrearing work that would ensure economic self-sufficiency, low-income black women still found themselves disproportionately in low-wage service work, and still cast as undeserving of the necessary benefits of income, housing, or childcare supports to lift them and their families out of poverty.

The ghosts of racialized gender labor remained fully present and influenced immigration law in new ways in the late twentieth century. 59 As had been the case during the earliest decades of the twentieth century, shifting racial demographics and stereotypes rendered people of color either invisible or extremely visible, primarily as burdens and criminal threats, for the purpose of nation- and state-building. The 1996 reform law explicitly created lengthy waiting periods for new immigrants to access federal health services; it also linked eligibility for public benefits to citizenship status. 60 Moreover, studies explicitly examining the fate of Latin American and Asian women immigrants in the late twentieth-century era of welfare reform expose the durability and pliability of nativism which, alongside the practice of policing legal citizenship, demonized immigrant women and their families while ignoring structural sources of women’s poverty in global markets. 61 The depiction of Mexican women immigrants is emblematic. They were often accused of crossing the border to give birth to “anchor babies” in the United States, who could then, as citizens, initiate a chain migration of kin within a mere twenty-one years. In this scenario, Mexican women and their children threatened the nation, as did their supposed drain on social services. 62

The rhetoric that undergirds society’s negative views of welfare recipients’ worthiness and distorts who they actually are and the structural impediments they confront also speaks to the way social citizenship and national belonging structure inequality. Ongoing racial misanthropy, alongside ethnocentrism and xenophobia, contributed to the dismantling of “welfare as we know it” (that is, as a social safety net for poor people), as well as the demonization of public housing tenants and that program’s downsizing in the United States. Assumptions of low-income racial minorities as scary and undeserving others or different “breeds” of human beings fueled theses of the “culture of poverty,” the “underclass,” and the need to rid cities of both. These assumptions contributed to the development of policies that blamed low-income and immigrant women and called for them to take personal responsibility. This emphasis not only obscured economic inequalities but also vilified women as either unworthy citizens or people unworthy of citizenship.

Hidden Welfare, Affluence, and Redistribution

The conflation of US “welfare” with AFDC, AFDC with single black mothers and increasingly Latinas, and these mothers with social ills not only successfully undermined the legitimacy of state-sanctioned income supports and gutted programs for a wide array of the most needy citizens. These same stigmas and assumptions also created a false division between low-income people and the rest of society, particularly in the matter of who actually benefited from government social programs. While low-income people were often at the receiving end of public wrath, the greatest amount of state aid redounded to middle-class people, wealthy elites, and corporate interests. This financial reality, however, has remained “hidden.”

During the 1980s, increased spending for the Department of Defense also supported military-based social welfare programs, as a result of activist army wives and women recruits. These women, who did not view themselves as simply “adjuncts” to men, began to protest their exclusion from military benefits. Between 1980 and 1987, these army wives—many middle-class, some college-educated, and most married to officers and noncommissioned officers—organized symposia to demand voice and concrete programs, such as childcare, improved healthcare, and education and employment assistance. Starting with 200 delegates worldwide in 1980, the symposia grew to 270,000 attendees by 1987. 63 Their self-advocacy, while challenging the male soldier-breadwinner model, nevertheless resulted in programs that did not suffer the same anathema as AFDC—at least not initially.

However, growing apprehension over the “social welfare-ization” of the army helped to undermine such programs. 64 As the military budget shrank in the 1990s, the moralistic language of dependency maligned social welfare programs, and encouraged military officials not only to demand that soldiers and their families be self-sufficient (that is, not dependent on the military) but also to outsource army social welfare programs to corporate and private entities. 65 The failure to categorize tax-supported benefits as social welfare is as much a function of the pathways by which those benefits make it into people’s pockets, as it is predicated on the feminization of dependency, the racialization of poverty, and other “social relation[s] of subordination.” 66

Comparative scholarly studies of the US welfare state have helped to shed light on hidden forms of government-supported social welfare. 67 These programs extended services and benefits through fiscal policy, which is not coincidentally the least feminized, racialized, or stigmatized form of policy. 68 Such fiscal policy comprises tax expenditures and deductions that have social welfare objectives and exist as part of the “hidden welfare state.” “Fiscal welfare” includes home mortgage insurance and interest, medical deductions, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and employer-provided retirement pensions. 69 Unlike people who depend on means- and morals-tested welfare programs, those who benefit from hidden welfare remain unscathed as recipients of public benefits. The latter also tend to be corporations or people who have above-average incomes and a greater abundance, rather than a shortage, of means. Moreover, because black people historically have been excluded from mortgage programs (that also have promoted residential segregation), and low-income women and poor people do not have the economic resources to purchase homes, they tend to inequitably benefit from these tax-supported private welfare programs. The invisibility of tax-supported social programs further alienates the general populace from the welfare state by not communicating a fuller picture of the ways in which a broad array of Americans benefit from government programs, from student loans to healthcare. As a result, many tiers of unequal access remain intact, social stratification and stereotyping remain hidden but real, and overall economic inequality is preserved. 70

The “submerged” and hidden welfare state also has benefited, since the 1980s, from cultural attacks against dependency and the privatization of social programs. 71 Within the economic context of late capitalism and its features of privatization and deregulation, government officials increasingly applied market models to the US welfare state as a mechanism to dismantle public welfare programs for poor people. The attack on the poor—through the tinged lens of race and gender—continued unabated and helped to advance laissez-faire capitalist schemes linked to the demise of AFDC and public housing. By the late 1990s, in cities such as Baltimore, Chicago, Atlanta, and New Orleans, public housing, demolished wholesale, became “New Deal ruins.” 72

This extension of government services to private agencies and business entities has underwritten a massive redistribution of resources. Privatization was not about smaller government per se; politicians engaged in ideological battles used racialized gender stereotyping as the blunt edge to hammer home policies that restructured who benefited from tax dollars and tax breaks. The attack on welfare facilitated the privatization of public programs, and this affected more than low-income and immigrant women of color. For instance, privatization facilitated the growth of the “security state,” which benefited from the funneling of public resources to private firms, many of them connected to the same corporate and Republican Party networks that bemoaned the supposed laziness and fraudulence of low-income people. 73 These firms won lucrative contracts to take over what had been federal responsibilities of war restructuring, building prisons, and managing incarcerated citizens. Corporate recipients of such benefits, however, escaped the demeaning labels of unworthiness ascribed to marginalized communities, and particularly low-income and immigrant women of color.

Past Inequalities and Future Just Possibilities

Through policies and programs, welfare states redistribute money in the service of economic security. The United States has been no different. However, economic security is not the same as economic justice. The redistribution of resources does not necessarily mean the fair, equitable, and respectful treatment of society’s most economically marginalized people, or the erasure (even if importantly, at times, the amelioration) of poverty.

Indeed, the visible and the hidden US welfare state has helped to maintain and expand differential economic power, even when it provided a minimal social safety net to protect some poor people from destitution and, at times, catalyzed their resistance against those very same inequalities. Nyasha’s experience as an antipoverty worker, AFDC recipient, and Black Panther activist is instructive here. Her story, along with Shirley Wise’s and Adelaida R. Del Castillo’s, reminds us of the crucial need for more historically based scholarship on differently situated women and their treatment by different sectors of the US welfare state. This will provide insight into the shifting political economy and institutional powers that reproduced social marginalization.

Broader understanding of low-income women’s resistance in response to social welfare will help scholars understand the contours, operation, and transformation of the welfare state, the capitalist economy, and social citizenship. In particular, the treatment, experiences, and struggles of black women in relation to the welfare state, while far from exhausted, have received much more scholarly attention than those of other women of color. It is imperative for us to remember that black (and white) women’s stories remain critical to our understanding of welfare state formation and its ameliorative and punitive policies. However, it is equally critical to gain increased knowledge of Native American, Puerto Rican, Chicana, Asian-descended, and immigrant women’s experiences during and after, but especially before 1996. Studies that center women’s voices, with race and gender as analytical frameworks, will further enrich our understanding of welfare state development, policy, and political economy.

More research on the intersections of social welfare, welfare state development, LGBTQ experiences, and sexual orientation is also needed. There is a dearth of historical understanding and scholarly work on the queering of the state, which has remained concealed in the federal social welfare “closet.” 74 When sexuality has been examined, it has usually focused on heterosexual practices and single mothers’ (and some men’s) intimate lives and alleged lascivious behaviors. These analyses have significantly exposed the existence and operation of race- and gender-based oppression through maternalist, patriarchal, and heterosexual notions. But they have also retained heterosexuality as the analytical norm, thus obscuring people in same-sex or same-gender relationships and their access to social welfare programs and citizenship status. More historical scholarship that explicitly unmasks heterosexual assumptions in federal social welfare regulations, policies, and programs are needed. 75

Finally, since the formation of the US welfare state, one of the certain features has been economic insecurity and the preservation of racial and gender hierarchies in a capitalist, market-driven society. To this end, examinations of the globalized feminization of low-wage work and worker protests are also critical. So are detailed studies that probe current aversions to expanding social welfare provisions for the most economically marginalized, including new immigrants in the United States, and the rise of punitive responses to women in other related state realms such as immigration, child welfare, foster care, and the prison systems. 76 By focusing on these systems, the wealth of programs, and the breadth of the welfare state, we will develop a more nuanced understanding of the state and economy. As we do that, the voices and activism of marginalized women, on whose images and backs social entitlements have been dismantled, must continue to be examined and recognized. This remains crucial for assessing past inequalities and future just possibilities.

I thank Margot Canaday, Misty Luminais, Premilla Nadasen, Jeanne Theoharis, and the editors of this volume, either for providing sources and citations, or reading versions and giving speedy feedback on this essay.

