Manufacturing Mammies: The Burdens of Service Work and Welfare Reform among Battered Black Women

Abstract

We cannot become a nation of short-order cooks and saleswomen, Xerox-machine operators and messenger boys. (Felix Rohatyn, 1981)2IntroductionContemporary welfare reform in the U.S. has been praised by conservative policy elites for its role in disciplining the poor and reducing the numbers of people receiving public assistance and focussing on work, not welfare (Horn and Bush, 2003; O'Neil and Hill, 2003). However, outside those circles, social scientists including anthropologists have generated a considerable critical body of work emphasizing the tensions within welfare reform. They have pointed out the corrosive effects of reform in structural terms showing how it actually produces new forms of poverty and increases inequality. This is the case, they argue, in part because people on welfare must now work or engage in work-related activity-for very low or no wages-in return for assistance. For example, Goode and Maskovsky (2001) have suggested that welfare reform is flawed because it sustains inequity in two ways. The first is related to the economic context of restructuring, specifically de-industrialization, in which such policies are implemented. Economic restructuring has meant a decline in the employment options for workers as well as falling wages for those employed. The second is related to the context of the prevailing neo-liberal ideologies that pervade the design and implementation of welfare reform. The result is the devolution of the responsibility for social policy to state governments, the implementation of incoherent tax policies, and forcing people to work to alleviate poverty even though there has been a decline in real earnings. Thus, although neo-liberal policies appear to decrease dependency of the poor on the state, ultimately they generate new forms of inequality (Morgen and Maskovsky, 2003). Other scholars have focussed on race in their critiques, both the role it played in facilitating welfare reform's implementation as well as the disparities it has aggravated (Davis, Aparicio et. al., 2003). These writers indeed offer a serious challenge to the merits of welfare reform often touted by policy elites. However astute such critiques are, they do not necessarily capture the complex intersection of economic restructuring, neo-liberalism, and racism on the conditions of work, living and making a living for a particular group who constitute up to 60% of welfare caseloads (Curcio, 1997; Kenney and Brown, 1996). This group is made up of people who have experienced intimate violence. They are Black women who are battered.The goal of this article is to examine the implications that welfare reform, specifically the mandatory work policy, has for Black women who have experienced violence. The political and economic changes that have been taking place is the U.S. beg an analysis of the distinctive ways that battered Black women are triply punished by the interacting dynamics of intimate violence and public welfare policy, which skate on racism. Battered Black women have been pressured to participate in work or work related programs that are dead-end, precarious and low-status, that do little to enable them to move out of the traps of poverty and violence, and to achieve economic security and independence from abusive partners. I will argue that there are consequences from the interplay of the proliferation of negative racial images, neo-liberal social policy and, the effects of de-industrialization on a local labour market. In exploring the relationship between these domains I argue furthermore that welfare reform work mandates have resuscitated one particular historical image of Black women-Mammy, a derogatory image that has been mapped on to Black women. I raise two questions in this article. First, to what extent is this historical construct of Black women contemporarily reproduced in the context of welfare reform? Second, what are the material disadvantages of this construct for battered Black women as they navigate welfare reform? …