This article uses data from interviews with 40 divorced women to examine the strategies they employed to negotiate public assistance. Divorced women on welfare, as do caseworkers, attempt to differentiate their status from other welfare recipients, rather than focus on their common dependence on the welfare state. They manipulate the system to their best advantage to lessen the state's control of their lives. Many consider welfare to be preferable to either marriage or work. The receipt of welfare by divorced women poses a tradeoff between needed economic assistance and its penalties and fails to establish them as economically self-sufficient heads of households.
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