1. Kiilu Nyasha, “A Chapter in the Life of a Panther,” Our Stories , It’s about Time: Black Panther Party Legacy & Alumni Website, http://www.itsabouttimebpp.com/our_stories/Chapter1/A_Chapter_In_The_Life.html ; Kiilu Nyasha, “Kiilu Talks about Life Experiences,” Women of the Black Panther Party , It’s about Time website, http://www.itsabouttimebpp.com/Women_BPP/salute_women_index.html . Also, Hans Bennett, “Media, Revolution, and the Legacy of the Black Panther Party: An Interview with Kiilu Nyasha,” LA Progressive , https://www.laprogressive.com/media-revolution-and-the-legacy-of-the-black-panther-party-an-interview-with-kiilu-nyasha/ . For more information on New Haven and Community Progress Inc., see Yohuru Williams , Black Politics, White Power: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Black Panthers in New Haven (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 74–79 .

Nyasha, “A Chapter in the Life of a Panther.”

Bennett, “Media, Revolution, and the Legacy of the Black Panther Party.”

4. See Linda Gordon , ed., Women, the State, and Welfare (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990) ; Gwendolyn Mink, “Lady and the Tramp: Gender, Race, and the Origins of the American Welfare State,” in Gordon, Women, the State, and Welfare , 92–122; Mimi Abramovitz , Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present , rev. ed. (Boston: South End Press, 1999) ; Robyn Muncy , Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) ; Linda Gordon , Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (New York: Free Press, 1994) .

5. On low-income women’s protest, Roberta M. Feldman and Susan Stall , The Dignity of Resistance: Women Residents’ Activism in Chicago Public Housing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004) ; Lisa Levenstein , A Movement without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009) ; Premilla Nadasen , Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2005) ; Annelise Orleck , Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005) ; Rhonda Y. Williams , The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles against Urban Inequality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004) .

6. Seth Rockman , Welfare Reform in the Early Republic (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2003), 1–33 .

7. Michael B. Katz , In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (New York: Basic Books, 1996) ; Theda Skocpol , Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992) ; Brandi C. Brimmer, “All Her Rights and Privileges: African American Civil War Widows and the Politics of Widows’ Pensions Claims” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2006); “Black Women’s Politics, Narratives of Sexual Immorality, and Federal Policy in Mary Lee’s North Carolina Neighborhood,” Journal of Southern History 80, no. 4 (November 2014): 827–58 . Also see Mary Frances Berry , My Face Is Black Is True: The Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations (New York: Vintage, 2005) .

8. Through the CCC, unmarried single men or “breadwinners-in-training” received a monthly check, which had to help support a dependent. This differed from the Federal Transient Program, also established in 1933 under the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, which was a “nonfamilial” program for single men deemed a “haven for sex perverts” and, as a result, operated under a shadow of disrepute. The WPA jobs went mostly to married men. These welfare state programs of the 1930s were built on heterosexual assumptions about gender, intimacy, and sexual orientation. By World War II, heteronormative or antihomosexual attitudes, which had operated informally within government programs, became formally inscribed through regulations legally excluding homosexual or “deviant” men” through the GI Bill—the largest welfare state expenditure after Social Security programs. See Margot Canaday , The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009) , chap. 3.

9. The Lundeen Bill was also titled the Worker’s Unemployment and Social Insurance Bill. The third was the Townsend Bill, which called for a 2 percent tax on financial transactions. This money would be redistributed via a monthly pension to all citizens 65 years and older. Mary Poole , The Segregated Origins of Social Security: African Americans and the Welfare State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 21–27 (quote 22).

10. See Eileen Boris and Lara Vapnek, “Women’s Labors in Industrial and Postindustrial America,” in this volume. Marisa Chappell , The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty, and Politics in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 6 .

Social citizenship incorporates social and economic rights, not just political and civil rights.

The Social Security Act of 1935, www.ssa.gov/history/35act.html .

Mothers’ aid and pension laws had existed in every state except South Carolina and Georgia. For detail on the content of the Children’s Bureau alternative to the ADC proposal introduced by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, see Poole, The Segregated Origins of Social Security , 141–73.

See Barbara J. Nelson, “The Origins of the Two-Channel Welfare State: Workmen’s Compensation and Mothers’ Aid,” in Gordon, Women, the State, and Welfare , 123–51.

15. Evelyn Nakano Glenn , Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 91 , 242.

Glenn, Unequal Freedom , 91–92.

17. On mothers’ assistance grants, see Joanne L. Goodwin , Gender and the Politics of Welfare Reform: Mothers’ Pensions in Chicago, 1911–1929 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) ; Mink, “Lady and the Tramp”; Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform ; Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled.

18. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham , “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Signs 17, no. 2 (Winter 1992): 251–74 ; Poole, Segregated Origins of Social Security , 174–76.

19. Deborah E. Ward , The White Welfare State: The Racialization of U.S. Welfare Policy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 1–2 .

20. Eileen Boris , “The Racialized Gendered State,” Social Politics 2 (Summer 1995): 160–80 ; Ward, The White Welfare State , 3. On the racialized welfare state, see Michael K. Brown , Race, Money, and the American Welfare State (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999) ; Poole, Segregated Origins of Social Security . Also see Eileen Boris and S. Jay Kleinberg , “Engendering Social Welfare Policy,” in The Practice of U.S. Women’s History: Narratives, Intersections, and Dialogues , ed. S. Jay Kleinberg , Eileen Boris , and Vicki L. Ruiz (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 258–79 .

The name was changed to AFDC after two-parent families, with an unemployed parent, became eligible for benefits.

22. Daniel Amsterdam , “Before the Roar: U.S. Unemployment Relief after World War I and the Long History of a Paternalist Welfare Policy,” Journal of American History 101, no. 4 (March 2015): 1123 , 1132.

Amsterdam, “Before the Roar,” 1126–28.

24. Premilla Nadasen , “Citizenship Rights, Domestic Work, and the Fair Labor Standards Act,” Journal of Policy History 24, no. 1 (2012): 74–94 .

25. Glenn, Unequal Freedom , 91; Alejandra Marchevsky and Jeanne Theoharis , “Welfare Reform, Globalization, and the Racialization of Entitlement,” American Studies 41, no. 2/3 (Summer/Fall 2000): 235–65 . Also see Alejandra Marchevsky and Jeanne Theoharis , Not Working: Latina Immigrants, Low-Wage Jobs, and the Failure of Welfare Reform (New York: NYU Press, 2006) .

26. On Marvel Cooke and her “labor journalism,” see Dayo F. Gore , Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War (New York: NYU Press, 2011), 100–118 .

27. On 1960s and Great Society liberals, see, for instance, Chappell, The War on Welfare ; Robert O. Self , All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy since the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012) . On the “camouflaged safety net” and the emergence of the military welfare state, see Brian Gifford , “The Camouflaged Safety Net: The U.S. Armed Forces as Welfare State Institution,” Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society 11, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 372–99 ; and Jennifer Mittlestadt , “The Soldier-Breadwinner and the Army Family: Gender and Social Welfare in the Post-1945 US Military and Society,” Gender and the Long Postwar: The United States and the Two Germanys, 1945–1989 , ed. Karen Hagemann and Sonya Michel (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2014) .

28. Jennifer Mittlestadt , The Rise of the Military Welfare State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 3–4 .

Mittlestadt, “The Soldier-Breadwinner and the Army Family,” 276. The food stamp program was initially developed during the Great Depression to help poor families and farmers, but was discontinued in the 1940s. President John F. Kennedy piloted a similar food stamp program in 1961, and President Lyndon Johnson asked Congress to make it permanent and signed the Food Stamp Act in 1964 as part of his War on Poverty.

Mittlestadt, “The Soldier-Breadwinner and the Army Family,” 280.

Mittlestadt, The Rise of the Military Welfare State , 8.

32. Williams, The Politics of Public Housing . On housing policy, see Gail Radford , Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) .

Williams, The Politics of Public Housing , 13. For a discussion on how women in using the welfare state to claim power also challenged its social control functions, see Frances Fox Piven, “Ideology and the State: Women, Power, and the Welfare State,” in Gordon, Women, the State, and Welfare , 150–64; Orleck, Storming Caesars Palace .

34. Felicia Kornbluh , The Battle for Welfare Rights: Politics and Poverty in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007) ; Nadasen, Welfare Warriors ; Guida West , National Welfare Rights Movement: Social Protest of Poor Women (New York: Praeger, 1981) ; Guida West and Rhoda Lois Blumberg , eds., Women and Social Protest (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) .

35. Felicia Kornbluh , “To Fulfill Their ‘Rightly Needs’: Consumerism and the National Welfare Rights Movement,” Radical History Review 69 (1997): 76–113 ; Nadasen, Welfare Warriors ; Williams, The Politics of Public Housing .

36. Local welfare policies, such as these, exposed not only the reigning ideas of heteronormativity and chastity but also how race and gender impacted sexual practices. Like black women, black men were seen as having uncontrollable libidos and, as a result, they too faced government scrutiny and censure. Alison Lefkovitz , “Men in the House: Race, Welfare, and the Regulation of Men’s Sexuality in the United States, 1961–1972,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 20, no. 3 (September 2011): 544–614 .

Lefkovitz, “Men in the House.”

Lefkovitz, “Men in the House,” 603.

39. King v. Smith (1968), in Welfare: A Documentary History of U.S. Policy and Politics , ed. Gwendolyn Mink and Rickie Solinger (New York: NYU Press, 2003), 286–89 .

Levenstein, A Movement without Marches .

