Privatization of welfare reflects the political pressure to limit public responsibility for protection of social citizenship. Recent welfare reforms incorporate three classic market-like privatization mechanisms—contracting out services, forcing allocation of a limited pool of benefits, and deregulation. Deregulation entails strategic diversion and disqualification of large numbers of would-be applicants who are left without alternatives to the labor market. In this article I discuss an empirical study of the effects of deregulation of welfare on the self-perceptions of recipients. Interviews with recipients and with low-wage health care workers, former recipients, show that, criticisms of welfare notwithstanding, they have embraced welfare reform’s valorization of market labor, despite the women’s continuing poverty. The interviews suggest that the “consent” of women in low-wage health care work is grounded in both powerlessness and resistance. Care taking, a role devalued by welfare reform, is valued by them and a foundation for identity and an imagined career. *This is a revised version of a paper first presented at the annual meeting of the Law and Society Association, Las Vegas, Nevada, June 2005. The article discusses one aspect of an empirical research project examining the effects of welfare reform on recipients, former recipients, frontline workers, and administrators of welfare programs. Other aspects of the research are considered in earlier published and unpublished work, including, Frank Munger, Dependency by Law: Welfare and Identity in the Lives of Poor Women, in Lives in the Law (Austin Sarat et al. eds., 2002); “Dependency by Law: The Policy Power of All Our Kin” a paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for North American Anthropologists, Merida, Mexico, May 2005. I would like to thank Courtney Fennimore, Melinda Feng, Asha Smith, and Susan Liu, my research assistants, who not only brought energy, diligence, and intelligence to the work of the project but also offered thoughtful and valuable insights about its substance, for which I am deeply grateful. **Professor of Law, New York Law School; Ph.D. (Sociology) 1997, J.D. 1968, University of Michigan. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.113 on Wed, 05 Oct 2016 04:19:53 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms