From welfare rights to welfare reform: The politics of AFDC, 1964--1984

American welfare politics changed dramatically between 1964 and 1984. Before 1970, a broad range of civil rights, labor, women's, religious, and civic organizations joined a burgeoning welfare rights movement to demand a guaranteed income for American families, a movement largely overlooked by historians. By 1981, President Ronald Reagan drastically reduced federal welfare spending while progressives struggled to articulate a new justification for income support. This dissertation analyzes government documents, Congressional hearings, journalistic accounts, and the records of the multitude of organizations participating in debates over economic justice from the War on Poverty through the Reagan administration. It attributes the shift in welfare politics to the demise of the family wage system. The family wage ideal—the male-breadwinner, female-homemaker family form—structured the American labor market and welfare state. In the 1960s, the antipoverty coalition hoped to extend that system, which had been available almost exclusively to steadily employed white male workers and their dependents, to urban African Americans in order to ameliorate racial inequality, black poverty, and social disorder. The coalition hoped to replace Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), which provided cash grants only to fatherless families, with jobs and a guaranteed income to create male breadwinners in inner cities. Even in the 1960s, though, the economic and ideological foundations of the family wage ideal were eroding. As workers lost access to breadwinner wages and more working- and middle-class women entered the labor market, AFDC became a symbol for a drastic reversal in racial, class, and gender order. The antipoverty coalition dropped AFDC from its agenda and placed the male-breadwinner family at the center of its campaign to rebuild the fragmenting New Deal coalition. Meanwhile, conservatives used the left's earlier emphasis on family structure to narrow discussion of economic justice to the supposed cultural and behavioral deficiencies of an urban “underclass.” AFDC thus became a powerful weapon in the right's attack on federal spending. Welfare politics provides new insight into an important political shift by highlighting Americans' struggles to adjust to the dramatic changes in family economics with their gender, racial, and class implications that accompanied transformation to the postindustrial era.