41. The quotes appear in Adelaida R. Del Castillo , “La Vision Chicana,” Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings , ed. Alma M. Garcia (New York: Routledge, 1997), 46 . For additional information on Alicia Escalante, see “Alicia Escalante: A Chicana Hero,” Notes from Atzlan website, April 16, 2014, http://www.notesfromaztlan.com/2014/04/16/alicia-escalante-a-chicana-hero-2/ ; Rosie C. Bermudez, “Recovering Histories: Alicia Escalante and the Chicana Welfare Rights Organization, 1967–1974” (master’s thesis, California State University, Dominguez Hills, 2010).‬

42. Rhonda Y. Williams , “ ‘Something’s Wrong Down Here’: Poor Black Women and Urban Struggles for Democracy,” in African American Urban History since World War II , ed. Kenneth L. Kusmer and Joe W. Trotter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 316–36 ; Rhonda Y. Williams , Concrete Demands: The Search for Black Power in the 20th Century (New York: Routledge, 2015), 182–83 ; Williams, The Politics of Public Housing.

43. Feldman and Stall, The Dignity of Resistance ; Christina Greene , Our Separate Ways: Women and the Black Freedom Movement in Durham, North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005) ; Nadasen, Welfare Warriors ; Orleck, Storming Caesars Palace ; Williams, The Politics of Public Housing .

44. Laurie B. Green , “Saving Babies in Memphis: The Politics of Race, Health, and Hunger during the War on Poverty,” in The War on Poverty: A New Grassroots History, 1964–1980 , ed. Annelise Orleck and Lisa Hazirjian (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 135 .

Johanna Fernandez, “The Young Lords and the Postwar City: Notes of the Geographical and Structural Reconfigurations of Contemporary Urban Life,” in Kusmer and Trotter, African American Urban History since World War II , 60–82; Green, “Saving Babies in Memphis,” 134; Greene, Our Separate Ways ; Levenstein, A Movement without Marches .

Annelise Orleck, “Introduction: The War on Poverty from the Grass Roots Up,” in Orleck and Hazirjian, The War on Poverty , 1.

47. Nadasen, “Citizenship Rights, Domestic Work, and the Fair Labor Standards Act,” 75–76; Premilla Nadasen , Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement (New York: Beacon Press, 2015) .

48. Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein , Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012) .

49. Nadasen, “Citizenship Rights, Domestic Work, and the Fair Labor Standards Act,” 85–87. Grace Chang argues that “slashing” benefits under “welfare reform” helps to ensure that the demand for household workers in middle-class homes “is met by eager migrant women workers.” See Chang , Disposable Domestics: Immigrant Women Workers in the Global Economy (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000), 124–25 .

Nyasha, “Kiilu Talks about Life Experiences.”

51. Bonnie Thornton Dill and Tallese Johnson , “Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Mothering, Work, and Welfare in the Rural South,” in Sister Circle: Black Women and Work , ed. Sharon Harley and the Black Women and Work Collective (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 2002), 67–83 ; Premilla Nadasen , “From Widow to ‘Welfare Queen’: Welfare and the Politics of Race,” Black Women, Gender, and Families 1, no. 2 (Fall 2007): 52–77 .

52. Also see Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon , “A Genealogy of ‘Dependency,’ ” in Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis (New York: Verso, 2013), 104–6 .

Boris and Klein, Caring for America , 100.

Boris and Klein, Caring for America , 96–97.

55. John Mica and Barbara Cubin , “Alligators and Wolves,” in Welfare: A Documentary History of U.S. Policy and Politics , ed. Gwendolyn Mink and Ricki Solinger (New York: NYU Press, 2003), 622–23 . See also Gwendolyn Mink , Welfare’s End (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998) ; Ange-Marie Hancock , The Politics of Disgust: The Public Identity of the Welfare Queen (New York: NYU Press, 2004) ; Chappell, The War on Welfare .

56. Nancy Fraser , “Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History,” Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis (New York: Verso Press, 2013), 209–26 .

Dill and Johnson, “Between a Rock and a Hard Place,” 69–70.

58. Nancy Rose , Workfare or Fair Work: Women, Welfare, and Government Work Programs (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995) . Also see, Chang, Disposable Domestics , 165–73.

59. Lynn Fujiwara , Mothers without Citizenship: Asian Immigrant Families and the Consequences of Welfare Reform (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), xiv .

60. Fujiwara, Mothers without Citizenship , 22; Priscilla Huang , “Anchor Babies, Over-Breeders and The Population Bomb: The Resurgence of Nativism and Population Control in Anti-Immigration Policies,” Harvard Law and Policy Review 2 (2008): 388–400 .

61. Also see, for instance, Lisa Sun-Hee Park , Entitled to Nothing: The Struggle for Immigrant Health Care in the Age of Welfare Reform (New York: NYU Press, 2011) .

Huang, 385–406.

Mittelstadt, The Rise of the Military Welfare State , 143.

Mittelstadt, The Rise of the Military Welfare State , 146.

Mittelstadt, The Rise of the Military Welfare State , 10–12.

Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon maintain that “with economic dependency now a synonym for poverty, and with moral/psychological dependency now a personality disorder, talk of dependency as a social relation of subordination has become increasingly rare” in the postindustrial, neoliberal society of the late-twentieth century and twenty-first century. See Fraser and Gordon, “A Genealogy of ‘Dependency,’ ” 108.

67. See, for instance, William J. Novak , “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State,” American Historical Review 113, no. 3 (June 2008), 752–72 .

68. Christopher Howard , The Hidden Welfare State: Tax Expenditures and Social Policy in the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997) ; Michael B. Katz , “The American Welfare State and Social Contract in Hard Times,” Journal of Policy History 22, no. 4 (2010), 508–29 ; Michael B. Katz , “Public Education as Welfare,” Dissent (Summer 2010), 54 .

Howard, The Hidden Welfare State , 5.

Howard, The Hidden Welfare State . Michael K. Brown found that the most value of tax deductions, such as mortgage and medical expenses, go to the upper one-third of the income distribution. Brown, Race, Money, and the American Welfare State , 2–3.

71. Katz, “Public Education as Welfare,” 55; Suzanne Mettler , The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Policies Undermine American Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011) .

72. Edward G. Goetz , New Deal Ruins: Race, Economic Justice, and Public Housing Policy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013) .

For instance, see Canaday, The Straight State .

76. Dorothy E. Roberts , “Prison, Foster Care, and the Systemic Punishment of Black Mothers,” 59 UCLA Law Review (2012): 1474–500 ; Lisa Sun-Hee Park, Entitled to Nothing .

Abramovitz, Mimi.   Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present . Rev. ed. Boston: South End Press, 1999 .

Google Scholar

Google Preview

Boris, Eileen , and Jennifer Klein . Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State . New York: Oxford University Press, 2012 .

Canaday, Margot.   The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009 .

Chappell, Marisa.   The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty, and Politics in Modern America . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011 .

Fujiwara, Lynn.   Mothers without Citizenship: Asian Immigrant Families and the Consequences of Welfare Reform . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008 .

Gordon, Linda.   Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare . New York: Free Press, 1994 .

Levenstein, Lisa.   A Movement without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009 .

Marchevsky, Alejandra , and Jeanne Theoharis . Not Working: Latina Immigrants, Low-Wage Jobs, and the Failure of Welfare Reform . New York: NYU Press, 2006 .

Mettler, Suzanne.   The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Policies Undermine American Democracy . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011 .

Mittlestadt, Jennifer.   The Rise of the Military Welfare State . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015 .

Nadasen, Premilla.   Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States . New York: Routledge, 2005 .

Orleck, Annelise.   Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty . Boston: Beacon Press, 2005 .

Williams, Rhonda Y.   The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles against Urban Inequality . New York: Oxford University Press, 2004 .

• About Oxford Academic
• Publish journals with us
• University press partners
• What we publish
• New features  
• Open access
• Institutional account management
• Rights and permissions
• Get help with access
• Accessibility
• Advertising
• Media enquiries
• Oxford University Press
• Oxford Languages
• University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• Cookie settings
• Cookie policy
• Privacy policy
• Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

Women, welfare, and work: One view of the debate

1998, Nursing Outlook

Related Papers

Jane Henrici

The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance

Randy Albelda

Labour / Le Travail

Mimi Abramovitz

Public Health Nursing

Anne Neufeld

Abstract Public health nurses are committed to promoting the health of vulnerable populations, including the economically disadvantaged. One of the perspectives that can be used to work with low-income women is feminist theory. In this paper, we analyze program descriptions from 45 community agencies whose services are accessed by urban low-income women. The purpose of the analysis is to identify congruence between agency programs and selected feminist principles. As a result of the content analysis, empirical referents and examples were identified for each principle. Public health nursing programs can incorporate feminist principles by responding to the perspectives of the vulnerable and facilitating their efforts to change the conditions that led to their vulnerability. Questions are presented that could guide public health nurses in stimulating reflection and in facilitating dialogue in the process of developing programs for low-income women.

Qualitative Sociology

Kerry Woodward

Janice Peterson

… Journal of Public …

Nalini Ranjit

Nursing Outlook

samuel vries

Women's Studies International Forum

Luisa Deprez

RELATED PAPERS

Eric Lagneau

Düşünen Şehir Dergisi

greeshma devannair

P. Latchoumy

Archiwum Filozofii Prawa i Filozofii Społecznej

Maciej Wojciechowski

Clinical cancer research : an official journal of the American Association for Cancer Research

Tomas Ohlum

Seminare. Poszukiwania naukowe

Marcin Jurczyk, Ph.D.

