Women and Welfare, Part Two

Abstract

The root Latin meaning of the word proletariat is people who have no wealth other than their How apt that is in these mean times! Conservative officials, not satisfied with taking away poor people's meager wealth, now propose to take their last remaining wealth, their children. These four books and one booklet deal with parents who receive Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), mostly mothers, and their children. Each looks at a different facet of the welfare prism. Louise Armstrong's book on child welfare might seem at first glance to be looking at a different prism altogether, but as she makes clear, child welfare is the flip side of AFDC. Welfare mothers have always feared the power of the state to label them as unfit parents and take away their children. While not all children in foster care come from AFDC families (45 percent do), all are poor. The connections between welfare and child welfare come through in all of these books. Nancy Rose points out that one result of slashing AFDC during the 1980s and 1990s has been an increase in foster care, for mothers who can no longer afford to care for their own children. An AFDC mother in Little Rock, Arkansas, Lisa Johnson, who placed her son for several