How Welfare Stigmatizes Single-Mothers
Around the world, women are stigmatized for numerous reasons. Here in the United States, single mothers using public assistance like Welfare are stigmatized as lazy, having children for a government check, and choose cohabiting parenting styles.
Before Welfare, there was the Mothers’ Pension program (1915–1935). This program was influenced through a femisit perspective that mothers, especially widows, should get paid for their domestic work while raising children. This idea of child care led to the creation of public assistance programs. During the year 1935, Franklin D. Roosevelt created the Social Security Act of 1935. Along with this, he implemented the Unemployment Insurance (UI) system, and the Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) program. These three programs were a huge step toward The New Deal. That is why 1935–1960 was known as the Pre Great Expansion. Additionally, during 1956, the Social Security Disability Insurance program (SSI) was created which was then added to these three programs. The 1960–1970’s was known as the Great Expansion Era. In 1962, ADC was changed to Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). These programs were not only expanded, but ADC/AFDC gave women a fighting chance for upward mobility. The ideologies of domestic work were accepted within society until the 1970’s. In 1970, the stigma of Welfare and its recipients had manifested.
During the 1970’s, people in power who opposed Welfare had socially constructed stereotypes of Welfare recipients as lazy and taking advantage of the system. By doing so, it reversed the upward mobility that women of color had built through the Great Expansion Era. This was done with anti-fraud campaigns which were set up to criminalize women using penal laws against them. During these anti fraud investigations, some recipients had taken advantage of the system. However, these anti-fraud campaigns capitalized on these women and portrayed all recipients of Welfare as taking advantage of the system. However, these recipients were outliers from the total population of Welfare recipients. Yet, Ronald Regan continued to label African American women and its recipients as this stereotype calling them the Welfare Queen. During the Regan era of 1981 until now, women have faced the consequences of the anti-fraud campaign and the stereotypes of the Welfare Queen. In general many recipients have suffered the consequences of stigmatization as many are labeled and struggle to survive as a single mothers in the United States.
When on google, one can see these consequences by simply googling “Welfare.” There, one is able to see the negative association of women and Welfare from the images that are displayed, such as the ones below.
I would argue that these images are examples of how society stigmatizes women in Welfare. Through the consistent stigmatizing of Welfare, research shows that mothers feel that society is constantly battling them and blame them for being poor. This is an issue because instead of stereotyping women, these programs should be helping them not adding to the problem.
Links:
https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/programs/mothers-aid/
https://journals-sagepub-com.libaccess.sjlibrary.org/doi/pdf/10.1177/0096144215589942
https://www.pbs.org/video/black-america-mlk-and-still-i-rise-myth-welfare-queen/
