Book description
Why did the War on Poverty give way to the war on welfare? Many in
the United States saw the welfare reforms of 1996 as the inevitable
result of twelve years of conservative retrenchment in American social
policy, but there is evidence that the seeds of this change were sown
long before the Reagan Revolution-and not necessarily by the Right.
The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty, and Politics in Modern
America traces what Bill Clinton famously called "the end of
welfare as we know it" to the grassroots of the War on Poverty
thirty years earlier. Marshaling a broad variety of sources, historian
Marisa Chappell provides a fresh look at the national debate about
poverty, welfare, and economic rights from the 1960s through the
mid-1990s. In Chappell's telling, we experience the debate over
welfare from multiple perspectives, including those of conservatives
of several types, liberal antipoverty experts, national liberal
organizations, labor, government officials, feminists of various
persuasions, and poor women themselves.
During the Johnson and Nixon administrations,
deindustrialization, stagnating wages, and widening economic
inequality pushed growing numbers of wives and mothers into the
workforce. Yet labor unions, antipoverty activists, and moderate
liberal groups fought to extend the fading promise of the family wage
to poor African Americans families through massive federal investment
in full employment and income support for male breadwinners. In doing
so, however, these organizations condemned programs like Aid to
Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) for supposedly discouraging
marriage and breaking up families. Ironically their arguments paved
the way for increasingly successful right-wing attacks on both
"welfare" and the War on Poverty itself.
"Essential."-Choice
Marisa Chappell teaches history at Oregon State University.
