Lone mothers, social assistance, and the life course

There have been major changes to Canadian social assistance programmes since the early 1990s, generally including a reduction in benefits and increased requirement that recipients participate in employment-related activities. These changes disproportionately affect lone mothers, who continue to make up a large proportion of welfare recipients. Marxist and feminist analysts have identified the ways in which welfare state programmes serve to reinforce gender and class structures. However, these approaches tend to overstate the role of these social structures in shaping the lives of women on welfare, and to underplay the role of individual agency. At the same time, rational choice and economic approaches to social assistance tend to ignore gender and class structures. This dissertation takes the perspective of the life course in order to incorporate both individual agency and social structures into an empirical investigation of the social assistance use of lone mothers. First, a theoretical framework of the life course, structure, and agency, is developed. This framework is then used to analyse longitudinal data from the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics. The analyses find that lone mothers tend to use social assistance for longer than other family types, but that in general, spells are short, with a median duration of about two years. The analysis also finds evidence of a "welfare trap", or that it becomes harder to leave social assistance the longer one is in receipt of benefits. A lone mother's social class is not as important as expected in predicting whether she used social assistance, or the length of receipt. More important are her previous work experience and whether she was married before becoming a lone parent. An analysis of trajectories finds that there are many pathways through work, family, and social assistance events, rather than a few well-defined patterns. Work appears to be an important route off of social assistance, but for many women, work is discontinuous, leading to returns to social assistance. These results are interpreted in light of one woman's experience with welfare and lone motherhood, illustrating the ways in which the life course is shaped by class and gender structures, the welfare state, and individual action.