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Review
| Welfare: A Documentary History of U.S. Policy and Politics, by Gwendolyn Mink and Rickie Solinger. New York and London: New York University Press, 2003. 815 pages. $80.00, cloth/ $28.00, paper.
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| Gwendolyn Mink and Rickie Solinger have compiled a massive collection of historical documents illustrating the politics of poverty, gender, race, and U.S. welfare policy. By "welfare," Mink and Solinger mean "a twentieth-century policy innovation designed for poor mothers and children in families without fathers" (1). The book is divided into seven chronological parts containing 188 documents. Part I, 1900-1940, focuses on mothers' pensions and the Social Security Act (1935): Title IV—Grants to States for Aid to Dependent Children. Part II, the 1940s, examines the effect of World War II on assistance programs for mothers and amendments to the Social Security Act. Part III, the 1950s, surveys the controversy over welfare "fraud and abuse" and the response by Congress. Part IV, the 1960s, views the "fraud and abuse" debate from a national perspective by presenting both racist attacks on and defenses of the welfare system. Part V, the 1970s, tracks the illiberal and racist shift in legal, congressional, and public opinion toward welfare recipients and welfare benefits. Part VI, the 1980s, studies the Reagan revolution, embodied in the Family Support Act (1988), a major, bipartisan, welfare reform measure that added work requirements, job training provisions, and stronger child support enforcement mechanisms. Part VII, the 1990s, covers the arguments that ostensibly were about replacing welfare with work but, according to Mink and Solinger, were really concerned with "illegitimacy" and poor single motherhood, placing "marriage, reproduction, and family formation at the center of the welfare debate" (557). The debate culminated in the bipartisan passage of the revolutionary 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORCA), which replaced Aid to Families for Dependent Children with the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families act The new legislation eliminated welfare recipients' federal entitlement to assistance and replaced it with fifty separate "workfare" programs funded by federal block grants. Within each part, the book contains a rich variety of sources: federal legislation, presidential proclamations, legal opinions, political cartoons, narratives of welfare recipients' experiences, excerpts from congressional hearings, policy experts' reports, newspaper and magazine articles, and public opinion polls. However, the parts are not equal in size: Mink and Solinger favor the post-World War II period. The first two parts, spanning half of the twentieth century, make up only fifteen percent of the volume, while part VII, the 1990s, comprises one third. |
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Welfare does not appear to be designed for undergraduate classroom use; at least not as a supplemental text in a U.S. survey course. It is too long and repetitive, especially in the later parts of the book where liberal and conservative differences of opinion over federal welfare policy are discussed. On the other hand, Welfare might be adopted in more specialized upper-division and graduate courses, for example, in courses dealing with the U.S. welfare state or twentieth-century women's history. Still, instructors must be sensitive when using Welfare because Mink and Solinger have chosen these documents using a distinct interpretative perspective. Throughout the volume, they wish to demonstrate that twentieth-century U.S. welfare policy has "only deeped[ed] inequality through racialized gender effects" (811). Although there are other interpretative frameworks within which to view the evolution of the U.S. welfare system, Mink and Solinger advance theirs fairly by including documents which counter their argument. These countervailing opinions will generate thoughtful discussions and critical thinking among students. The one exception to Mink and Solinger's generally balanced interpretation is their presentation of the documents in part VII of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. In their introductory notes, the authors repeatedly label welfare reform and the PRWORCA as "punitive" (596, 623). More seriously, none of the documents present a defense of or offer any positive result of the PRWORCA, when there are many to choose from. Instead, the authors present documents that denounce and oppose the PRWORCA and its reauthorization. Nevertheless, if not an ideal textbook, Welfare is "invaluable as a source book," as Frances Fox Piven remarks in her foreword (xix). Thanks to Mink and Solinger, scholars and serious students alike now have easy access to a wealth of primary sources at a reasonable price. |
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| Pacific Lutheran University |
E. Wayne Carp |
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