Abstract
Much has been written about Welfare Reform efforts of the mid-1990s and the racist roots of newly imposed work requirements and time limits. Welfare scholars have long known that Reagan's description of a “welfare queen in Chicago” was expertly crafted to subconsciously tap into growing White unease after the Civil Rights and Great Society movements of the 1960s and 70s. With that seed planted, conservatives and neo-Liberals were able to successfully “end welfare as we know it” in 1996 based upon the dominant assumption that mothers receiving welfare, especially Black mothers, must be forced into the workforce and away from government “dependence.”
Little previous scholarship, however, has so expertly traced these themes to Freedman's Bureau policies following the Civil War as Priya Kandaswamy does in her book, Domestic Contradictions: Race and Gendered Citizenship from Reconstruction to Welfare Reform. The central theme of Kandaswamy's work is that both Reconstruction era policies and Welfare Reform are built upon the assumption that Black women require paternalistic and punitive enforcement mechanisms to ensure their assimilation to the heteronormative and capitalist expectations placed upon them.
As Kandswamy points out, the “heart” of this book lies in Chapters 3 and 4, with Chapters 1 and 2 primarily setting the stage. (My primary criticism of the book focuses on the author's delay in presenting her central message.) In Chapter 3, Kandswamy argues that framers of the Freedman's Bureau in the mid-1860s promoted heterosexual marriage as the appropriate vehicle to facilitate transition for those exiting slavery and entering citizenship. For free persons, this privileging of heteronormativity within officially certified marriage created a mechanism “for privatizing responsibility for the lasting harms of slavery, enforcing economic and social obligations, and rationalizing public surveillance (p. 27),” while simultaneously eroding the cultural kinship practices of African Americans. This ideology is similar to that promoted in the 1990s during Welfare Reform debates. Tthe Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, which created the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program (TANF), was explicitly designed to “encourage the formation and maintenance of two-parent families,” negating the validity of a variety of other family structures outside of heterosexual marriage.
Chapter 4 further examines the marital expectations of Black women and the contradiction created when the idealized role in heterosexual marriage for White women is to serve as full-time caretakers while the same activity among Black women is interpreted as evidence of laziness and dependence. For example, she quotes one Freedman's Bureau official who states that “Most of the Freedwomen who have husbands are not at work, while they are nearly as idle as it is possible for them to be pretending to spin-knit or something that really amounts to nothing” (p. 117). Further, Kandiswamy offers examples of women who rejected these cultural and political expectations only to be depicted as sexual deviants, prostitutes, and vagrants.
In Chapter 5, Kandaswamy turns her attention to the Twentieth Century and the ways in which the growing American safety net replicated Reconstruction era frameworks. For example, both eras assume that conscientious White mothers ought to be at home with their children, but dutiful Black mothers must be in the paid workforce. In the post-reconstruction era following 1877 and for much of the early Twentieth Century, for many Black women, this ironically meant domestic servitude in White homes and caring for White children, while their own children were cared for by others or necessarily fended for themselves.
When social safety net policies such as Mother's Pensions and Aid to Families with Children were first established in the 1920s and 30s, they were framed as ways to provide support for widowed White women and enjoyed fairly strong public approval. But this support was rescinded as civil rights activists of the 1960s defeated many of the overtly racist policies that blocked Black women from receiving aid, and impoverished African American families therefore increasingly became part of the welfare caseloads. In possibly the most poignant statement of the book, Kandaswamy argues that “the implicit message of [welfare reform] is that impoverished children do not need care as much as they need role models in labor discipline (p. 3).”
In Domestic Contradictions, Kandaswamy offers an important perspective on the well-established idea that welfare policies are deeply classist, racist, and sexist. She reminds us that welfare mechanisms designed to infantilize, control, and punish poor, Black women and their children are rooted in slavery and the policies immediately following emancipation in 1863 and 1865. I strongly recommend this book to welfare scholars and students of social policy who want to understand more deeply our uniquely American social safety net.
