From Welfare to Workfare: The Unintended Consequences of Liberal Reform, 1945-1965
2006; Oxford University Press; Volume: 92; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/4486030
ISSN1945-2314
Autores Tópico(s)Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes
ResumoJennifer Mittelstadt's clear and informative study of welfare advocates from the New Deal to the Great Society reminds readers “that although the political debate about welfare in postwar America has never been egalitarian, it was at one time at least nuanced” (p. 173). From Welfare to Workfare charts the progress of a group of policy actors as they navigated the waters of political change in the early Cold War period. The subjects of the book include Wilbur Cohen, secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare under President Lyndon B. Johnson; Elizabeth Wickenden, a New Dealer who became a leading welfare analyst in the late 1950s and 1960s; and National Urban League leader Whitney Young. Mittelstadt demonstrates that the themes that dominated recent debates over welfare, which led to the 1996 reform drafted in Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton, were present in at least embryonic form by the middle 1950s. She focuses on the question of waged work for welfare mothers, which, she argues, entered national policy through intentional and unintentional actions by Cohen, Wickenden, and their allies. In the middle 1940s, the “welfare experts,” as Mittelstadt terms them (p. 133), sought to provide benefits to more people and to fix the Social Security Act by erasing categorical distinctions among the poor. In the 1950s, they instead lobbied for what they called rehabilitation policies, including training for waged work, to fix the supposed psychosocial problems of unmarried mothers. And in 1962, the experts were complicit in the passage of an amendment to the Social Security Act that emphasized preparation for waged work as much as it emphasized mothers' entitlement to financial support while they raised young children.
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