Melissa Gutierrez October 20, 2010
Annotated Bibliography
- Mink, Gwendolyn: Welfare’s End Cornell University Press; Ithaca, 1998.
In the book Welfare’s End, Gwendolyn Mink analyzes the history of United States welfare states until the enactment of the Personal Responsibility Act. Mink discusses “Welfare as a condition of women’s equality,” (Mink 1). Mink makes an argument about the sub-citizenship of welfare recipients when compared to non-recipients. Mink refers to the history of welfare to its origins to illustrate that the reform would only harm poor single mothers and their children by ending the entitlement to welfare and replacing it with a policy that coerced women to work outside of the home as well as implicitly controlled their sexual and reproductive freedoms. “The Personal Responsibility Act makes poor single mothers decisions for them, substituting moral prescriptions for economic mitigation of their poverty. Moreover, the Act withdraws rights from recipients, thereby restoring the moral regime that sifted, sorted, and ruled welfare applicants and recipients until the late 1960’s.” (Mink 6). Mink advocates that we all recognize and fight for a right to welfare, because “social rights such as welfare are a condition of equal citizenship.” (Mink 32) Mink analyzes the history of civil rights in the law to argue that poor single mothers are being denied citizenship through the denial or restriction of their civil rights as equal citizens in the eyes of the law.
- Kornbluh, Felicia: The Battle for Welfare Rights University of Pennsylvania Press; Philadelphia, 2007
Felicia Kornbluh’s The Battle for Welfare Rights will be analyzed to illustrate the necessity of social movements in order to obtain or maintain rights. Kornbluh analyzes many states, but pays particular attention to New York, and discusses policies and grassroots movements such as NRWO, which formed to fight for a right to welfare. She goes into detail discussing strategies, successes, failures, and organizational tactics for improving access to welfare benefits as well as the system itself.
- Reese, Ellen: Backlash against Welfare Mothers, Past and Present University of California Press, 2005
Ellen Reese’s Backlash against Welfare Mothers, Past and Present, will be analyzed to support my argument as well. I would like to use my argument to build off of some of Reese’s main claims. Reese discusses in great detail the conservative movement to change welfare, the barriers that TANF creates to limit or deny access to higher education, and a policy analysis of welfare as well as an analysis of the welfare rights movement. Reese also analyses the movements and backlashes of government in response to the gain of welfare rights. In the end, Reese calls for a new new deal, for the working poor.
- Edin, Katheryn and Lein, Laura: Making Ends Meet Russell Sage Foundation, New York; 1997
This source provides empirical evidence for my argument. It discusses the fact that low wage work and welfare do not adequately support a family. Women in different states were interviewed to illustrate this reality. This illustrates that many single mother headed families do need subsistence, which they do not get from the market nor from the welfare system. Chicago, Boston, San Antonio, and Charleston were some of the cities examined to prove that single mothers headed families could not survive merely on welfare and low wages, and certainly not on either alone.
- Neubeck, Kenneth: When Welfare Disappears: The Case for Economic Human Rights Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, New York; 2006
In the book When Welfare Disappears: The Case for Economic Human Rights, Kenneth J. Neubeck discusess economic human rights, and the history of welfare policy in the United States. Neubeck illustrates why single mother recipients have particular difficulty staying off of or avoiding public assistance which is through systemic barriers such as a lack of access to education and job training skills that would allow single mothers to be more competitive in the job market and get out of poverty. “PROWRA reflects what some have called the “new paternalism.” The act subtly communicates a strong distrust of–if not disdain for–impoverished lone mothers even as it spells out measures to control them,” (Neubeck 31). “U.S. welfare policy has reflected and, in many ways, has reinforced society wide systems of class, gender, and racial inequality,” (Neubeck 32). Neubeck discusses the difficulty of single mothers and uses statistics of those on TANF, exiting, and the poverty rate to illustrate the harmful effects of TANF. Neubeck analyses history of the welfare policy as well as TANF and uses a human rights framework as a claim for welfare rights in the United States. Neubeck discusses “invisible barriers” such as mental illness and domestic violence that are not adequately addressed by the system. ultimately, I will refer to Neubeck to illustrate that the right to welfare would encompass the human/economic rights to food/from hunger, to a job or assistance, a right to shelter, a right, although Neubeck states “welfare has never been treated as a right,” (page 35) which is true, it was an entitlement, but if the argument for a right to welfare was framed as essential to fulfilling the human rights of American citizens who were in need, then we could be closer to equality between recipients and non-recipients citizen status.
