become the instrument of God: welfare’s mission, from the beginning, was to punish women for having had sex outside of marriage, for having had children outside of marriage, for having had children at all— for being women. With righteousness on its side, the welfare program and those who made and executed its policies punished women through starvation for having “unsuitable homes, ” that is, illegitim ate children.
Mothers and their dependent children are purged en masse from
the welfare rolls whenever a state government decides its purity is
being sullied because it gives money to immoral women. A typical
purge, for instance, took place in Florida in 1959. Seven thousand
families with over 30, 000 children were deprived of benefits because of the suitable home law. According to a report for the then Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, these families met
all the eligibility requirements for welfare but were denied benefits
“where one or more of the children was illegitimate. . . or where
the welfare worker reported that the mother’s past or present conduct of her sex life was not acceptable when examined in the light of the spirit of the law . ”9 Other states, including Northern states,
have done the same. By virtue of being illegitim ate, the children
are being reared in unsuitable homes; therefore, they can starve.
This is a fine exercise in state morality. The benefit to the state is
concrete: the women must do the cheapest labor; in economic
terms, welfare is a refined instrument of state power and of capitalism. In what looks like chaos, it accomplishes a serious goal—creating and maintaining a pool of degraded labor, cheaper than dirt. In terms of its other function, it is not so refined an instrument yet. It
is supposed to keep these women from having children; it is supposed to discourage them, punish them, force them to have fewer children. It is supposed to use the twin weapons of money and
hunger—reinforced by fear of suffering and death—to stop these
women from reproducing. Sterilization has a legislative history in
the United States: in 1915 thirteen states had mandatory sterilization laws (for “degenerates”); and by 1932 twenty-seven states had laws mandating sterilization for various kinds of social misfits. As
Linda Gordon said in
is on welfare. But when doctors sterilize Medicaid women, they
know they are acting in concert with the best interests of the government that administers welfare; and the government does not hesitate to pay the doctor for his good deed. So far, the strategies
of the state in stopping women on welfare from having children
have been crude. The government has tried to police their sexual
relations, enforce chastity, keep men out of their homes, punish
them for having illegitimate children, starve them and their children: state policy is one of absolute, cruel, murderous paternalism.
Welfare policy has usually been interpreted in terms of its impact on black men. From the state (police) side, the effort is to keep a shiftless man from living off the welfare benefits of a woman; to
keep men from defrauding welfare by using benefits intended for
women and children; to get black families back into the patriarchal
mode, that is, headed by males, for reasons of traditional morality
or economics; to force black men to marry black women and be
legally responsible for the children. From the antiracist side, w elfare policy has been seen as a blanket effort to destroy black men or the black fam ily, which, when headed by a woman, is seen as inherently degraded. The absent black male is the political focus and priority. But neither side penetrates to the real meaning of welfare
