policy because both sides keep their eye on the man as the significant figure in the drama. The state, obviously, does not intend any economic dignity for that man or that same state would not promote black male unemployment in its economic policies and create a situation, through welfare, in which husbands are forced to abandon women and children so as to be sure they do not starve. From the antiracist perspective, the efforts of welfare have been deeper
and far more malevolent than can be realized if its impact on men
is seen as prim ary, because the effort has been to stop or significantly diminish reproduction through social control of women.
The notion that the state has acted to promote the conventional
male-dominated fam ily (by persecution of unmarried mothers, for
instance) is only superficially viable. If that were its real interest,
other state policies would support that same goal. Instead, welfare
policy has directly concerned itself with controlling women. The
most intrusive and degrading regulations back from the beginning
of welfare all have to do with women as women: all have to do with
a gender-specific regulation of motherhood and sex. These policies
all articulate the reproductive worth of women on welfare to the
state, and that value is almost entirely negative. *
The causes of the need for welfare (from the human, not the
state, point of view) are in the systematic economic discrimination
against women, with black women suffering the most stark eco
*The one positive value is that the women and their progeny are cheap
labor, as discussed previously in this chapter.
nomic deprivation, and in the systematic sexual degradation of
women. Welfare is the barest maintenance for those who, being
female and poor, would otherwise slowly die. Those kicked off the
welfare rolls in the endless quest for those who are poor but pure
get jobs where they are paid
provides shit. They work, keeping those upholders of the Protestant work ethic happy, and go hungry at the same time. The poverty of women is appalling. As of December 1981, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that unemployment for females who
headed households was nearly twice that of males who headed
households: 10. 6 percent for the women; 5. 8 percent for the men.
Gay Talese, who wrote about the sex industry, found it meaningful in terms of sexual liberation that the women in massage parlors giving him handjobs were college graduates and
meaningful—but in terms of what women have to do to earn
money, even with college educations and advanced degrees. The
welfare system that seeks to control women, and ultimately to destroy expendable women (black and poor white women, Hispanics, the females of any marginal groups), can count on the continuing
poverty of these women as women; they are never going to do
better because they are women and there are no social means to
enable them to do better, except marriage upward. The poverty of
these millions of women is assured; and so is the state’s continued
access to them; and so too is their continuing sexual humiliation by
state intrusion, the welfare agencies being thus far the major enforcement arm of state policy. Since reproductive containment (at best) has been the goal of welfare, there will be continued state
intrusion into the reproductive lives of poor women—with the endemic racism of the United States putting black women consistently at the highest risk. The intrusion will be under the guise of morality, as it has always been, a morality applied exclusively to
women, a morality that no right-wing senator or congressman
would ever think of using the state to apply to men. It will also be
disguised— by those more secular—as concern for the black fam
ily: controlling the sexual promiscuity of the woman, reinstating
the black man in the master’s bedroom, such as it is on his block.
Under the surface, there w ill be a different truth: the state,
through the welfare system as a whole, wants to control the fertility of the woman and w ill not ever let the black man come in out of the cold. The state regulates the sexual use of non welfare women
for the benefit of men as a class, and it attempts to control the
