Feminist policy scholars intervene in welfare debate.

Mink, Gwendolyn

AS PUNITIVE WELFARE PROPOSALS BEGAN TO MAKE THEIR WAY THROUGH CONGRESS in the spring of 1995, a group of feminist social policy scholars joined together to combine our voices and deploy our expertise in sisterhood with poor mothers and in opposition to "welfare reform." Calling ourselves the Women's Committee of One Hundred--because our initial goal was to pledge 100 scholars, advocates, and social welfare practitioners to the cause of welfare justice--we lobbied Congress and the White House, mobilized call-in campaigns, designed and placed ads in the New York Times and the New Republic, and developed teach-in materials for communities and campuses. Our primary message was that caregiving is work, including when it is performed for one's own children or other dependents. We worked to bring the caregiving issue to the welfare debate, and so to expose the race- and class-based double standard behind efforts to strip poor mothers of economic security through stringent welfare requirements such as mandatory work outside the home and time limits.

In August 1996, President Clinton signed into law the welfare legislation we had opposed. The new welfare law replaced the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, which had provided income assistance to poor children and their caregivers for 60 years, with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF). The TANF law stipulated more stringent regulation of poor mothers'intimate decisions; imposed work requirements that foreclosed caregiving by poor mothers for their own children; meted out punishments and disincentives to mothers who do not satisfy various mandates; authorized discrimination against documented immigrants; and declared a cumulative five-year lifetime limit on eligibility for welfare. In addition, the 1996 law required that the new TANF program be legislatively reauthorized in 2002.

The Women's Committee of One Hundred targeted the 2002 reauthorization process as an opportunity to try to undo some of the damage wrought by the 1996 law--damage both to poor mothers' rights and to their families' economic security. Other groups also organized to this end, including the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund (NOW-LDEF) and the Welfare Made a Difference Campaign, as well as grass-roots welfare rights groups throughout the country.

During 2000 and 2001, recipients and advocates at the grass roots and inside the beltway strove to develop a legislative alternative to the punitive policy framework. In the early spring of 2001, my late mother Patsy Mink, then a member of Congress, decided that she wanted to bring a progressive welfare bill to the table during the reauthorization process, much as she had done during the "welfare reform" process in 1995. On behalf of my mother and as a member of the Women's Committee, I worked closely with NOW-LDEF and the Welfare Made a Difference Campaign to try to design a bill that would recognize mothers' rights and caregiving work while promoting economic security. NOW-LDEF provided crucial legal expertise and organized the legislative drafting effort; meanwhile, both NOW-LDEF and the Welfare Made a Difference Campaign facilitated communication with a broad welfare justice coalition. The Women's Committee's steering group also offered links to groups and communities, but its more distinctive contribution was wisdom from history and theory, along with policy research. The result of this collaborative effort was HR 3113, a progressive, feminist legislative intervention in the TANF reauthorization debate. More than 90 members of Congress signed on as co-sponsors of the bill. Brought to the floor of the House of Representatives as a Democratic substitute in February 2003--by Representatives Dennis Kucinich and Barbara Lee--the bill secured 124 votes (123 Democrats, 1 independent), but was defeated.

Instead, that same month, the House passed a harsh reauthorization bill (HR 4) that raises work requirements and dedicates money to "marriage promotion" while making it more difficult for poor mothers to acquire the job skills and social services that might open pathways out of poverty. The Senate Finance Committee has developed a bill that is slightly less draconian than the House bill, but that still would ratchet up work requirements and redirect income assistance to marriage promotion. In response to the marriage initiatives--which many Democrats have embraced--an ad hoc "No Promotion of Marriage in TANF!" campaign sprouted in January 2003. In addition to posting a website and recruiting signers to our petition, the campaign organized fax-ins to Congress and other activities to raise awareness of the ways in which marriage initiatives injure rights, create new opportunities for discrimination, and waste precious public funds. Although TANF was due for reauthorization in 2002, at this writing in fall 2003, TANF has not yet been reauthorized.

To illustrate some of the results of the activist, applied research efforts described above by Gwendolyn Mink, Social Justice reproduces in the following pages three primary documents: (1) NOW-LDEF's summary of HR 3113, the late Congresswoman Patsy Mink's bill to reauthorize TANF; (2) excerpts from HR 3113, including its table of contents and findings; and (3) the "No Promotion of Marriage in TANF" position paper drafted by Martha Fineman, Gwendolyn Mink, and Anna Marie Smith.--Eds.

GWENDOLYN MINK is Professor and Chair of Women's Studies at Smith College (Women's Studies Program, Seeyle Hall, Smith College, Northampton, MA, 01063; e-mail: gmink@smith.edu). She has authored several books, including Welfare's End and The Wages of Motherhood: Inequality in the Welfare State, 1917-1942.