Welfare Debate Points To Shift In Society’s View Of Motherhood

The American welfare system, born as a way to help widows and their children, never intended poor mothers to work.

Now, the congressional welfare bill - which vows first and foremost “to restore the American family” - would require even mothers with preschool children to get jobs.

At a time when there is great social debate about where a woman’s place is, the government is coming down firmly on the side of work, at least in the case of poor mothers. The irony is that social conservatives who traditionally honor the stay-at-home mother are among the strongest backers of sending women on welfare into the work force.

Of course, 60 years of social change occurred between the concept of federal support for mothers and of mothers supporting themselves. Working mothers are now commonplace; one-third of all children are now born to single mothers, and taxpayers demand a cutback on government spending.

“More middle-class women are working,” said R. Kent Weaver of the Brookings Institution. “So politically, how can you justify welfare recipients not working?”

Attitudes like that symbolize a change in how motherhood is viewed, say some scholars and researchers, and will help determine whether welfare reform succeeds, especially in some of the most distressed communities.

“In the debate, you hardly hear the term ‘mother’ - just ‘welfare recipients,”’ said Virginia Schein, who wrote a book about poor women struggling to hold on to jobs. “But these are mothers, and they are just trying to take care of their children.”

By not guaranteeing child care and job training, said Shein, a professor at Pennsylvania’s Gettysburg College, lawmakers showed little appreciation of the obstacles these women face.

Diane M. Dujon, a college administrator and former welfare mother, worries about what will happen when these mothers - who often are in a struggle to keep their children from gangs and drugs - go to work.

“For so long, society has told poor youngsters that they are no good,” said Dujon, who works for the University of Massachusetts. “Now, we’re saying ‘your mother isn’t either.’ That could make them more alienated and angry.”

There has definitely been a “social shift” in the way this country has viewed the poor mother, said David Blankenhorn, president of the conservative Institute for American Values in New York.

Through the 1970s, he said, that mother was viewed as “the deserving poor.” By the mid-‘80s, she became an unemployed worker. Lately, he said, she has been stereotyped as “someone with an illegitimate child” who does not deserve help.

“In the first category, the solution is a check; in the second category the solution is a job,” Blankenhorn said. “For the latest category, the solution is a marriage license.

“But there’s no way to legislate that. And that’s part of the frustration. So, we punish them by saying ‘Make them work.”’

Concern about the rising out-of-wedlock birth rate fueled a lot of the debate over a welfare bill, although nearly half the 5 million women on welfare are divorced or separated.

Social conservatives especially support provisions in the House welfare bill that ban cash benefits to children of teenage mothers and prohibit extra benefits for an additional child born to a mother on welfare. By taking away the money, they said, the shame of illegitimacy will be restored and marriage encouraged.

And that may be the overarching message of welfare reform, said Heidi Hartmann, director of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, which has been active in lobbying for job training and child care for welfare mothers.

Those on welfare, she said, have been handy targets to attack the larger societal trend of women, across racial and economic lines, choosing to be single mothers.

“The message is to all women,” she said, “that they should not be so irresponsible to think they should have a child without a father.”

Researchers say this overlooks a prime cause of single parenthood: a lack of low-skill jobs for men in a high-tech economy. Recent studies show that the higher the male unemployment rate in a community, the higher the rate of mother-headed homes.

“No matter how we implore people to strengthen families, no matter how much we extol the virtues of marriage, people are not going to marry unless they see it as a viable option,” said Frank Furstenberg, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Furstenberg, who has studied a group of single mothers and their children for decades, said the welfare overhaul errs by ignoring fathers, except for tougher child support enforcement he said was likely to do little but “create more fugitives.”

“We are acting as if we can push on one side of the balloon and it won’t affect the other side,” he said. “The men are both part of the problem and part of the solution.”

Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., a former social worker, proposed setting aside some money to let states provide job training to fathers as a way of keeping families together. The idea was soundly defeated.

Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas said the $920 million cost over seven years would undercut the $70 billion he wanted to trim from social welfare programs. And Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., denounced it as a program for “deadbeat dads and for people who let their children go on welfare.”

So the welfare mother must now become breadwinner and therefore worthy of respect in a work-obsessed culture that has “devalued parenthood,” said Blankenhorn. Taking care of young children, he said, used to be considered “something more important” than work.

But poor mothers should work in order to take care of themselves and feel like full citizens, said Hartmann, of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. The welfare system was created, she said, as a cheap way to push poor women to the side like “a heap of garbage.”

And that is how many of them feel now as they face an uncertain future, said Brenda Richardson, who runs a nonprofit social service organization in some of the poorest areas of Washington.

For more than a year, she has been holding meetings with women in community centers and public housing complexes to get them to start thinking about a life without government help.