Melissa Gutierrez November 10, 2010
TANF: Denying Single Mothers the Opportunity to Obtain Self-Sufficiency
Temporary Assistance for Needy Families is a flawed system of American welfare provision. My overall thesis is that recipients are denied the opportunity to achieve self-sufficiency in the American welfare system. I focus on how single mothers are denied an opportunity for self-sufficiency through the implementation and structure of TANF. In the book Welfare’s End, Gwendolyn Mink analyzes the history of United States welfare from its origin in states’ “mothers’ pensions” until the federal enactment of the Personal Responsibility Act. I build on Mink’s theory, which supports the right of TANF recipients to have the option to be stay-at-home mothers. Single motherhood, with the exception of widows, has been and still is morally regarded as unacceptable and economically punishable. A conservative coalition has launched attacks on welfare since its beginnings in 1935, and they won with the enactment of TANF. TANF promotes a model of wage-earning in the nuclear family as envisaged by conservative policy as the foundation of a healthy society” (Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996). By promoting marriage through the use of TANF funds, as opposed to creating programs that could aid single mothers, Congress and the states have chosen to legally quasi-coerce recipients into positions of dependency. Non-conformity to this patriarchal social norm, being a single mother, results in an economic sanction. If women wanted to be stay at home mothers they had to remain married. If they wanted to be single mothers, they are punished with work outside of the home. I will also cite political and legal theorist Ronald Dworkin’s works Liberalism and A Moral Reading of the Constitution as an analytic framework to illustrate that through the enactment of TANF, the government legislated unconstitutional moral preferences.
