Welfare

In the United States, welfare most commonly refers to assistance provided by government to poor people to enable them to survive at a basic level of living. In Europe the government sector is larger, and public welfare programs are more developed and provide assistance to more people than only the poor. The phrase welfare state refers to a nation that has substantial apparatus to provide services and security to most of its citizens in a variety of domains, such as health care, education, recreation, and transportation, as well as the necessities of daily life, such as food, clothing, and housing. In the United States public policy is less extensive in the welfare area and the public sector guards against fewer risks. Most families are on their own, earning their living in a relatively unregulated marketplace; the public services that are provided are generally available only to those who meet income and asset eligibility standards and are targeted to the poor rather than being made more widely available to the working and middle classes. An inordinate fear of making people dependent on the state seems to motivate much of the relative stinginess of the U.S. welfare system. Put another way, the deserving poor, such as the elderly or the blind, or the disabled, can safely be taken care of, whereas the able bodied must be forced to work lest they should become an expensive burden. Mothers without husbands, able bodied or not, have generally been given assistance to care for their children, whereas able-bodied fathers have often been excluded because they ought to be able to work and earn enough to support a family on their own.

Even though most observers seem to agree that a highly industrial and urbanized economy requires the public provision of basic aid through the tax system, the extent of aid that is provided varies among countries, and the amount, type, and proper recipients of aid are often matters of considerable debate in all countries. And in most rich countries in Europe and North America, the extent to which aid is offered to gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered (GLBT) persons is not known. Few countries explicitly allow such aid, although it is likely that nonheterosexual individuals can get some aid in many countries. Who requires aid or who is deserving of aid or is viewed as able bodied also changes over time.

DEVELOPMENT OF WELFARE IN THE UNITED STATES

When welfare was first forming along with the new professional field of social work (which grew largely out of private charitable organizations in the nineteenth century), destitute mothers of young children, it was thought, should be able to stay at home with their children rather than have to earn their own living and place their children in orphanages because their low earnings would not enable them to maintain a household for them. The United States was actually the first country to develop mothers' pensions, first at the local and state levels, and then at the national level as part of the 1935 Social Security Act. From 1935 to 1996 basic aid to poor children living in families was, at least in theory, a basic right, an entitlement, although the benefit amounts were set by the states and were never generous enough to raise assisted families even up to the official federal poverty line let alone above it. Nevertheless, given the benefit levels set by the states, sufficient funds to meet the needs of each state population were automatically transferred from the federal government to the state governments and agencies that administered the welfare program locally. During the civil rights era of the 1960s, access to the program expanded so that African-American women in the South, who had been excluded at first so they would be available to work in the fields and as maids, began to join the rolls and claim the benefits that were theoretically available to all.

The population receiving welfare also changed from mostly widows in the early years to increasing numbers of divorced and then never-married mothers. During the same time period other parts of the Social Security system addressing the needs of the disabled and poor elderly were expanded, and poor mothers became isolated in a separate system, which came to be known as welfare and so carried a high degree of stigmatization.

Beginning in the 1970s, as mothers everywhere increased their participation in the labor force, the federal and state governments encouraged single mothers receiving welfare to work. The government also took a growing interest in tracking down the fathers of the children and obtaining child support payments from them. Finally, with the passage of the 1996 welfare reform law, the federal government ended the entitlement and placed a life-time limit of five years on the receipt of benefits; funds were transferred to the states as a fixed sum, and states could now set their own eligibility standards as well as benefit levels. The result is that there is no longer a national guarantee of assistance to poor women and children in the United States. Rather, it is expected that poor mothers will work outside the home, hopefully earning enough, with limited public support, to maintain a home for themselves and their children. Since passage of the 1996 law, the welfare rolls have fallen, and although some families are now better off, others have fallen further into poverty.

Moreover, the 1996 law established several goals of federal policy, including to encourage two-parent families, to reduce nonmarital child bearing, and to increase financial support of their children by absent fathers. The law allows states to refuse benefits to a child who is conceived and born while her or his mother is receiving welfare, and more than half of the states now do so. Mothers are required to assist the government in finding the fathers of their children and to receive aid must often reveal even the most intimate details of their intimate relationships. The law also promotes misinformation about reproductive health. It provides funding to the states for promoting abstinence in everyone who is not married and requires that states teach "that sexual activity outside of the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects" [P.L. 104-193, section 510(b)(2)]. Thus, the 1996 reform moved the goals of restricting the reproductive activity of all poor women squarely into the mainstream of public policy and, furthermore, established heterosexual marriage as the foundation of modern society for the nonpoor and poor alike. The fertility of poor women has always been a target of state policy; for example, in some states, Native-American, Hispanic-American, or African-American women especially were forced to undergo sterilization to receive benefits. In the late twentieth century, times, poor women were encouraged to have long-acting contraceptives inserted under their skin.

Although abuses such as these have been eliminated, the new emphasis on two-parent heterosexual families as the nationally legislated norm certainly creates barriers for many families to receive welfare benefits in the United States. Although several states and localities offer recognition of same-sex relationships, only one state, Massachusetts, offers marriage to gay and lesbian couples, but, through the federal Defense of Marriage Act of 1996, those marriages are explicitly not recognized by the federal government in any of its benefit programs.

EUROPEAN WELFARE POLICIES

In Europe welfare benefits are generally more generous and less restrictive. Assistance with child-rearing is not limited only to poor people; many middle class families receive child allowances, subsidized child care, paid parental leaves, and other forms of income support. Although the European Union (EU) does not yet have a union-wide policy of recognizing marriage between same-sex couples, several member countries do recognize such marriages and many recognize various forms of registered partnerships for same-sex couples that convey many of the benefits of marriage. The EU has also established some rights for transgendered persons and, in theory, protects the rights of all children, regardless of their parents' or their own sexual identity. In most of those countries welfare and other family-related benefits are available to same-sex couples and children of same-sex couples or GLBT individuals on the same basis as they are to heterosexual couples. For example, in Sweden both members of a lesbian couple would be eligible to receive paid parental leave to care for their child. Medical services are also universally available in most European countries, and access to abortion has been provided in most. In the United States, in contrast, states may not use federal funds to provide abortions for poor women except in instances of rape, incest, or protecting the woman's life, and the new abstinence-only policies discourage even teaching about contraception.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bell, Mark. 2003. Families, Partners, Children, and the European Union. Brussels: The European Region of the International Lesbian and Gay Association.

Defense of Marriage Act of 1996, P.L. 104-199.

Donovan, Patricia, and Lisa Kaeser. 2003. Welfare Reform, Marriage, and Sexual Behavior. Washington, DC: The Guttmacher Institute. Available from http://www.guttmacher.org/.

Gordon, Linda. 1994. Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. Press.

Lind, Amy. 2004. "Legislating the Family: Heterosexist Bias in Social Welfare." Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare 31(4): 21-35.

Mink, Gwendolyn. 1998. Welfare's End. Ithaca, Cornell University Press.

Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, P.L. 104-193.

Roberts, Dorothy. 1997. Killing the Black Body. New York: Vintage Books.

                                        Heidi Hartmann