Violating Women: Rights Abuses in the Welfare Police State

Gwendolyn Mink
Additional contact information
Gwendolyn Mink: New Immigrants in American Political Development

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2001, vol. 577, issue 1, 79-93

Abstract: The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program subordinates recipients to a series of requirements, sanctions, and stacked incentives aimed at rectifying their personal choices and family practices. In exchange for welfare, TANF recipients must surrender or compromise their vocational freedom, sexual privacy, and reproductive choice, as well as the right to make intimate decisions about how to be and raise a family. As TANF's foremost objective is to restore the patriarchal family, numerous provisions promote marriage and paternal headship while frustrating childbearing and child-raising rights outside of marriage. Implementation decisions and a new wave of welfare reform underscore the centrality of marriage in welfare policy. The current thrust of welfare policy en courages poor mothers to be dependent on men, punishes them for independence, and withholds the material recognition necessary to sustain independence.

Date: 2001
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/000271620157700107 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:anname:v:577:y:2001:i:1:p:79-93

DOI: 10.1177/000271620157700107

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().