Korean Journal of Environmental Agriculture

Prof.R.C. Dubey

Kadir Bunga

Polonia Sacra

Michael Rosenberger

Journal of Childhood and Adolescence Research

Julian Sehmer

Scholars international journal of obstetrics and gynecology

Nahreen akhtar

Philosophie in der islamischen Welt 4 (Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie online)

Frank Darwiche

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

David Galindo

Astronomy &amp; Astrophysics

M. Groenewegen

Pablo Ceccarelli

International Journal of Infectious Diseases

Maria Eduarda Rodrigues Oliveira

Engineering With Computers

Yakubu Kasimu Galadima

Polgári szemle

Maria Makkai

The Quantum Labyrinth

dick hoekzema

The Egyptian Journal of Internal Medicine

Hatem Darwish

Rabbani: Jurnal Pendidikan Agama Islam

Ach Syafiq Fahmi

Advanced Materials

Adrian David

Chemical Physics Letters

Silvia Völker

RELATED TOPICS

•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

Welfare is a Women's Issue

• Student sensitivity.
• The Power of Advertising and Girls' Self-Image

Print this Text

Select the Student Version to print the text and Text Dependent Questions only. Select the Teacher Version to print the text with labels, Text Dependent Questions and answers. Highlighted vocabulary will appear in both printed versions.

• Google Classroom

Sign in to save these resources.

Login or create an account to save resources to your bookmark collection.

Learning for Justice in the South

When it comes to investing in racial justice in education, we believe that the South is the best place to start. If you’re an educator, parent or caregiver, or community member living and working in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana or Mississippi, we’ll mail you a free introductory package of our resources when you join our community and subscribe to our magazine.

Get the Learning for Justice Newsletter

Sample details

• Social Issues
• Women Empowerment
• Words: 1772

Related Topics

• Feminist literary criticism
• Radical feminism
• Feminist movement
• Laura Mulvey
• Women'S Rights

Women and Welfare Essay

Women and welfare is a relative issue based on the fact that the lack of resources available to women are limited. Access to education, pay gap, and health rights are three main reasons to why the standard of living for a women is significantly lower. Although it is important for the government to allocate funding for women to recieve equal resources and opportunities, this issue begins with how patriarchy and capitalism has influenced society. Patriarchy is the start of this issue between women and welfare, because it has created a gap between genders, degraded women, which has put women out of reach for certain opportunities.

According to the United States Bureau of the Census in 1996, there were 44.3% of female headed households with children living in poverty (Gellman). From then to now this issue has only worsened. It is perspicuous that women continuously find themselves dependent on other people. This may because of unwed pregnancies, death, divorce, and a majority of those individuals who collect benefits from various welfare programs are women. The cycle of reliance is a result of a funnel of failure that women tend to fall victim to. Women are left living in poverty, uneducated, risk of many health issues due to structural issues in society. Women’s welfare is a social welfare program which seeks to promote welfare to women by giving special attention to the promotion of skills of employment and self actualization. In order for women to receive welfare they must meet an extensive amounts of requirements.

ready to help you now

Without paying upfront

The different types of welfare programs that the government has created are, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Each of these programs were created to help women reach their full potential. The qualifications that women need to meet for these programs are dependent child living in the home, all minors must attend school, must be 18 years or older, must be a legal and permanent citizen of the United States. Although these programs are being put in place their are many prevailing issues women still face with welfare. Employment opportunities even in wealthy countries is still a current issue. It is estimated that for every dollar a man earns a women only earns 77 cents. “Women earn only one-tenth of the world’s income despite working two thirds of the total work hours” (Glick). A way to resolve this issue is to educate women on fair share and how that could benefit the entire community in the long run. Women would be more inclined to invent which would put money into their families while restoring the community. Another issue women face with welfare is access to health resources. According to an article in Global Citizen, it is estimated that eight hundred women die every day due to preventable pregnancy related contentions. The author of the article “9 key issues affecting girls and women around the world” written by Hans Glick has found that nearly 300,000 lives are lost in a life creating event. That number could be significantly reduced if women had a great education higher than primary school. In 2013 a report by UNESCO has found that nearly thirty-one millions girls were not in school. That number exemplifies an outrageous amount of unused female power. In the report it is stated that educated women are more likely to raise healthy children, find work, get married later, and even earn more money (Glick). This being said, each of these problems could all be resolved by starting with access to education. In order to fix this core issue further than education, it starts and begins with patriarchy.

Patriarchy is a term used in feminism to describe the system of gender based hierarchy in society which assigns power to men, and put a higher value to men. Although some might believe that the government has the ability to fix this issue by funding more programs this will only prolong this situation. In the future year of 2019, the United States government will be spending and estimated amount of $1,179 billion on welfare, including federal, state, and local. This will also be including a total of $721 billion on Medicaid, $458 billion on other welfare programs. (What is the Spending on Welfare, 1). Even though the amount being spent on these programs have significantly increased, the number of women dependent of welfare has also increased. In the fourth quarter of 2012, an estimated amount of 110 million American were receiving some type of government assistance. That is about thirty-five percent of the United States total population. Of that percentage, women are more likely to need help through welfare programs. As of 2011, twenty-five percent of those who aged from 16 to 64 were receiving benefits. Men who range around the same age received slightly more than nineteen percent of some type of welfare (Lake). Single mothers who are the headed households are more likely to be on welfare. According to studies, in 2011 single mothers represented fifty-five percept of the total welfare population. Compared to in 2000, that percentage was only thirty-seven. For starters, not all the work has been created equal. Research found in Welfare Statistics in America states that a suggested one-third of women did not see a increased pay check…………… Other studies that shown that a majority of women were no longer on welfare worked low-wage jobs without benefits. Consequently, many children and women will continue to live in poverty, without a likely chance of a leg up on welfare (Passy).

The root between women and welfare first began with patriarchy, and allowing men to be the hierarchy. Women at various levels have been subjugated levels such as political, ecnomonic, social, and cultural. Patriarchy dictates femininity and masculinity character stereotypes in society which strengthens the godly powerful relationship between and women and men. The beliefs and practices of the patriarchal system de powers a women. Women ultimately feel powerless when they are told to believe that they are unstable and unable to cope with physical and social demands. The economic environment of a domestic household where a housewife and her contribution in running it is devalued and look down upon. In society it is expected for a women to be only capable of running a household and nothing more. Domestically, the husband is the sequestrate class. Meaning that paid employment describes that patriarchal relations on the job refers to women being given worse jobs and being paid less than a man for the exact same job. The state supports to its patriarchal, racist, and capitalist interest by choosing not to intercede or be slow in intervening in cases of injustice against women. For example, women have the freedom to move around and earn a subsistence, but may not have control over the money she earns for herself. To this current day it is still managed by the patriarchs within a family.

Therefore, there is variance distinction between experiences of empowerment and creating conditions for empowerment (Gellman). The nature of vanquisting and control of women varies from one patriarchal society to the other. Patriarchy is not a constant and gender relations which are complex and dynamic. There has been change over periods of history, but not completely for the better. The commendatory conditions created for empowerment are present in the environment and are outermost to the women a term known as eve empowerment. The word “to empower” means to authorize, delegate or give legal power to someone. The feminist movements have resulted in feminine meticulation against patriarchal subjugation. Consequently, many contemporary studies have been carried out to study empowerment. If conditions favoring eve empowerment make a women experience empowerment, then it is termed as psychological empowerment (Gellman). Psychological empowerment is a impetes construct and is commenced within an individual. Since eve empowerment is a measure of surmount patriarchal beliefs and practices, it would enable women to experience a choice on domestic matters and control. Feminism is a perception of patriarchal control, oppression, and exploitation at the ideological and material levels of women’s labor at work, and in the general society, is ultimately caused by actions of men. In the article “Female-Headed Households and the Welfare System” written by Lauren Gellman, a study about psychological empowerment in a home. This refers to the experience of components related to household activities and work. Therefore, it is safe to presume that eve empowerment will facade to experience of psychological empowerment in a home. Since education impacts socialization and endorses modern values, it is logical to Organizations may introduce women-friendly policies like flexi-time, second career, removing the glass-ceiling, and reservation for women. But in the current scenario, when the society is driven by patriarchal values, the effort towards changing the condition of women will have only surface-level impact. Deep-level impact will take place only when the concept of patriarchy is shaken and conditions supporting eve empowerment are created for women to experience psychological empowerment.

More and more programs are being created to resolve this issue, but since the government does not see this issue as a priority, then it will never become resolved. Raising awareness and having each state focus more on helping those who need help, will benefit the overall economy. Economic programs are only way to help hinder this issue but it is not the main solution. You can not just tell a women to stop having kids if she can not afford them. The number one area that should be fixed first, is the root of patriarchy. Educating women that they are equals and understanding their rights, and breaking barriers that created the gender gap will ultimately improve this issue of women and welfare. Start with children by making it mandatory for children to graduate college. This is start a revolution for women, and see the change in the world.

Works Cited

• Gellman, Lauren. “Female-Headed Households and the Welfare System.” HOPES Huntington’s Disease Information, HOPES Huntington’s Disease Information, 4 June 1999, web.stanford.edu/class/e297c/poverty_prejudice/soc_sec/hfemale.htm.
• Glick, Hans. “9 Key Issues Affecting Girls and Women around the World.” Global Citizen, 4 June2015 ,www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/9-key-issues-affecting-girls-and-women-around-the/
• Kaiser, Henry. “The Role of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.” Clasp.org, www.clasp.org/sites/default/files/public/resources-and-publications/publication-1/0128.p
• Df. Lake, Rebecca. “23 Shocking Statistics of Welfare in America.” CreditDonkey, 23 May 2016, www.creditdonkey.com/welfare-statistics.html.
• Passy, Jacob. “How Welfare Reform Made Women Worse Off.” MarketWatch, MarketWatch, 28 Feb.2018,www.marketwatch.com/story/how-welfare-reform-made-women-worse-off-20 18-02-26.
• “What Is the Spending on Welfare?” Government Spending in United States: Federal State Local for 1961 – Charts Tables History, www.usgovernmentspending.com/welfare_spending.
• “Women, Infants and Children (WIC).” Food and Nutrition Service, 11 May 2018, www.fns.usda.gov/wic/wic-eligibility-requirements.

Cite this page

https://graduateway.com/women-and-welfare-essay/

You can get a custom paper by one of our expert writers

Check more samples on your topics

Welfare research paper welfare it is.

Welfare Essay, Research Paper ? Welfare, it is on merely about everyone's ’ head, whether it is Medicare or the Aid to Families with Dependent Children, which is besides called the AFDC. Some believe there is excessively much and others think there is excessively small. As the old ages go by, the demand for public assistance

Welfare Reform Paper Research Paper Welfare

Social welfare, it is on merely about everyones ’ head, whether it is Medicare or the A.F.D.C.Some believe there is excessively much and others think there is excessively small. As the old ages go by, the demand for public assistance reform additions. President Clinton had pledged in his 1992 run to “ end public assistance

Welfare Reform Research Paper Welfare and

Welfare and public assistance reform has been a hot subject amongst politicians and their components for old ages. Feeling the force per unit area brought on by people shouting out for public assistance reform President Clinton brought about some alterations in our public assistance system. Prior to President Clinton's brushing reforms this is non the

Impoverished women and children and no welfare

Imagine you are on the verge of homelessness, no job, you have applied at every possible job opening, no training assistance available, no family to help, children at home to support and the small amount of help you do receive from the state welfare system is about to be depleted. Over 41,000 families lost their

An Essay on Welfare Reform: Community Service Jobs

Community Service

Throughout the years, reformers have revisited the concept of welfare recipients earning their benefits. Under the 1996 Federal Welfare Law, welfare no longer is a one-way handout. The law established designed standards and work requirements. To comply, the states must adhere to the following requirements. Welfare recipients are required to work a prescribed number of

The Effect of Welfare Reform

Abstract      In any economic climate, there is always a segment of the population which is impoverished to the point where the receipt of welfare benefits is essential for survival.  However, this situation has become more acute in recent years, given the aging of the American population, a faltering economy, and the rapid increase in immigration

The social welfare response to HIV/AIDS

The first official case of AIDS in Britain was recorded in 1983 but nurses said they were caring for unofficial cases before. Similar to America early reports were confined to the homosexual population. When looking at initial attitudes to the disease if we look at the statement provided by Day and Klein the confused nature

Welfare Reformation

This hebdomad we offered a program to stop public assistance as we know it? a program that will promote personality and aid beef up our households through tougher kid support, more instruction and preparation, and an absolute demand to travel to work after a period of clip. ? The public assistance system is in deep hurt.

A Need for Welfare

There’s an old joke that asked,” Where do you find a welfare recipients check?” Under his work boots of course . For a long time now, since the accomplished formation of a stable government, the U.S government has had the programs and passed laws that either dealt with issues of or influenced family. Many of

Hi, my name is Amy 👋

In case you can't find a relevant example, our professional writers are ready to help you write a unique paper. Just talk to our smart assistant Amy and she'll connect you with the best match.

To raise the awareness of society members on women’s Rights, gender equalities, Women’s roles in peacebuilding, women’s peace in International and National conventions, laws, and legislations.

• Changing negative attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs of the public that they are the main barriers and making obstacles for women’s peace, women’s role and contribution in the political process, decision making, development, and women’s participation in peacebuilding.
• Increase the mass awareness and education on women’s peace, peacebuilding process, women’s Rights, women’s roles, and contribution to peacebuilding.
• Sharing of experience, exchanging of good practices, and mutual learning between local and International Actors, public authorities’ representatives, activist women, and women’s union executives,
• Promoting the principle of anti-discrimination and gender equality concepts in governmental and organizations’ practices.

To build the capacities of women and young girls on the peacebuilding process, leadership, skills improvements, women’s rights, participating in the political process and decision making:

• Strengthen women’s groups and organization through capacity building and leadership development to ensure good governance, services, and justice for the exploited, ethnic minorities, and extremely poor people.
• Build-up capacity of the rural people including ethnic minorities women to protect their cultural heritage, practices
• Foster women’s groups accommodative capacity, democratic practices, values, and development framework to keep the sustainability of their activities, programs, and management.
• Building the capacities of professional women on awareness-raising, advocacy campaigns by enriching their theoretical backgrounds, learning them on the pertinent legislative framework, analyzing examples of good practices, and motivating them to take action,
• Improve livelihoods and small-scale income-generating activities of vulnerable women, especially women with disabilities, women heading her family, IDPs, and Refugees women to ensure their participation in family and society, enhance participate to fair trades.
• Increase opportunities of professional and personal development of women through the provision of support skills.

To advocate for women’s issues, women’s participation in strategic plans, drafting laws and legislations to fit in women’s interests:

• Establishing synergies of collaboration between women’s institutions for networking, exchange of knowledge, and best practices.
• Advocate to facilitate the women’s groups to take different activities on rights-based livelihood development and sustainability of natural ecologic issues (Socio-economic, culture, food and nutrition, health, education)
• Researching and mapping of cases of multiple discrimination and constructing qualitative and research-based knowledge to be used for advocacy activities.
• Organize community-based campaign against discrimination and violence towards women to establish women’s rights and dignity in the family and society
• Engage with existing and develop strategic networks and opportunities for collaborative women’s working on peacebuilding.
• Establish a strong platform with government, non-government and private sectors to promote rights-based approach and ensure the rights, entitlements, and services for women and young girls.
• Advocate and facilitate the local government to ensure women’s participation in development, transparency, accountability, and good governance.

To prevent women and young girls from all types of discrimination and violence within the society and communities:

• Protect women and young girls from all forms of discrimination and gender based violence.
• Contribute and take positive steps to protect women’s rights, participation in the development process, peacebuilding and enhance access to Justice.
• Prevention and protection of vulnerable women and young girls working from sexual abuse, exploitation, and trafficking

(Stanford users can avoid this Captcha by logging in.)

• Send to text email RefWorks EndNote printer

Welfare state and woman power : essays in state feminism

Available online, at the library.

Green Library

More options.

• Find it at other libraries via WorldCat
• Contributors

Description

Creators/contributors, contents/summary, bibliographic information, browse related items.

• Stanford Home
• Maps & Directions
• Search Stanford
• Emergency Info
• Terms of Use
• Non-Discrimination
• Accessibility

© Stanford University , Stanford , California 94305 .

• Tools and Resources
• Customer Services
• African Diaspora
• Afrocentrism
• Archaeology
• Central Africa
• Colonial Conquest and Rule
• Cultural History
• Early States and State Formation in Africa
• East Africa and Indian Ocean
• Economic History
• Historical Linguistics
• Historical Preservation and Cultural Heritage
• Historiography and Methods
• Image of Africa
• Intellectual History
• Invention of Tradition
• Language and History
• Legal History
• Medical History
• Military History
• North Africa and the Gulf
• Northeastern Africa
• Oral Traditions
• Political History
• Religious History
• Slavery and Slave Trade
• Social History
• Southern Africa
• West Africa
• Women’s History
• Share This Facebook LinkedIn Twitter

Article contents

History of social welfare policy in south africa.

• H. Chitonge H. Chitonge Center for African Studies, University of Cape Town
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.1528
• Published online: 17 April 2024

South Africa’s social sector has evolved from simple and disjointed nonstate initiatives into a complex set of interventions, institutions, programs and services. The review presented in this paper shows that the development of social policy and institutions in South Africa has been shaped by the political and economic situation both locally and internationally. Like social policy in many other countries around the world, the state was initially reluctant to accept responsibility for the provision of social welfare services; most of the services were provided in a fragmented way by nonstate actors, including the Church. But from the 1920s, the state started to gradually accept the responsibility to provide social services including education, health care, housing and social welfare. Although different South African governments have, from colonial times to the 21st century, consistently rejected the idea of making South Africa a welfare state, the state has, with time, increasingly taken on greater responsibility, not only in terms of regulating all social services but also the provision of all public services in the country.

Of all the social services, it is the cash transfer program (social grants) that currently attracts political and public attention in the country. However, it is the provision of education services that has consistently accounted for the largest share of public expenditure since the beginning of the democratic dispensation in 1994. For instance, in the 2022 to 2023 national budget, education services accounted for 20.4 percent of total public expenditures, followed by social development (social welfare) at 16.9 percent, and health care services at 12 percent. Social policy expenditure together accounts for almost half of government expenditure, which is roughly about 14 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).

The social policy scholarship in the country has historically focused on social welfare, a situation that gives the impression that social policy is synonymous with social welfare policy. Although this article focuses on the history of social welfare policy in South Africa, it is important to note that social policy is a broader field of public policy that includes education, health care, and social welfare (which in South Africa is also referred to as social development).

One of the fundamental features that defines the history of social policy in South Africa is racial discrimination; institutionalized during colonial and apartheid periods, it has continued to shape and reproduce racial disparities in access to social services even thirty years after the fall of apartheid. While the democratic South African government has increasingly accepted and taken greater responsibility to provide social services, social policy in the country is characterized by a persistent tension arising from the commitment to neoliberal principles of fiscal discipline and austerity on one hand and espousing social democratic principles which emphasize the provision of meaningful support to citizens both as a form of social investment, as well as an instrument for addressing the legacies of colonialism and apartheid on the other. Since the dawn of democracy, this tension has been exacerbated by the growing calls to address racial injustices of the past, as evident in the number of protests, against the background of persistently weak economic growth since 2010.

• South Africa
• social policy
• social welfare
• health care
• racial disparities

You do not currently have access to this article

Please login to access the full content.

Access to the full content requires a subscription

Printed from Oxford Research Encyclopedias, African History. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 28 April 2024

• Cookie Policy
• Privacy Policy
• Legal Notice
• Accessibility
• [66.249.64.20|185.80.149.115]
• 185.80.149.115

Character limit 500 /500

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Guest Essay

Do Not Make Survival Even More Difficult for People on the Streets

By Laura Riley

Ms. Riley is the director of the clinical program at the School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of “Homeless Advocacy.”

