1. The Social Security Act created Aid to Dependent Children, the predecessor to AFDC. In 1950 Congress passed the “caretaker provision,” which expanded benefits to care providers as well as dependent children. Nadasen, Premilla, Mittelstadt, Jennifer, and Chappell, Marisa, Welfare in the United States: A History with Documents: 1935-1996 (New York: Routledge, 2009), 33 Google Scholar.

2. In a piece about debates over tax expenditures, Monica Prasad cites Christopher Howard’s argument that “the American welfare state is actually 40 percent larger than commonly believed.” Howard, “Making Taxes the Life of the Party,” in The New Fiscal Sociology, ed. Isaac Martin, Ajay Mehrotra, and Monica Prasad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), cited in Prasad, “Tax ‘Expenditures’ and Welfare States: A Critique,” Journal of Policy History 23, no. 2 (2011): 251–66.

On the expansion of public health care programs, see Quadagno, Jill, “The Transformation of Medicaid from Poor Law Legacy to Middle-Class Entitlement?” Medicaid and Medicare at 50: America’s Entitlement Programs in the Age of Affordable Care, ed. Cohen, Alan B., Colby, David C., Wailoo, Keith, Zelizer, Julien E. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015)Google Scholar; Keith A. Wailoo, “The Era of Big Government: Why It Never Ended,” in Medicare and Medicaid at 50, 233–52.

3. Katz, Michael B., The Price of American Citizenship: Redefining the American Welfare State (New York: Macmillan, 2002), 294–98Google Scholar, quote on 298.

4. In 2019, the Child Tax Credit, Medicaid, and the EITC were the top federal expenditures on children. Hahn, Heather, Lou, Cary, and Isaacs, Julia B., How Much Dose the Federal Government Spend on Programs Benefitting Children? (Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 2019)Google Scholar, https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/102752/how-much-does-the-federal-government-spend-on-programs-benefiting-children.pdf.

5. Federal Fiscal Year 2019 Statistical Enrollment Data System Reporting, November 10, 2020, https://www.medicaid.gov/chip/downloads/fy-2019-childrens-enrollment-report.pdf.

6. “Analysis Examines the Affordable Care Act’s Impact on Nearly All Americans,” KFF, September 23, 2020, https://www.kff.org/health-reform/press-release/analysis-examines-the-affordable-care-acts-impact-on-nearly-all-americans/. As of April 2022, twelve states have not expanded Medicaid, “Status of State Medicaid Expansion Decisions: Interactive Map,” KFF, April 26, 2022, https://www.kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/status-of-state-medicaid-expansion-decisions-interactive-map/.

7. Katz, The Price of Citizenship, 337–38.

8. Felicia Kornbluh and Gwendolyn Mink, Ensuring Poverty: Welfare Reform in Feminist Perspective (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), ix, xi; H. Luke Schaefer and Kathryn Edin, Policy Brief: Extreme Poverty in the United States, 1996 to 2011, National Policy Center Policy Brief, no. 28 (February 2012), https://www.thenation.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/policybrief28.pdf; Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer, $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015); Bryce Covert, “Why Hillary Has Never Apologized for Welfare Reform,” The Atlantic, June 14, 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/welfare-reform-and-the-forging-of-hillary-clintons-political-realism/486449/; Clyde Haberman, “20 Years Later, Welfare Overhaul Resonates for Families and Candidates,” New York Times, May 1, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/02/us/20-years-later-welfare-overhaul-resonates-for-families-and-candidates.html.

9. Krissy Clark, “Oh My God—We’re on Welfare?!” Slate, June 2, 2016, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/moneybox/2016/06/_welfare_money_often_isn_t_spent_on_welfare.html, cited in footnote 5, Kornbluh and Mink, Ensuring Poverty, 153.

10. Peter Holley and Elahe Izadi, “Kansas Bans Welfare Recipients from Seeing Movies, Going Swimming on Government’s Dime,” Washington Post, April 6, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2015/04/06/kansas-wants-to-ban-welfare-recipients-from-seeing-movies-going-swimming-on-governments-dime/; Dana Milbank, “The Rush to Humiliate the Poor,” Washington Post, April 7, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-rush-to-humiliate-the-poor/2015/04/07/8795b192-dd67-11e4-a500-1c5bb1d8ff6a_story.html?utm_term=.00f0fcbfb65d; Robert Pear, “Political Rifts over Bill Clinton’s Welfare Law Resurface as Aid Shrinks,” New York Times, May 20, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/21/us/politics/welfare-arizona-bill-hillary-clinton.html.

