Welfare, Poverty, and Low-Wage Employment

Abstract

This chapter describes women’s social movement activity for economic justice, with an emphasis on race and gender intersectionality. The chapter begins with a case study of the welfare rights movement. It then describes tensions between issue and identity frames in the literature on poor women’s mobilization. This discussion links the intersectional politics of the movements to the intersectional dynamics of social movement scholarship. The chapter then homes in on two overlapping sectors of women’s labor organizing—child care and domestic work—in order to highlight the emergent themes more empirically. The intersectional politics and scope of women’s organizing for economic justice challenge scholars to develop new frameworks for understanding social movement activity.