In 2013, Grants Pass, Ore., came up with a strategy to deal with a growing homeless population in the city of roughly 40,000, one that might best be described as kicking the can down the road.

Through a series of ordinances, the city essentially made it illegal to sleep outside in public. In particular, anyone sleeping anywhere in public with bedding, a blanket or a sleeping bag would be breaking the law.

“The point,” the City Council president explained at the time, “is to make it uncomfortable enough for them in our city so they will want to move on down the road.”

Unhoused individuals wouldn’t have much choice. There are no homeless shelters in Grants Pass. At least 600 people in the city were unhoused in 2018 and 2019, according to counts by a local nonprofit that serves the unhoused.

Now the United States Supreme Court is being asked whether the enforcement of the city’s camping regulations, which apply to all of the city’s residents but affect them in vastly different ways, violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Oral arguments are scheduled for Monday.

Of course, weighing the legality of camping obscures the real issue, which is how, in a nation with roughly 650,000 unhoused people, the federal, state and local governments can make sure there are enough beds for people to sleep in. Forcing unhoused people to the next town does not create housing that is affordable or available.

The case is an appeal to a ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that prohibited Grants Pass from using citations to enforce its public camping ordinance. The Ninth Circuit had earlier prohibited cities from enforcing criminal restrictions on public camping unless there was access to adequate temporary shelter.

In the decision being challenged by Grants Pass, the Ninth Circuit concluded that the city “cannot, consistent with the Eighth Amendment, enforce its anti-camping ordinances against homeless persons for the mere act of sleeping outside with rudimentary protection from the elements, or for sleeping in their car at night, when there is no other place in the city for them to go.”

Which there rarely is, in Grants Pass or elsewhere, and which is why people often have no choice but to sleep outside.

In a friend of the court brief, the National Homelessness Law Center argued that Grants Pass had “rejected” its obligation to care for unhoused residents and that vulnerable groups would continue to be marginalized unless the court decides once and for all that those ordinances are cruel. In its brief to the court, the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund noted that the laws disproportionately affect people with disabilities and don’t serve any rehabilitative or deterrent interest.

If nothing else, one thing this case has done is unite many officials on the left and the right of the political spectrum, from San Francisco to Arizona. They have complained in briefs to the court that the Ninth Circuit has hamstrung their communities in dealing with homeless encampments.

But homelessness arises from policy decisions, not from a ruling by an appellate court. The Supreme Court should uphold the Ninth Circuit’s ruling. Otherwise it will open the door for communities to pass local laws that effectively punish unhoused people for existing within their borders, making what is clearly cruel permissible.

It would not be unexpected for the Supreme Court’s conservative majority to give the green light for the kind of camping bans at issue. Unhoused people would be pushed further to the margins, increasingly out of sight and mind. They will still be out there, parked in cars in rural areas or subsisting on urban streets, perhaps after being fined or jailed for the crime of trying to survive without a roof over their heads.

This case shines a light on the abdication of responsibility by governments at all levels to their unhoused residents. Instead of arguing about the legality of bans on sleeping in public, we should be asking: Why move people down the road to another community, one that is likely also short on shelter beds?

There is no doubt that the path to creating permanent housing (and more temporary shelter) is politically challenging and expensive. But there are many solutions along this path that go beyond what lawyers and the courts, even our highest one, can accomplish, and that the public should be demanding.

Governments at all levels should invest in homelessness prevention programs and strategies. Those include providing housing subsidies to people who otherwise could lose their housing and supportive transitional services for those leaving mental health treatment and correctional centers.

People on the brink of homelessness should have a right to counsel in eviction proceedings and should be offered the possibility of mediation in housing courts to give them a chance to remain in their houses or apartments.

Businesses should be increasing employment opportunities by not requiring a permanent address in job applications. Lawmakers should create more pathways for people to clear their criminal records, some that arise from targeted enforcement of low-level, nonviolent offenses, because those records can make it much more difficult to get a job.

For populations with unique needs, such as young people and veterans, social service agencies should pursue particularized interventions that address the underlying reasons that pushed individuals into homelessness.

And, of course, we should be building more housing, plain and simple, and we should be providing affordable housing incentives in areas with grocery stores and medical care nearby.

The Supreme Court should not further criminalize homelessness. But whether it does or not, this case should put governments at all levels on notice that humane policies can help to reduce homelessness. We don’t have to let this crisis continue.

Laura Riley is the director of the clinical program at the School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of “Homeless Advocacy.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

V. I. Lenin

The tasks of the working women’s movement in the soviet republic, speech delivered at the fourth moscow city conference of non-party working women, september 23, 1919.

Delivered: 23 September, 1919 First Published: Pravda No. 213, September 25, 1919 ; Published according to the text of the pamphlet, V. I. Lenin, Speech at the Working Women’s Congress, Moscow, 1919, verified with the Pravda text Source: Lenin’s Collected Works , 4th English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, Volume 30, pages 40-46 Translated: George Hanna Transcription/HTML Markup: David Walters & Robert Cymbala Copyleft: V. I. Lenin Internet Archive (www.marx.org) 2002. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

Comrades, it gives me pleasure to greet a conference of working women. I will allow myself to pass over those subjects and questions that, of course, at the moment are the cause of the greatest concern to every working woman and to every politically-conscious individual from among the working people; these are the most urgent questions—that of bread and that of the war situation. I know from the newspaper reports of your meetings that these questions have been dealt with exhaustively by Comrade Trotsky as far as war questions are concerned and by Comrades Yakovleva and Svidersky as far as the bread question is concerned; please, therefore, allow me to pass over those questions.

I should like to say a few words about the general tasks facing the working women’s movement in the Soviet Republic, those that are, in general, connected with the transition to socialism, and those that are of particular urgency at the present time. Comrades, the question of the position of women was raised by Soviet power from the very beginning. It seems to me that any workers’ state in the course of transition to socialism is laced with a double task. The first part of that task is relatively simple and easy. It concerns those old laws that kept women in a position of inequality as compared to men.

Participants in all emancipation movements in Western Europe have long since, not for decades but for centuries, put forward the demand that obsolete laws be annulled and women and men be made equal by law, but none of the democratic European states, none of the most advanced republics have succeeded in putting it into effect, because wherever there is capitalism, wherever there is private property in land and factories, wherever the power of capital is preserved, the men retain their privileges. It was possible to put it into effect in Russia only because the power of the workers has been established here since October 25, 1917. From its very inception Soviet power set out to be the power of the working people, hostile to all forms of exploitation. It set itself the task of doing away with the possibility of the exploitation of the working people by the landowners and capitalists, of doing away with the rule of capital. Soviet power has been trying to make it possible for the working people to organise their lives without private property in land, without privately-owned factories, without that private property that everywhere, throughout the world, even where there is complete political liberty, even in the most democratic republics, keeps the working people in a state of what is actually poverty and wage-slavery, and women in a state of double slavery.

Soviet power, the power of the working people, in the first months of its existence effected a very definite revolution in legislation that concerns women. Nothing whatever is left in the Soviet Republic of those laws that put women in a subordinate position. I am speaking specifically of those laws that took advantage of the weaker position of women and put them in a position of inequality and often, even, in a humiliating position, i.e., the laws on divorce and on children born out of wedlock and on the right of a woman to summon the father of a child for maintenance.

It is particularly in this sphere that bourgeois legislation, even, it must be said, in the most advanced countries, takes advantage of the weaker position of women to humiliate them and give them a status of inequality. It is particularly in this sphere that Soviet power has left nothing whatever of the old, unjust laws that were intolerable for working people. We may now say proudly and without any exaggeration that apart from Soviet Russia there is not a country in the world where women enjoy full equality and where women are not placed in the humiliating position felt particularly in day-to-day family life. This was one of our first and most important tasks.

If you have occasion to come into contact with parties that are hostile to the Bolsheviks, if there should come into your hands newspapers published in Russian in the regions occupied by Koichak or Denikin, or if you happen to talk to people who share the views of those newspapers, you may often hear from them the accusation that Soviet power has violated democracy.

We, the representatives of Soviet power, Bolshevik Communists and supporters of Soviet power are often accused of violating democracy and proof of this is given by citing the fact that Soviet power dispersed the Constituent Assembly. We usually answer this accusation as follows; that democracy and that Constituent Assembly which came into being when private property still existed on earth, when there was no equality between people, when the one who possessed his own capital was the boss and the others worked for him and were his wage-slaves-that was a democracy on which we place no value. Such democracy concealed slavery even in the most advanced countries. We socialists are supporters of democracy only insofar as it eases the position of the working and oppressed people. Throughout the world socialism has set itself the task of combating every kind of exploitation of man by man. That democracy has real value for us winch serves the exploited, the underprivileged. If those who do not work are disfranchised that would be real equality between people. Those who do not work should not eat.

In reply to these accusations we say that the question must be presented in this way—how is democracy implemented in various countries? We see that equality is proclaimed in all democratic republics but in the civil laws and in laws on the rights of women—those that concern their position in the family and divorce—we see inequality and the humiliation of women at every step, and we say that this is a violation of democracy specifically in respect of the oppressed. Soviet power has implemented democracy to a greater degree than any of the other, most advanced countries because it has not left in its laws any trace of the inequality of women. Again I say that no other state and no other legislation has ever done for women a half of what Soviet power did in the first months of its existence.

Laws alone, of course, are not enough, and we are by no means content with mere decrees. In the sphere of legislation, however, we have done everything required of us to put women in a position of equality and we have every right to be proud of it. The position of women in Soviet Russia is now ideal as compared with their position in the most advanced states. We tell ourselves, however, that this is, of course, only the beginning.