11. The Goldberg v. Kelley (1970) decision, which “ruled that welfare benefits were protected by due process and could not be terminated without a hearing,” was particularly decisive. See Nadasen, Premilla, Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States (New York, Routledge, 2005), 60, 61Google Scholar.

12. Piven, Frances Fox and Cloward, Richard A., Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (New York: Vintage, 1971)Google Scholar.

13. Katz, Michael B., In the Shadow of the Poor House: A Social History of Welfare in America (New York: Basic Books, 1986)Google Scholar.

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19. For a masterful synthesis of historians’ reckoning with neoliberalism, see Phillips-Fein, Kim, “The History of Neoliberalism,” in Shaped by the State: Toward a New Political History of the Twentieth Century, ed. Cebul, Brent, Geismer, Lily, and Williams, Mason B. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 347–62Google Scholar.

20. Examples include Lichtenstein, Nelson, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor: A Century of American Labor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Harvey, David, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cowie, Jefferson, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: The New Press, 2010)Google Scholar; Stein, Judith, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the 1970s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Rodgers, Daniel T., Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Self, Robert O., All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy since the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012)Google Scholar; Cowie, Jefferson, The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gerstle, Gary, “America’s Neoliberal Order,” in Beyond the New Deal Order: U.S. Politics from the Great Depression to the Great Recession, ed. Gerstle, Gary, Lichtenstein, Nelson, and O’Connor, Alice (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 216–33Google Scholar.

21. Examples include Jones, Daniel Steadman, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013)Google Scholar; Burgin, Angus, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015)Google Scholar; Geismer, Lily, Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; MacLean, Nancy, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (New York: Viking Press, 2017)Google Scholar; Slobodian, Quinn, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Offner, Amy C., Sorting Out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019)Google Scholar; David Stein, “Containing Keynesianism in an Age of Civil Rights: Jim Crow Monetary Policy and the Struggle for Guaranteed Jobs, 1956–1979,” in Beyond the New Deal Order, 109–22; Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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23. Examples include Moreton, Bethany, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Boris, Eileen and Klein, Jennifer, Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Winant, Gabriel, The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021)Google Scholar.

24. Cooper, Melinda, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (New York: Zone Books, 2017), 21 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Lily Geismer explicitly claims the liberal origins of neoliberalism. Geismer, “Agents of Change: Microenterprise, Welfare Reform, the Clintons, and Liberal Forms of Neoliberalism,” Journal of American History 107, no. 1 (June 2020): 107–31.

25. N. D. B. Connolly, “A White Story,” Dissent, January 22, 2018; N. D. B. Connolly, “The Strange Career of American Liberalism,” in Shaped by the State, 62–95. See also Jenkins, Destin, The Bonds of Inequality: Debt and the Making of the American City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26. A new book rejects the lens of “social critic” commonly embraced by social policy historians. Berkowitz, Edward D., Making Social Welfare Policy in America: Three Case Studies Since 1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 10 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27. I hope to show that welfare scholarship offers a response to the incisive question Phillips-Fein raised: “Are there ways to think about liberalism and neoliberalism in relation to each other that avoid collapsing them into each other altogether?” Phillips-Fein, “The History of Neoliberalism,” 357.

28. This innovative historical overview argues that neoliberalism’s “assault on the working class was waged just as much, if not more so, on the terrain of social reproduction.” Mohandesi, Salar and Teitelman, Emma, “Without Reserves,” in Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression, ed. Bhattacharya, Tithi (London: Pluto Press, 2017), 37–67 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quote on 63.

29. Though this essay examines pivotal texts that chart long histories of welfare, including its origins in local poor laws and the poorhouse, it does not engage with the exciting work on poverty and welfare in early America. Examples include Herndon, Ruth Wallis, Unwelcome Americans: Living on the Margin in Early New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Green, Elna C., This Business of Relief: Confronting Poverty in a Southern City, 1740-1940 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Lockley, Timothy, Welfare and Charity in the Antebellum South (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007)Google Scholar; Rockman, Seth, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rockman, Seth, editor, Welfare Reform in the Early Republic: A Brief History with Documents (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2014)Google Scholar.

Neither does this article fully grapple with important scholarship published since I authored the article, including Geismer, Lily, Left Behind: The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality (New York: Public Affairs, 2022)Google Scholar.

30. Felicia Kornbluh and Gwendolyn Mink call for a “new framework in welfare policy” that begins with an “intersectional feminist agenda for equality.” In Kornbluh and Mink, Ensuring Poverty, 144, 145.

31. Covert, “Why Hillary Has Never Apologized for Welfare Reform.”

32. On 2020 debates, see Carl Huse, “Jobless Aid Fuels Partisan Divide over Next Pandemic Rescue Package,” New York Times, May 7, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/07/us/coronavirus-stimulus-package.html?searchResultPosition=4; Jeff Stein and Erica Werner, “Trump Demands Payroll Tax Cut While GOP Eyes Benefit Cuts for Unemployed,” Washington Post, July 20, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/07/19/republican-stimulus-unemployment-coronavirus/; Alex Pareene, “The $2,000 Checks and Our Failing Vaccine Rollout Have Something in Common,” The New Republic, January 8, 2021, https://newrepublic.com/article/160810/2000-stimulus-checks-vaccine-rollout-democrats. On welfare and domestic violence, see Roberta Spalter-Roth, Beverly Burr, Heidi Hartmann, and Lois Shaw, Welfare That Works: The Working Lives of AFDC Recipients—A Report to the Ford Foundation (Washington, DC: Institute for Women’s Policy Research, 1995), cited in Chappell, The War on Welfare, 245.

33. Nadasen, Welfare Warriors, 161.

34. On the politics of GAI in this period, see Nadasen, chapter six in Welfare Warriors, 157–92; Steensland, Brian, The Failed Welfare Revolution: America’s’ Struggle over Guaranteed Income Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

35. Piven, Frances Fox and Cloward, Richard A., Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare, updated edition (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 3Google Scholar. The revised edition added two chapters, which I do not incorporate into my analysis of the text published in 1971.

36. Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, 30.

37. Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, 123.

38. Examples from Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, 128, 151, 158, 161, 166.

39. Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, vxii.

40. Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, 336. See also Piven, Frances Fox and Cloward, Richard, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Pantheon: 1977)Google Scholar.

41. On continued welfare rights organizing beyond the 1975 shuttering of NWRO doors, see, for example, Orleck, Annelise, Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty (Boston: Beacon Books, 2005)Google Scholar; Povitz, Lana Dee, Stirrings: How Activist New Yorkers Ignited a Movement for Food Justice (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 198–239 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42. Howard, chapters three and seven in The Hidden Welfare State, 64–74, 139–60.

43. In 1982, Piven and Cloward wrote, “we now think the cyclical relief pattern [theorized in Regulating the Poor] may represent a characterization truer of the past than of the future.” Piven, Frances Fox and Cloward, Richard A., The New Class War: Reagan’s Attack on the Welfare State and Its Consequences (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 29, 33–34Google Scholar.

44. Rothman, David J., Conscience and Convenience: The Asylum and Its Alternatives in Progressive America (Boston: Little Brown, 1980)Google Scholar; Katz, Michael B., Poverty and Policy in American History (New York: Academic Press, 1983)Google Scholar.

45. Trattner, William I., From Poor Law to Welfare State: A History of Social Welfare in America (New York: The Free Press, 1974)Google Scholar; Patterson, James T., America’s Struggle against Poverty, 1900-1980 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981)Google Scholar.

46. Berkowitz, Edward and McQuaid, Kim, Creating the American Welfare State: The Political Economy of Twentieth-Century Reform (New York: Praeger, 1980)Google Scholar.

47. Murray, Charles, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1984)Google Scholar. In response to Murray (as well as liberals), William Julius Wilson looked to unemployment, lending credence to the idea of the underclass. Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

48. Katz, Michael B., “Segmented Visions: Recent Historical Writing on American Welfare,” Journal of Urban History 24, no. 2 (January 1998): 244–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

In a recent essay historian Maurizio Vaudagna concurred, arguing that from the postwar period until the early 1980s, social scientists dominated the field of “welfare state development.” In Vaudagna, “Historians Interpret the Welfare State, 1975-1995,” in Democracy and the Welfare State: The Two Wests in the Age of Austerity, ed. Alice Kessler-Harris and Maurizio Vaudagna (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 28.

49. Katz, Michael B., In the Shadow of the Poor House: A Social History of Welfare in America, 10th anniversary rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1996), ix Google Scholar. The revised edition added a chapter, which I do not incorporate into my analysis of the text published in 1986. Examples of contemporary work include Katz, Michael B., The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989)Google Scholar.

50. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse, xii.

51. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse, ix.

In a footnote tucked deep in In the Shadow of the Poorhouse, Katz described how in the 1970s, “few social scientists realized that the expansion of social welfare was about to be checked by the war on welfare. At the worst, they thought the trajectory of welfare expansion would flatten during the next decade; at best, they forecast the federal government follow its expansion of social benefits with a modest attack on income inequality.” See footnote one in Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse, 365. Katz cites Robert A. Haveman, “Introduction: Poverty and Social Policy in the 1960s and 1970s: An Overview and Some Speculations,” in Haveman, ed., A Decade of Federal Antipoverty Programs (New York: Academic Press, 1977), 18–19.

52. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse, 259, 214.

53. Charity organizers “responded as harshly as employers and governors” similarly confronted with working-class unrest; relief was as coercive as the capitalist system it propped up. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse, 60–61.

54. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse, xii.

55. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse, quote on 214. Katz suggests that “the reluctance to exercise public responsibility had so crippled the development of government capacity that it fell to the leaders of private industry to pioneer key aspects of the American welfare state.” Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse, 192.

56. Katz gestures at the Federal Emergency Relief Administration’s Civil Works Administration as a desirable missed alternative. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse, 233.

57. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse, 268.

58. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse, 287.

59. Katz recognized his missed gendered analysis in the introduction to the tenth anniversary edition but posited, “none of the main interpretations in the book seem to be wrong, and the periodization still seems right.” In Katz, In the Shadow of the Poor House, xiv. He later wrote on the narrowing of “welfare” to mean AFDC, Katz, Michael B. and Thomas, Lorrin R., “The Invention of ‘Welfare’ in America,” Journal of Policy History 10, no. 4 (1998): 399–418 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

60. Gordon proposed using historical research to understand women’s role in creating welfare and to complicate the “antistatist, anti-expert, participatory-democracy values characteristic of the late 1960s/early 1970s women’s liberation movement” that had colored earlier analyses of welfare. Gordon, “The New Feminist Scholarship on the Welfare State,” in Gordon, Women, the State, and Welfare, 21.

As Gordon recognized, this work built on earlier examples of feminist scholarship, including many republished in the volume. Acknowledgements, in Gordon, Women, the State, and Welfare, ix–x. See also Leff, Mark H., “Consensus for Reform: The Mothers’-Pension Movement in the Progressive Era,” Social Service Review 47, no. 3 (September 1973): 397–417 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ware, Susan, Beyond Suffrage: Women in the New Deal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Abramovitz, Mimi, Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present (Boston: South End Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Pateman, Carole, “The Patriarchal Welfare State,” in Democracy and the Welfare State, ed. Gutmann, Amy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 231–60Google Scholar.

61. She explicitly stated, “feminist consideration of the welfare state stands in a complex dialogue with the older scholarship,” which she characterized as “gender-blind” and deterministic. Gordon, “The New Feminist Scholarship on the Welfare State,” vii, 4, 29. See also “What Does Welfare Regulate? A Review Essay on the Writings of Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward,” Social Research 55, no. 4 (Winter 1988): 609–30.

62. Gwendolyn Mink, “The Lady and the Tramp (II): Feminist Welfare Politics, Poor Single Mothers, and the Challenge of Welfare Justice,” Feminist Studies 24, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 55.

63. Kornbluh and Mink, Ensuring Poverty, 73.

64. On the eve of the PRWORA, one percent of the federal budget went to AFDC. In 1995, the federal government spent $294.6 billion on Social Security, $157.3 billion on Medicare, $88.4 billion on Medicaid, and $17.3 billion on AFDC. Katz, The Price of Citizenship, 318; Nadasen, Mittelstadt, and Chappell, Welfare in the United States, 66; Howard, The Hidden Welfare State, 26.

65. Nelson, “The Origins of the Two-Channel Welfare State.” Nelson’s essay was one of nine already published and compiled by Gordon in her twelve-essay volume. See Nelson, Barbara J., “The Gender, Race, and Class Origins of Early Welfare Policy and the Welfare State: A Comparison of Workmen’s Compensation and Mothers’ Aid,” in Women, Politics and Change, ed. Tilly, Louse A. and Gurin, Patricia (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1990), 413–35Google Scholar.

Nelson saw her article as adding gender analysis to the “state capacities approach” rooted comparative welfare state formation. Nelson cites Skocpol, Theda, “Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis and Current Research,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Evans, Peter B., Rueschmeyer, Deitrich, and Skocpol, Theda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Orloff, Ann Shola and Skocpol, Theda, “Why Not Equal Protection? Explaining the Politics of Public Social Spending in Britain, 1900-1911, and in the United States, 1880s-1920,” American Sociological Review 49, no. 6 (1984): 726–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Skocpol, Theda and Ikenberry, John, “The Political Formation of the American Welfare State in Historical and Comparative Perspective,” in Comparison Social Research: The Welfare State, 1883-1983, vol. 6, ed. Tomasson, Richard F. (Greenwich: JAI Press, 1983)Google Scholar. In footnote 2, Nelson, “The Origins of the Two-Channel Welfare State,” 146.

Vaudgna observes that this generation of feminist scholars was unique in its effort to bridge the divide between social scientific and historical writing on the welfare state. Vaudagna, “Historians Interpret the Welfare State, 1975-1995,” 43.

66. Nelson, “The Origins of the Two-Channel Welfare State,” 124, 133.

67. Nelson, “The Origins of the Two-Channel Welfare State,” 140.

68. Nelson, “The Origins of the Two-Channel Welfare State,” 141.

69. Nelson, “The Origins of the Two-Channel Welfare State,” 144.

70. Orloff, “Gender in Early U.S. Social Policy,” Journal of Policy History 3, no. 3 (1991): 252. A poll showed that although confidence in the ability for the government to pay out Social Security benefits dipped in the 1970s and 1980s, support for the program remained strong, in Sally R. Sherman, “Public Attitudes toward Social Security,” Social Security Bulletin 52, no. 12 (December 1989), 2–16, https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v52n12/v52n12p2.pdf.

71. Examples of work pioneering the study of race, the New Deal, and the welfare state include Quadagno, Jill, The Transformation of Old Age Security: Class and Politics in the American Welfare State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Quadagno, Jill, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Hamilton, Charles V. and Hamilton, Donna Cooper, The Dual Agenda (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

72. Mink argued that the Progressive Era “origins of the American welfare state lay in gender-based solutions to what was widely perceived to be a racial problem.” Mink, “The Lady and the Tramp,” 111. See also Mink, Gwendolyn, The Wages of Motherhood: Inequality in the Welfare State, 1917-1942 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

73. Mink, “The Lady and the Tramp,” 110, 111.

74. Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled, 45.

75. Quadagno, The Color of Welfare, 119. See also Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled, 111–44.

76. Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled, 60, 145. Gordon attributes this in part to the “‘silence’ of the women’s movement” during 1930s unrest. Unemployed councils and labor organizing emphasized male needs, Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled, quote on 212, 218.

77. Skocpol, Theda, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

Skocpol’s analysis was part of a larger conversation about comparative welfare state development and why the United States was late to develop a welfare state. See Vaudagna, “Historians Interpret the Welfare State, 1975-1995,” 35–37, 44.

Some scholars criticized Skocpol’s claims to have “discovered” women’s involvement in building the American welfare state and her uncritical account of women’s labor norms. As historian Marisa Chappell recently argued, Skocpol was instrumental in inspiring a new generation of scholars to investigate the history of state-building, to “bring the state back in.” The histories that resulted, Chappell suggests, deepened understandings of the raced and gendered limitations of liberal governance. Chappell, “Protecting Soldiers and Mothers Twenty-Five Years Later: Theda Skocpol’s Legacy and American Welfare State Historiography, 1992-2017,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 17, no. 3 (2018): 546–73.

78. In a 1998 essay, Gwendolyn Mink indicted feminists who failed to oppose welfare reform as “uniquely responsible for how Congress reformed welfare.” Mink, “The Lady and the Tramp (II),” 57. Examples of the extensive scholarship on maternalism and welfare during this period include Muncy, Robyn, Creating a Female Dominion American Reform, 1890-1935 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Ladd-Taylor, Molly, Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890-1930 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Mink, The Wages of Motherhood; Goodwin, Joanne L., Gender and the Politics of Welfare Reform: Mothers’ Pensions in Chicago, 1911-1929 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On comparative welfare states and maternalism, see Koven, Seth and Michel, Sonya, eds., Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (New York: Routledge, 1993)Google Scholar. Examples of work on maternalism and labor include Hart, Vivien, Bound by Our Constitution: Women, Workers, and the Minimum Wage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Sklar, Kathryn Kish, Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work: The Rise of Women’s Political Culture, 1830-1990 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

79. Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled, 45.

80. Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled, 7. On the family wage, see also Fraser, Nancy and Gordon, Linda, “A Genealogy of Dependency: Tracing a Keyword of the US Welfare State,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 19, no. 2 (1994): 309–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

81. Goodwin, Joanne L., Gender and the Politics of Welfare Reform: Mothers’ Pensions in Chicago, 1911-1929 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

82. On the contradictions between the nature of social policy and the reality that many single women needed to work for wages, see also Boris, Eileen, Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

83. Roberts reviewed Pitied but Not Entitled and Jill Quadagno’s The Color of Welfare. Roberts, Dorothy E., “Review: Welfare and the Problem of Black Citizenship,” The Yale Law Journal 105, no. 6 (April 1996): 1565 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

84. Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled, 141. Gordon further argues that “the deletion of public works [permanent public jobs program] and medical insurance from Social Security contributed greatly to the stigma on ‘welfare’ by depriving the poorest of essential supports that might have provided them with dignity of work and health care.” Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled, 256.

85. Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled, 282. On motherhood as work, see Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled, 56–57.

86. Mink, “The Lady and the Tramp,” 110.

Orloff suggested that noncontributory mothers’ pensions were seen as an entitlement, but when they were administered “ended up with many shortcomings”—they were inadequate, invasive, and discriminatory. Orloff, “Gender in Early U.S. Social Policy,” 256.

87. Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled, 4.

88. Kornbluh, Felicia A., “The New Literature on Gender and the Welfare State: The U.S. Case,” Feminist Studies 22, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 172 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

89. Examples include Kornbluh, “To Fulfill Their ‘Rightly Needs”; Eileen Boris, “When Work Is Slavery,” Social Justice 25 (Spring 1998), 28–46; White, Deborah Gray, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves (New York: Norton, 1999), 212–56Google Scholar; Valk, Anne, “Mother Power: The Movement for Welfare Rights in Washington, D.C., 1966-1972,” Journal of Women’s History 11, no. 4 (2000): 34–58 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nadasen, “Expanding the Boundaries of the Women’s Movement”; Nadasen, Welfare Warriors; Williams, Rhonda Y., The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles against Urban Inequality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Orleck, Storming Caesars Palace; Kornbluh, Felicia, The Battle for Welfare Rights: Politics and Poverty in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007)Google Scholar. This work builds on earlier scholarship, including Guida West, The National Welfare Rights Organization: The Social Protest of Poor Women (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1981).

90. Some did this directly. For example, Kornbluh, “The Goals of the Welfare Rights Movement.”

91. Boris, “When Work Is Slavery,” 40.

92. Boris, “When Work Is Slavery,” 37.

93. Nadasen, Welfare Warriors, 167. Many male activists were less critical of work and did not conceptualize the guaranteed income this way. Nadasen, Welfare Warrior, 165.

94. Historian Gabriel Winant cited Nadasen when arguing in his recent work that welfare rights activists “defied the assumptions of the liberal order entirely” by “developing a feminist analysis and seeking to detach survival from production.” Winant, The Next Shift, 126–27; Nadasen, “Expanding the Boundaries of the Women’s Movement.”

