Perceptions of Welfare:
An Interview with Linda Gordon

Aired March 1, 1999

David C. Barnett–Writer Linda Gordon says that the word welfare, once associated with prosperity, good health, and well-being, today connotes poverty, bad health, and a philosophy of fatalism. Linda Gordon is the author of the book, Pitied, But Not Entitled, and she will be in Cleveland tomorrow to address a Case Western Reserve University forum with her topic, "How Welfare Became a Dirty Word." Good morning, Professor Gordon.

Linda Gordon–Good morning.

DCB–Was the notion of public assistance, which we now call welfare, received well when it was first introduced back in the '30s?

LG–Extremely well. Something that is a very odd irony is that welfare, which as not many people know is part of the Social Security Act, the part that we call welfare was actually the only uncontroversial part of the Social Security Act. People fought like the very dickens on the principles of unemployment compensation and old age pensions. They particularly hated the idea of old age pensions because they thought that what that was doing was removing from children the obligation to support their parents.

DCB–And was the system initially well-run?

LG–Well, it had an entirely different conception and I think that is why we're in the mess we're in today. What we call welfare, which was the program called Aid to Families with Dependent Children, when it was created, its whole entire purpose was to keep mothers out of the labor force. There was a very broad consensus in the United States at this time that mothers of school-age children did not belong in the labor force, but should be home full-time, and if they didn't have husbands who could support them to do that, the public needed to accept responsibility for providing those children with what people believed children needed. But what happened is that a law that was designed for that purpose naturally became completely illogical, irrational, and contradictory as the world changed and as mothers went increasingly rapidly into the labor market over the decades.

DCB–So was this a slow change or did it happen within any particular decade?

LG–It was a slow change until really the 1960s-1970s because this is the period in which you really began to get very well-organized, well-funded conservative campaigns against welfare, which culminated in the early 1990s, and the other part of the change is that welfare was designed in a period in which this was still a completely segregated and completely racist country and another of the ironies is that when welfare was first established in 1935, it was designed so as to exclude almost all people of color in the United States. In the first, say, five years of welfare at the end of the 1930s it was pretty much a lily-white program.

DCB–Really?

LG–And what happened is that in the 1950s and '60s, as part of the civil rights movement when particularly African Americans started challenging these exclusions and saying we have a right to these benefits too, that the program began to change very rapidly and to become stigmatized in part because of that change in the color of the faces of the people on welfare.

DCB–Now in your book you argue that a whole lot of people benefit from public assistance in our country these days. Give us some examples.

LG–Well, of all of the monies that the federal government spends to support its citizens, 23% of those monies go to poor people, meaning that, what is it, 77% go to people who are not poor. This is one of the central parts of what I mean by saying how welfare became a dirty word. What has happened is through a gradual process that has a lot to do with language, that people stigmatize programs that give poor people some of other people's tax money, but they don't stigmatize the kind of either huge corporate benefits. Just one example, in one of the most recent minimum bills, attached to that bill are riders worth $21.4 billion of corporate subsidies. These are the things we don't notice. Or take one other example, to show you what I mean. Today, the average elderly recipient of Social Security/old age pension, that person receives five to six times more of other people's tax money than does the average mother who was collecting AFDC. And yet we don't have that kind of discussion in which people worry about Social Security recipients as being parasites who are taking other people's money.

DCB–And now for the million dollar question - in a minute, if you can, how do we change the perceptions that you describe? How do we make it so that it isn't pitied but not entitled, how do we make sure that welfare is not a dirty word?

LG–I think we need to understand . . . I think a good starting place is to understand the consequences of the welfare repeal in 1996. The problem is not that mothers should not be working, I think there is a consensus that there are many mothers of young children who have to work. The problem is, that by-and-large, even Business Week has reported that people who are going off welfare into jobs are ending up worse off. Their children are poorer, they have poorer medical care, poorer nutrition. What we need to do is to think about how to make work pay, how to arrange things so that a parent who is willing to put in a substantial number of hours of work can, in fact, earn enough and have the supports necessary to raise their children properly. And this is something that cannot be done by the states; the states do not have the tax base to take on this kind of responsibility. It's going to have to be federal responsibility.

DCB–Linda Gordon is a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and has written extensively about women's issues and women's history. Her book is Pitied, But Not Entitled, she will be talking about that book with an address called "How Welfare Became a Dirty Word" at a forum tomorrow at Case Western Reserve University. Thanks for joining us, Professor Gordon.

LG–Thank you.