Postindustrial Welfare Policy: Just Say No to Women and Children

Abstract

Recent changes in welfare policy underscore the continuation of persistent parallel tendencies to promote work by devaluing welfare and privilege the two-parent family over female-headed families. In this way, policy is integrally involved in perpetuating the problems it ostensibly is supposed to be attacking. Both conservatives and liberals have helped to promote this line of policymaking in ways which further threaten the well-being of poor women with children. In the current period, the decline in adequate paying jobs, the deterioration of needed services, and the decrease in the value of public assistance benefits force poor families to rely more than previously on an uneven, unreliable and inadequate system of privatized assistance. These practices are likely to continue the bias in favor of the two-parent family as the route out of poverty and are just as likely to accelerate the trend toward the "femininization of poverty."