A right to welfare? Poor women, professionals, and poverty programs, 1935--1975

This dissertation is a social, political, and cultural history of efforts to establish a right to welfare in the United States. At its center is the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). For seven years (1966--1973) NWRO represented, and to some extent coordinated, a large-scale social movement of public assistance recipients. At its height NWRO included 540 local affiliates in African-American, Puerto Rican, Chicana/o, and white ethnic neighborhoods in Northeastern cities, in communities of tenant farmers in the South, on Indian reservations in the Southwest, and in small cities of the Midwest.; "A Right to Welfare?" argues that the welfare rights movement grew from the ambiguities of the Social Security Act of 1935 and its administration in the thirty years following its passage. Women and children lacking male support, and others defined as categorical beneficiaries under Social Security, faced continual tensions between their nominal entitlement to financial aid and a multitude of legal obstacles to their accessing that aid. Combined with the example of the African-American civil rights movement, the legal changes that occurred in the era of the Warren Court, and the political changes that occurred under the auspices of Great Society poverty programs, these ambiguities led to the mobilization of public program recipients.; The political campaigns of welfare recipients and their middle-class allies reveal complex and novel ideas about modern citizenship. By invoking what they construed as inherent rights of American citizenship, and organizing in their defense, welfare activists called new rights into being. "A Right to Welfare?" reveals differences in political perspective between welfare recipient activists and activists in other social movements of the 1950s and 1960s, including the African-American civil rights movement in the South, the student New Left, and the liberal and radical wings of the Second Wave women's movement. Finally, "A Right to Welfare?" is a case study in the utility, and malleability, of the language of rights in U.S. politics.