View the Table of Contents. Read the Foreword.
"The debate over welfare suffers from lack of historical
perspective. Now come Mink and Solinger to transform our
understanding with a clearly articulated, carefully organized, and
judiciously selected collection of key sources and illustrative
documents that illuminates the past and present of aid to poor
women and their children. Essential for classroom use, this book
also belongs on the desks of policy makers and activists
alike."
--Eileen Boris, Hull Professor of Women's Studies, University of
California, Santa Barbara
"A stirringly dramatic narrative of welfare policy history.
Through the documents they select, Mink and Solinger bring to life
an immensely important human drama, and they do so in a way that
paves a path to a higher awareness of the deeply ingrained biases
of gender, race, and class that operate in welfare policy."
--"Social Service Review"
Federal welfare policy has been a political and cultural
preoccupation in the United States for nearly seven decades.
Debates about who poor people are, how they got that way, and what
the government should do about poverty were particularly bitter and
misleading at the end of the twentieth century. These public
discussions left most Americans with far more attitude than
information about poverty, the poor, and poverty policy in the
United States.
In response, Gwendolyn Mink and Rickie Solinger compiled the
first documentary history of welfare in America, from its origins
through the present. Welfare: A Documentary History of U.S. Policy
and Politics provides historical context for understanding recent
policy developments, as it traces public opinion,
recipients'experiences, and policy continuities and innovations
over time. The documents collected range across more than 100
years, from government documents and proclamations of presidents
throughout the 20th century, to accounts of activist and grass
roots organizations, newspaper reports and editorials, political
cartoons, posters and more.
They enable readers to go straight to the source to find out how
public figures racialized welfare in the minds of white Americans,
to explore the origins of the claim that poor women have babies in
order to collect welfare, and to trace how that notion has been
perpetuated and contested. The documents also illustrate how
policymakers in different eras have invoked and politicized the
idea of dependency, as well as how ideas about women's dependency
have followed changing characterizations of poor women as workers
and as mothers.
Welfare provides a picture of the government's evolving ideas
about poverty and provision, along side powerful examples of the
voices too often eclipsed in the public square--welfare recipients
and their advocates, speaking about mothering, poverty, and human
rights.
General
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