11/4 Summary Post

In her article "The Lady and the Tramp: Feminist Welfare Politics, Poor Single Mothers, and the Challenge of Welfare Justice", Gwendolyn Mink discusses how the primary goals of 2nd wave feminists have not been aimed at earning rights for those lower class women who need support from welfare systems. She points out that most feminists are "supereducated, do-good feminists, most of whom would never need a welfare check" (55). Although some women tried to argue that a war against poor women was actually a war against all women, she realized that his slogan really failed to rally many women at all. Many middle-class women even participated on the anti-welfare side and many feminist congress members did not use their positions of power to even try to make a difference. She describes the Personal Responsibility Act, which denied single others their entitlement to welfare, and how there was no real widespread opposition to its passing in 1996. Mink questions why so many feminists were completely unconcerned about this need for welfare reform even though it could be argued that it "encroached on their basic civil rights as well" (57). Until reading this article, I never really thought about how poor single mothers are the only Americans who law forces them to work outside the home and are the only ones who are punished due to their decisions to have children, as Mink points out. She ultimately argues that welfare is actually a condition of women's equality that has not yet been fulfilled. Women used to be paid for their work at home but no are forced to choose between wages and children. She references the common racially charged conceptions of welfare supported women as "lazy, promiscuous and matriarchal" (59). She also notes that the middle class feminists' emphasis on women's right to work outside of their homes has actually been a hindrance to the recognition of the need for a better welfare system for single mothers. Another part of the problem is that "white and middle-class feminists...see welfare mothers as victims- of patriarchy, maybe of racism, possibly of false consciousness" (60). Out of the feminist movement for gaining the right to work outside the home grew the expectation that only jobs outside of the home are truly productive and beneficial to society. Mink ends the article by suggesting that we begin to provide single caregivers an income in recognition of their work to address the poor woman's side of the gender divide.