Rats, Gender, and Representation in the War on Poverty: How Cleveland Welfare Rights Activists Defined Democracy, 1964-1966

Abstract

In 1965, impoverished Clevelanders and their allies brought dead rats to City Hall to demonstrate that they alone had the required expertise to write antipoverty policy. They used the rats to educate their representatives about poverty conditions after their unsucessful struggle to gain control over the local War on Poverty. Scholarship on the War on Poverty and welfare rights movement has uncovered stories of innovative women who fought for official and unofficial access to policymaking. But our focus on movement leaders and sympathetic allies has obscured how some of these activists defined democracy. Activists in Cleveland envisioned democracy as a system where those affected by a policy had influence over its crafting. Their radical vision of urban municipal policymaking illuminates that historians have over emphasized the concessions that these women forced from their representatives, an interpretation which has inadvertently privileged access to a seat at the table over their larger goals.