- Goldberg, Chad Alan: Citizens and Paupers: Relief, Rights, and Race: From the Freedmen’s Bureau to Workfare the University of Chicago Press, Chicago; 2007.
Goldberg begins the book by stating that “The central thesis of this book is that social welfare policies have been preeminent sites for political struggles over the meaning and boundaries of citizenship in the United States. These struggles are easier to grasp if we understand citizenship as an instrument of social closure through which people monopolize valuable material and symbolic goods while excluding others,” (Goldberg 1). For the purpose of my honors thesis, I will rely on Goldberg’s definition of citizenship when using the term citizen.
- Gordon, Linda: Women, the State, and Welfare the University of Wisconsin Press United States; 1990
This book is a collection of essays and short pieces addressing the topics listed in the title. Pieces from authors such as Mink, Linda Gordon, Virginia Sapiro, Paula Baker, Barbara Nelson, Jane Jenson, Nancy Fraiser, Elizabeth Schnider, Frances Fox Piven, Diana Pearce, and Teresa Amott. The book addresses a lot of the theoretical framework of analyzing the welfare state, offers an analysis of the history of the welfare state and women’s rights in some parts, and ultimately offers a critique of the welfare state and how it limits/denies women’s rights. The book offers hope for the future of the American welfare state, by illustrating the flaws of the system and encouraging them to be fixed in order to create a better and more efficient welfare state for women. The authors all wrote their pieces from a feminist perspective and address the oppression of women on welfare, since the origins of the American welfare state. I will use the authors to address the gender discrimination within the welfare system and how this in turn oppresses recipients, who are predominantly females (heading the household). This oppression and discrimination in turn creates unequal citizenship between female recipients and non-recipient females.
- Mink, Gwendolyn and Solinger, Rickie: Welfare: A Documentary History of U.S. Policy and Politics New York University Press, New York: 2003
This book is phenomenal, it offers and extensive and detailed history of American welfare policy and why it is flawed. It goes all the way back to the 1900’s, when welfare was first conceived of and ran by the states on a local basis. What I find particularly useful about this book is both its policy analysis as well as its historical analysis of the welfare state, and I will be using both analysis in my argument. It has many short articles, pieces, or chapters from books, cases, basically any type of document that had anything to do with American welfare, both Conservative and Liberal commentary, opinions, and advocacy. It will be extremely useful for both my own analysis and counter argument. I will use the cases discussed to illustrate the Supreme Courts power in creating or denying welfare rights and a right to welfare. I will also analyze the time periods of these cases and what was going on with both public opinion (the welfare rights movement) and with welfare policy at the time as well as the liberal or conservative influence on both the government and the public, depending on the time period.
- Noble, Charles: Welfare as We Knew It: A Political History of the American Welfare State Oxford University Press, New York; 1997
Charles Noble offers the reader a deep and extensive analysis of the political history of the American welfare state. What is particularly interesting of Noble is his comparison of the American welfare state to the welfare systems of other industrious nations, and illustrates how America has the most poorly designed and implemented welfare system of all of the developed nations. He then breaks his analysis into three sections that were meaningful to American welfare policy, the Progressive Era, the New Deal Era, and the Great Society Era, and discusses the conservative backlash to these liberal time periods of widening rights for recipients. Noble illusrtaes why reform is difficult in America, and ends the book discussing the future of reform, and offers some great advice based on his analysis of Conservative backlash, he suggests how actors and recipients should move in this politically hostile environment.
- Davis, Martha F. Brutal Need: Lawyers and the Welfare Rights Movement, 1960-1973 Yale University Press, New Haven; 1993
This book is phenomenal, and in great detail discusses the welfare rights movements of the late sixties and early seventies. Davis provides us with background, of how legal aid was created, the idea in the legal world that poor people deserved representation as well. The lawyers in this time period played an essential role in aiding the movement by assisting the recipients with fair hearings and class action law suits. Also, this book addresses the need for more lawyers in the field.
Cloward, Richard A, Piven, Frances Fox Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare Vintage
