as to their own sexual habits, activities, and partners—and have
been denied welfare if living with a man or if a man spends any
time in the domicile or if having a sexual relationship with a man.
Their homes could be inspected anytime: searches were common
after midnight, when the welfare workers expected to find the contraband man; the courts put a stop to late searches but daytime searches are still legal. Beds, closets, and clothes were inspected to
see if any remnant of a male presence could be found. Sometimes
criminal charges of fornication were actually brought against the
mothers of illegitimate children; the purpose was to keep them
from getting welfare. For instance, in one typical case, a New
Jersey woman was convicted of fornication and given a suspended
sentence; she was forced to name the father, who went to prison.
Welfare workers were allowed to interrogate children concerning
the social and sexual habits of their mothers. Women on welfare
have even been required to tell when they menstruate. Women on
welfare have had no rights to sexual privacy; and in this context,
turning them toward prostitution goes right along with refusing to
allow them private, intimate, self-determined sexual relations.
Prostitution is the ultimate loss of sexual privacy. Gains made in
the courts in the 1960s to restore rights of privacy to these women
are being nullified by new welfare policies and regulations designed
to control the same population in the same old w ays— practices
that reappear in new guises but are built on the same old attitudes
and impinge on the welfare population in the same old and cruel
ways. The state is a jealous lover, except when it pimps.
Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) is the largest
federal welfare program: this is welfare for women and their dependent children. As of 1977, 52. 6 percent of the recipients were white, 43 percent were black, and 4 . 4 percent were designated as
“American Indian and other. ” Welfare fundamentally articulates
the state’s valuation of women as women; the condition of women
determines the philosophical bases and practical strategies of the
welfare system; * the racist structure of class provides a framework
in which women can be isolated, punished, and destroyed as
women. In the welfare system, racism increases the jeopardy for
black women in particular in a m ultiplicity of w ays. But the degradation built into the welfare system in general and AFDC in particular originates in social attitudes toward women: in sexual contempt for women; in paternalistic assumptions about women; in
moral codes exclusively applied to women; in notions of immorality that have no currency except when applied to women.
Women not on welfare are cruelly hurt by these same endemic
woman-hating attitudes; but women on welfare have nothing between them and a police-state exercise of authority and power over them in which and by which they are degraded because they are
women and the state is the real head of the household. AFDC
controls women who have no husbands to keep them in line; it
caretakes women, keeps them always hungry and dependent and
desperate and accessible; it keeps them watching their children go
*This is not to suggest that welfare does not have devastating consequences for black men. It is to suggest that the whole system, including its impact on black men, is ultimately comprehensible only when we understand to what extent the feminizing of the oppressed is part of public policy and therefore fundamentally related to the degradation of women as
a class.
hungry and underclothed and uneducated; it tells them exactly
what they are worth to their lord and master, the state, in dollars
and cents. In 1979 they were worth $111 per month in Alabama,
$144 per month in Arkansas, $335 per month in Connecticut, $162
per month in Florida, and so on. In Hawaii they were worth most:
$389 per month. In Mississippi they were worth least: $84 per
month. In New York State, with the largest welfare budget, they
were worth $370 per month. These were average payments per
month per family (for the woman and her dependent children).
Suitable employment standards, for instance, in whatever form
they appear, are used to degrade women: to punish women for
being poor by enclosing them in a terrible trap—they have children to raise and the only work they are offered will not feed their children, it is degrading work, it is a dead end, it is meaningless, it
is intrinsically exploitative; and women with husbands who have
some money or good jobs or steady jobs are being pressured to stay
home and b e go o d mothers. How is the mother in the welfare population supposed to be a good mother? The answer is always the same: she is not supposed to have had the children to begin with,
and she is not supposed to have any more, and her suffering is no
more than she deserves. The welfare system combines the imperatives of sex and money: get a man to marry and support you or we will punish you and yours until you wish you were all dead. The
welfare system also combines the imperatives of morality and
money: your shameless bad ways got you knocked up, girl; now
you be good or we are going to do you in. Even when the issue is
suitable employment, it is always in the air: you wouldn’t be here
if you hadn’t done wrong; so where we send you is where you go
and what we tell you to do is what you do— because you deserve it
because you are bad.
So, in addition to suitable employment, the welfare system has
been—and will continue to be—preoccupied with what are called
“suitable homes” and with what can be called “suitable m orality, ”
something of a redundancy. Most AFDC programs were estab
lished by 1940; by 1942 over half the states had “suitable homes”
laws. These laws demanded that women meet certain social and
sexual standards in order to qualify for welfare benefits: illegitim ate
children, for instance, would make a home not suitable; any infraction of conventional social behavior for women might do the same; any overt or noticeable sex life might do the same. The women
could keep the children— the homes were suitable enough for
that— but were not entitled to any money from the chaste government. As Piven and Cloward make very clear, this meant that the women had to work doing whatever menial labor they could find;
they simply had no recourse. But it also meant that the state had
become the instrument of God: welfare’s mission, from the beginning, was to punish women for having had sex outside of marriage, for having had children outside of marriage, for having had children at all— for being women. With righteousness on its side, the welfare program and those who made and executed its policies punished women through starvation for having “unsuitable homes, ” that is, illegitim ate children.