Owing to her work in the house, the woman is still in a difficult position. To effect her complete emancipation and make her the equal of the man it is necessary for the national economy to be socialised and for women to participate in common productive labour. Then women will occupy the same position as men.

Here we are not, of course, speaking of making women the equal of men as far as productivity of labour, the quantity of labour, the length of the working day, labour conditions, etc., are concerned; we mean that the woman should not, unlike the man, be oppressed because of her position in the family. You all know that even when women have full rights, they still remain factually downtrodden because all housework is left to them. In most cases housework is the most unproductive, the most barbarous and the most arduous work a woman can do. It is exceptionally petty and does not include anything that would in any way promote the development of the woman.

In pursuance of the socialist ideal we want to struggle for the full implementation of socialism, and here an extensive field of labour opens up before women. We are now making serious preparations to clear the ground for the building of socialism, but the building of socialism will begin only when we have achieved the complete equality of women and when we undertake the new work together with women who have been ’emancipated from that petty, stultifying, unproductive work. This is a job that will take us many, many years.

This work cannot show any rapid results and will not produce a scintillating effect.

We are setting up model institutions, dining-rooms and nurseries, that will emancipate women from housework. And the work of organising all these institutions will fall mainly to women. It has to be admitted that in Russia today there are very few institutions that would help woman out of her state of household slavery. There is an insignificant number of them, and the conditions now obtaining in the Soviet Republic—the war and food situation about which comrades have already given you the details—hinder us in this work. Still, it must be said that these institutions that liberate women from their position as household slaves are springing up wherever it is in any way possible.

We say that the emancipation of the workers must be effected by the workers themselves, and in exactly the same way the emancipation of working women is a matter for the working women themselves. The working women must themselves see to it that such institutions are developed, and this activity will bring about a complete change in their position as compared with what it was under the old, capitalist society.

In order to be active in politics under the old, capitalist regime special training was required, so that women played an insignificant part in politics, even in the most advanced and free capitalist countries. Our task is to make politics available to every working woman. Ever since private property in laud and factories has been abolished and the power of the landowners and capitalists overthrown, the tasks of politics have become simple, clear and comprehensible to the working people as a whole, including working women. In capitalist society the woman’s position is marked by such inequality that the extent of her participation in politics is only an insignificant fraction of that of the man. The power of the working people is necessary for a change to be wrought in this situation, for then the main tasks of politics will consist of matters directly affecting the fate of the working people themselves.

Here, too, the participation of working women is essential —not only of party members and politically-conscious women, but also of the non-party women and those who are least politically conscious. Here Soviet power opens up a wide field of activity to working women.

We have had a difficult time in the struggle against the forces hostile to Soviet Russia that have attacked her. It was difficult for us to fight on the battlefield against the forces who went to war against the power of the working people and in the field of food supplies against the profiteers, because of the too small number of people, working people, who came whole-heartedly to our aid with their own labour. Here, too, there is nothing Soviet power can appreciate as much as the help given by masses of non-party working women. They may know that in the old, bourgeois society, perhaps, a comprehensive training was necessary for participation in politics and that this was not available to women. The political activity of the Soviet Republic is mainly the struggle against the landowners and capitalists, the struggle for the elimination of exploitation; political activity, therefore, is made available to the working woman in the Soviet Republic and it will consist in the working woman using her organisational ability to help the working man.

What we need is not only organisational work on a scale involving millions; we need organisational work on the smallest scale and this makes it possible for women to work as well. Women can work under war conditions when it is a question of helping the army or carrying on agitation in the army. Women should take an active part in all this so that the Red Army sees that it is being looked after, that solicitude is being displayed. Women can also work in the sphere of food distribution, on the improvement of public catering and everywhere opening dining-rooms like those that are so numerous in Petrograd.

It is in these fields that the activities of working women acquire the greatest organisational significance. The participation of working women is also essential in the organisation and running of big experimental farms and should not take place only in isolated cases. This i5 something that cannot be carried out without the participation of a large number of working women. Working women will be very useful in this field in supervising the distribution of food and in making food products more easily obtainable. This work can well be done by non-party working women and its accomplishment will do more than anything else to strengthen socialist society.

We have abolished private property in land and almost completely abolished the private ownership of factories; Soviet power is now trying to ensure that all working people, non-party as well as Party members, women as well as men, should take part in this economic development. The work that Soviet power has begun can only make progress when, instead of a few hundreds, millions and millions of women throughout Russia take part in it. We are sure that the cause of socialist development will then become sound. Then the working people will show that they can live and run their country without the aid of the landowners and capitalists. Then socialist construction will be so soundly based in Russia that no external enemies in other countries and none inside Russia will be any danger to the Soviet Republic.

Collected Works Volume 30 Collected Works Table of Contents Lenin Works Archive

• Newsletters
• Account Activating this button will toggle the display of additional content Account Sign out

SCOTUS Has a Chance to Right the Wrong Its EMTALA Ruling Forced

Will it listen.

This week, the Supreme Court will hear a case that could have devastating and widespread consequences for pregnant patients, their families, and their health care providers—yes, even considering where we currently are with reproductive health care in this country. It involves Idaho’s near-total abortion ban, which makes it a crime for the state’s physicians to terminate a pregnancy, even when termination is necessary to protect the mother’s health. As a result of that state’s cramped statutory exceptions for emergency abortion care, a woman showing up to an ER in Idaho could be at imminent risk of losing her reproductive organs, and yet a physician could still not be allowed to end her pregnancy to save them, unless or until she is about to die.

By contrast, right now, a federal law called the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act requires that hospitals that participate in Medicare (meaning virtually every private hospital in the country) provide stabilizing care when the health of a patient is in serious jeopardy. As any emergency physician can explain , sometimes an abortion is the stabilizing care necessary to protect a patient’s health: to avoid loss of reproductive organs and fertility, loss of other organs, permanent disability, severe pain, dire mental health results, and a host of other horrible consequences, including—but also short of—risk of imminent death.

​Before Idaho’s law took effect, a federal district court in the state found that EMTALA and the Idaho law conflict: When a pregnant patient needs an abortion to stabilize a health emergency and consents to receive one, federal law requires that her doctors give her an abortion. The Idaho ban therefore criminalizes what federal law requires. Whenever that happens, the Constitution’s supremacy clause says federal law wins: Under what’s known as the preemption doctrine, federal law is the “supreme Law of the Land” and overrides the conflicting state law. The Idaho court thus temporarily ordered an exception to the Idaho law, allowing physicians to terminate a pregnancy when EMTALA requires it.

​In January, however, the Supreme Court disagreed. Leaping into the case before it was conclusively resolved, the high court issued a stay allowing Idaho’s law to take effect again, despite the conflict with EMTALA, ruling on its “ shadow docket ” and offering no opinion explaining its reasoning. On Wednesday, in the final week of the court’s term, the justices will hear oral argument in the case. They have an opportunity to undo the harm their earlier ruling has already caused. Their decision will affect the law not just in Idaho but in every state whose laws clash with EMTALA.

In the weeks since the high court paused EMTALA and allowed Idaho’s more stringent ban to go into effect, health care providers have experienced what can been seen only as a natural experiment in what happens when physicians are barred from delivering the kinds of medical assistance that is widely understood to be the standard of care in emergency rooms. Whereas the justices may have been able to plausibly claim back in January that they had no idea what it would mean to turn away patients who should have received stabilizing care under EMTALA, we now know. In fact, we can measure the harms. And in Idaho, over just a few months, the consequences of the Supreme Court’s stay have been devastating.

St. Luke’s Health System is the largest private employer in the state of Idaho and treats by far the most emergency patients. (Disclosure: Lindsay Harrison is counsel of record for St. Luke’s in the case.) In an amicus brief submitted to the court in this lawsuit, St. Luke’s explains that since the stay was imposed, it has continued to see patients with emergency medical conditions posing severe health risks short of death and that, as a result of the stay, those patients are suffering.

Because of the stay, Idaho physicians have essentially two options: First, because Idaho’s ban still allows for abortions to prevent death, they can certainly wait until the risks to a patient’s health become life-threatening. But the conditions that come with this state can be extremely painful. And if untreated, they can cause serious health complications, including systemic bleeding, liver hemorrhage and failure, kidney failure, stroke, seizure, and pulmonary edema. In these situations, watching a patient suffer and deteriorate until death is imminent is intolerable to most doctors. It is also medically unsound and dangerous.

Their best option is therefore the second and only alternative: Transfer the patient out of state. But this delays critical emergency care while transport is arranged, still forces patients to endure serious physical pain, and still risks potentially grave complications. It also distances patients from their families, homes, and support networks at a time when they most need them. And it is expensive and wholly unnecessary.

Despite the serious downsides of transfer, the numbers show starkly how that option has become the new “standard of care” in Idaho. In the whole of 2023, before Idaho’s law was in effect, only one pregnant patient presenting to St. Luke’s with an emergency was transferred out of state for care. Yet in the few months the new abortion law has been in effect, six pregnant St. Luke’s patients with medical emergencies have been transferred out of state for termination of their pregnancy. This is a dramatic change for a small state like Idaho, and what it shows is that the new crabbed definition of stabilizing care is already harming pregnant women. In an extremely short time, we have seen precisely the uptick in transfers that could have been predicted when SCOTUS allowed Idaho to end-run the federal statute: More patients are harmed, more patients are sent long distances for care, and more providers find themselves unable to offer necessary care.

Congress passed EMTALA decades ago to solve a serious problem—hospitals were dumping patients on other hospitals without considering their medical condition or how the transfer might harm them. The Supreme Court’s stay is now actually undermining the stated goal of the statute by literally forcing Idaho’s hospitals to transfer patients across state lines, instead of providing the emergency care they need.

When they hear arguments in this case, the justices should therefore bear in mind one other piece of data: The patients affected by this decision are still receiving exactly the same number of abortions they received before the stay because, for patients presenting with their particular medical emergencies, termination remains the standard of care. The St. Luke’s data thus proves that abortion care will still happen—but it will happen following costly and time-wasting emergency transfers, helicopter rides, and bleeding and pain for women who are often already experiencing the very worst day of their lives. The St. Luke’s numbers reveal that denying abortion care doesn’t save fetal life or protect maternal health. It just makes emergency care more expensive, higher-risk, and brutally painful.

A few weeks back, we saw the Supreme Court’s justices take it upon themselves to second-guess the practice of medicine and drug regulation in the mifepristone case. The EMTALA case offers a repeat opportunity for justices to publicly practice emergency medicine without a license, a knowledge base, or any solicitude for actual physicians and their real-life patients. Allowing the Idaho abortion statute to go into effect was a consequential legal error that has already demonstrably harmed pregnant people and their families while impeding doctors from offering the kind of health care they have been trained to deliver. This suffering is entirely avoidable. The court has the power to rectify this error. Now the justices also have the data to understand what will happen should they opt not to do so.

Status message

Moscow office.

1350 Troy Highway Moscow , ID 83843 United States

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

Junk science is cited in abortion ban cases. Researchers are fighting the ‘fatally flawed’ work

Researchers are calling for the retraction of misleading anti-abortion studies that could influence judges in critical cases

T he retraction of three peer-reviewed articles prominently cited in court cases on the so-called abortion pill – mifepristone – has put a group of papers by anti-abortion researchers in the scientific limelight.

Seventeen sexual and reproductive health researchers are calling for four peer-reviewed studies by anti-abortion researchers to be retracted or amended. The papers, critics contend, are “ fatally flawed ” and muddy the scientific consensus for courts and lawmakers who lack the scientific training to understand their methodological flaws.

While some papers date back to 2002, the group argues that now – in the post-Roe v Wade era – the stakes have never been higher. State and federal courts now routinely field cases on near-total abortion bans , attacks on in vitro fertilization and attempts to give fetuses the rights of people .

“When we saw the meta-analysis presented again and again and again – in the briefs to the Dobbs case ” that overturned Roe v Wade “and state cases” to restrict abortion, “the concerns really rose,” said Julia Littell, a retired Bryn Mawr professor and social researcher with expertise in statistical analysis.

A meta-analysis is a kind of research that uses statistical methods to combine studies on the same topic. Researchers sometimes use these analyses to examine the scientific consensus on a subject.

Littell was “shocked” by a paper that said women experience dramatic increases in mental health problems after an abortion – primarily because of the paper’s research methods.

Of the 22 studies cited by the meta-analysis, 11 were by the lone author of the paper itself. The meta-analysis “failed to meet any published methodological criteria for systematic reviews” and failed to follow recommendations to avoid statistical dependencies, according to a criticism published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ).

Large scientific bodies have found no evidence to suggest abortion causes increases in mental health problems. The best predictor of a woman’s mental health after an abortion is her health before. What’s more, there is substantial evidence that women who are denied a wanted abortion suffer both mental and financial harms.

From the time it was published, this 2011 meta-analysis has drawn consternation. Still, it remains in the scientific record in a dispute that the 17 authors of the BMJ criticism, including Littell, say goes beyond mere scientific disagreement.

The paper has been cited in at least 24 federal and state court cases and 14 parliamentary hearings in six countries.

Dr Chelsea Polis , a reproductive health scientist in New York City, who helped gather the group of academics, says her “concerns with the meta-analysis on abortion and mental health published … are based on it being, in my professional opinion, egregiously methodologically flawed”.

The researcher who wrote the article, Priscilla Coleman, a retired professor from Bowling Green State University in Ohio, has responded to calls for retractions with legal threats and descriptions of conspiracy. She said calls for retraction were “an organized effort to cull professional literature and remove studies demonstrating abortion increases risk of mental health problems to impact the legal status of abortion”.

Since the supreme court overturned the constitutional right to abortion and allowed 21 states to severely restrict or ban the procedure, a series of retractions and investigations show how the scientific community is slowly beginning to re-evaluate work cited in these court cases.

“We’re seeing claims made with legal force behind them, and that’s causing people to look at a lot of this research in a different way,” said Mary Ziegler, a professor of law at the University of California Davis, and an expert on the history of reproduction.

A second author whose work is at the center of the BMJ critique is David C Reardon, a longtime abortion opponent. A 2002 study by Reardon, also published in BMJ, is now under investigation.

BMJ said in a statement that the “issue remains under consideration by our research integrity team”, and that their final decision would be made “public once we have completed our internal process”.

Reardon trained as an engineer, but found his calling in research that claimed a connection between abortion and poor mental health. He founded the Elliot Institute in Illinois, an openly anti-abortion non-profit, to pursue that research.

Today, Reardon is affiliated with the Charlotte Lozier Institute, funded by one of the most powerful anti-abortion campaign organizations in the US, Susan B Anthony Pro-Life America. Reardon also co-authored two of the articles that were retracted before supreme court hearings, both by a colleague at the Lozier Institute. Reardon did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

According to analyses of the literature and experts such as Julia Steinberg, an associate professor of family science at the University of Maryland School of Public Health and a co-author of a recent critique of these studies in BMJ, the science is not in dispute. The “rates of mental health problems for women with an unwanted pregnancy were the same whether they had an abortion or gave birth”, an analysis by the UK’s National Collaborating Center for Mental Health found in 2011. That review was cited as one of the best by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, in its own 2018 review of the issue.

Other reviews, such as one from 2009 by the American Psychological Association , found evidence “did not support the claim that observed associations between abortion and mental health problems are caused by abortion per se”.

“One can be pro-choice or pro-abortion or anti-abortion, but still understand what the science says with respect to abortion and mental health,” said Steinberg.

Although matters of scientific integrity may seem academic, they can have concrete impacts on policy in the US post-Roe.

One of the few cases of scientific retractions to break through to the wider public was in Texas, where a federal court relied heavily on two studies in a decision to invalidate the approval of mifepristone – better known as the “abortion pill” .

The case was appealed all the way to the supreme court, where it was heard in March in oral arguments in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v FDA . Just weeks before the justices were set to hear the case, and as nearly the entire scientific community screamed about the “ junk science ” at its heart, the heavily cited studies were retracted by Sage Publications. Even so, the article’s claims remained in briefs before the court, and were cited as evidence by one of the most conservative justices, Samuel Alito .

Like Reardon, Coleman also recently had a paper retracted, this one in Frontiers in Psychology in 2022. The journal said publicly that the paper “did not meet the standards for publication”. Notably, one of the paper’s reviewers also worked at the Lozier Institute. Coleman unsuccessfully sued the journal over its decision to retract. The court ruled against Coleman in March 2023, Frontiers told the Guardian.

Coleman’s 2011 meta-analysis, published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, was also involved in a heated retraction fight in the UK. The first calls for retraction of the article came soon after it was published in 2012.

It was again brought to journal editors in 2022 after the BJP established a research integrity group . “Motivated by strong agreement with” the importance of scientific integrity, said Polis, “I led a group of 16 scholars to summarize and submit our concerns, again, about the Coleman meta-analysis to BJP.”

In response to these concerns, the BJP established an independent panel of experts to investigate. The panel recommended Coleman’s article be retracted, but was overruled by the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the professional association that publishes the BJP. The move prompted members of the independent panel and some editorial board members to resign .

Later reporting that appeared in the BMJ included panel members saying they believed the college declined to retract because they may not have had comprehensive legal cover in the United States. Coleman threatened to sue – twice – according to letters obtained by the BBC .

Although Coleman denied that her legal threats contributed to the BJP’s decision not to retract her study, she said help from attorneys had been important to defending her work.

“I have spent the last two years vigorously defending three of my own articles and without the financial means to hire highly competent lawyers and the time and opportunity to write lengthy rebuttals, the impact could have been very damaging,” said Coleman.

The Royal College of Psychiatrists responded to inquiries from the Guardian by sending a 2023 statement on its decision. That statement read, in part: “After careful consideration, given the distance in time since the original article was published, the widely available public debate on the paper, including the letters of complaint already available alongside the article online, and the fact that the article has already been subject to a full investigation, it has been decided to reject the request for the article to be retracted.” The statement added: “We now regard this matter as closed.”

Coleman has also defended her work when she testified in US courts, including in a Michigan hearing in which she said her study was “not retracted”.

Steinberg said: “That’s what’s really infuriating.”

Coleman “hasn’t even had to admit that she made an error”, she added.

Researchers also called for retraction of a 2009 article in the Journal of Psychiatric Research by Coleman and the anti-abortion activists Catherine Coyle and Vincent Rue. This article too has been under fire for years and even publicly debunked .

In spite of apparent flaws, Coleman included this 2009 article in her meta-analysis, which critics say compounds the errors.

Additionally, authors of the BMJ critique called for a 2005 article in the Journal of Anxiety Disorders by Coleman, Reardon and a Florida State University psychology professor, Jesse Cougle, to be accompanied by an expression of concern.

Ivan Oransky, one of the founders of the Retraction Watch blog, said that although retractions had become more common, they were nowhere near common enough to correct the scientific record. About one in 500 papers are retracted today, but perhaps as many as one in 50 ought to be, he said.

“All it does is further throw into question what the heck value these multibillion-dollar publishing companies are adding,” said Oransky. For critics of the scientific publishing industry, like Oransky, the response shows how flawed studies cited by courts are a “symptom” of problems with publishers, rather than a failure of courts.

To Littell, the solution is in plain sight: “We really need to be publishing fewer papers, better work, better science.”

• US healthcare
• US supreme court
• Reproductive rights

Most viewed