They Say Cut Back, We Say Fight Back! Welfare Activism in an Era of Retrenchment By Ellen Reese Russell Sage Foundation. 2011. 288 pages. $42.50 cloth

Abstract

Unsurprisingly, Ellen Reese's account of collective challenges to welfare reform in the 1990s and 2000s does not end in the triumph of welfare activists over the political actors who, with sometimes barely concealed disdain for the recipients of public assistance, sought to make welfare more restrictive by toughening eligibility criteria and imposing new work requirements on recipients. Reese does not claim that a clear-cut victory was within reach of welfare activists. Instead, she seeks to understand the conditions under which activists in Wisconsin and California—particularly in Milwaukee and Los Angeles, the two largest cities of those states—were able to gain some, mostly small-scale, benefit expansions, funding increases and exemptions for particular populations under welfare reform. These efforts were important not only because they made a difference in real people's lives, but also because they sowed the seeds for potentially powerful alliances between welfare activists and two other constituencies: labor and immigrants.