Ellen Reese, Backlash Against Welfare Mothers Past and Present.

De Marco, Allison

Ellen Reese, Backlash Against Welfare Mothers Past and Present. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005. $19.95 papercover.

Since the passage of welfare reform in 1996 there has been extensive research on its implementation and the impact of its provisions on children and families. In addition to the wealth of articles produced for academic journals, a number of recent books also deal with the subject of welfare reform chronicling families' experiences negotiating the welfare system. Although most of these books present stories of families dealing with the fallout from welfare reform, Ellen Reese's book, Backlash Against Welfare Mothers Past and Present, provides a historical analysis of the attacks on the women who receive benefits from the system from the late 1940s to the present.

Reese, a professor of Sociology at the University of California, Riverside, traces the history of political attacks against poor mothers' access to public assistance to assess how and why regional welfare attacks in the early days of the welfare state led to the strong, national assault on welfare we are experiencing today. Part I focuses on the causes and consequences of welfare opposition, looking at the impact of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996 that imposed strict limits on welfare use. The initial chapters trace the early history of mothers' aid and explore how class, race, and gender politics have historically interacted to provoke powerful cross-class support for welfare cutbacks. Part II deals with the first welfare backlash between 1945 and 1979 following the expansion of welfare after World War II when employment declined and caseloads swelled. Public assistance became more inclusive of unwed and minority mothers leading to increased controversy. This section also discusses the role of large farmers whose interest in maintaining a pool of cheap labor impacted the development of welfare policy. Part III focuses on the contemporary welfare backlash from 1980 to 2004. Reese examines the rise of the Republican Right, business interests, conservative think tanks, and their role in the attacks on welfare culminating in the current reform of welfare policies. In her final chapter, Reese presents an agenda for rebuilding a welfare state that advocates a "New Deal for Working Families" to include improved access to jobs, training, and education, help for workers to make ends meet, and help for workers in balancing the dual obligations of work and family.

Reese's book serves an important function by analytically and comprehensively exploring the assaults against welfare over the past 60 years. A major strength of the book is the exhaustive research undertaken by the author. This will be helpful to those who desire more than a cursory knowledge of social welfare history in the United States. This book will be valuable for anyone interested in this area, but particularly for social work graduate students, researchers, and instructors. The level of detail presented may overwhelm undergraduates. One drawback of the book is that its proposals for policy reforms in the final chapter are too brief and could be more fully fleshed out. Overall, readers of this volume will come away with a deeper understanding of US welfare policy and the history of attacks against public assistance programs that seek to support needy families.

Allison De Marco, University of California, Berkeley