95. Mittelstadt, From Welfare to Workfare; Chappell, War on Welfare.

Several other works found the roots of welfare’s decline in mid-century liberal policy. On the 1970s shift from the liberal focus on welfare, instead of poverty, as the social problem, see O’Connor, Alice, “The False Dawn of Poor-Law Reform: Nixon, Carter, and the Quest for a Guaranteed Income,” Journal of Policy History 10, special issue no. 1 (January 1998): 99–129 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the role of scientific research in shaping welfare reform, see O’Connor, Alice, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Graebner, William, “The End of Liberalism: Narrating Welfare’s Decline, from the Moynihan Report (1965) to the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (1996),” Journal of Policy History 14, no. 2 (2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On backlash, see Ellen Reese, Backlash against Welfare Mothers (Oakland: University of California Press, 2005). On persistent emphasis on charity, see Morris, Andrew J. F., The Limits of Voluntarism: Charity and Welfare from the New Deal through the Great Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)Google Scholar. On the antitax politics driving liberal social policy during the mid-twentieth century and how it paved the way for antistatism, see Michelmore, Molly C., Tax and Spend: The Welfare State, Tax Politics, and the Limits of American Liberalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014)Google Scholar. For an excellent overview of welfare history, see Nadasen, Mittelstadt, and Chappell, Welfare in the United States.

96. Mittelstadt, From Welfare to Workfare, 7.

97. Mittelstadt, From Welfare to Workfare, 1.

98. Mittelstadt, From Welfare to Workfare, 11. Mittelstadt’s focus on this period of relative affluence such as the 1950s and 1960s, perhaps indirectly, supported Piven and Cloward’s theory that periods of prosperity bring about greater welfare discipline. Mittelstadt, From Welfare to Workfare, 7, 8–9.

99. Mittelstadt, From Welfare to Workfare, 52, 53.

100. Crises included the State of Louisiana cutting 30,000 people from welfare rolls after the governor called recipients “a bunch of prostitutes” and a New York city manager declaring war on welfare in 1961. In Mittelstadt, From Welfare to Workfare, 86–106. On racist state-level “family caps” that withheld benefits for children born to unmarried women and how contemporary bipartisan welfare reforms pursued similar goals but “cleansed” their rhetoric “of its express racial terms,” see Roberts, Dorothy E., Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997), 207, 229Google Scholar.

101. Mittelstadt, From Welfare to Workfare, 121–26, 151. War on Poverty job programs focused on men’s employment, seeking to reinsert men as heads of family. Mittelstadt, From Welfare to Workfare, 147–48.

102. This emphasis on family attracted support of the YWCA and the AFL-CIO, which supported “the traditional two-parent, male-breadwinner family” in its struggle for a family wage. The Urban League supported these reforms as part of its “effort to strengthen and improve family life among African Americans.” Mittelstadt, From Welfare to Workfare, 83.

103. Chappell, The War on Welfare, 6.

104. Chappell, The War on Welfare, 5.

105. Chappell described how the liberal coalition intended to win over the white working class by supporting the Family Assistance Plan, despite welfare rights activists’ opposition to FAP’s “racially motivated distinctions.” The liberal antipoverty organization Movement for Economic Justice avoided drawing the connections between poverty and race that had characterized economic justice struggles in the 1960s. In Chappell, The War on Welfare, 93,114–15, 122. On embrace of underclass, see Chappell, The War on Welfare, 141.

106. Chappell, The War on Welfare, 108, 125. In the late 1970s, some feminist and welfare rights groups presented “a new, degendered family wage.” They embraced the focus on employment as a solution to poverty but more carefully determined “exactly what poor women would need to achieve self-sufficiency through labor.” They demanded job trainings, transitional income, childcare, and other supports. Chappell, The War on Welfare, 158, 182.

On tensions between activist demands for income and jobs, see Gordon K. Mantler, chap. 4 in Power to the Poor: Black-Brown Coalition and the Fight for Economic Justice, 1960-1974 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 90–120.

107. Mittelstadt, From Welfare to Workfare, 170.

108. Mittelstadt, From Welfare to Workfare, 169, 170–71, quote on 169.

109. On the politics of “breadwinner liberalism” leading to those of “breadwinner conservatism,” see Self, All in the Family. Political scientist Melinda Cooper criticizes Piven and Cloward for bolstering the breadwinner wage model in Cooper, Family Values, 41–42. On Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s embrace of the Family Assistance Plan to garner white support, paving the way for welfare retrenchment, see Hower, Joseph E., “‘The Sparrows and the Horses’: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Family Assistance Plan, and the Liberal Critique of Government Workers, 1955–1977,” Journal of Policy History 28, no. 2 (2016): 256–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

110. Chappell, War on Welfare, 200, quote on 109.

111. Examples of the expansive welfare state include Katz, The Price of Citizenship; Katz, Michael B., “The American Welfare State and Social Contract in Hard Times,” Journal of Policy History 22, no. 4 (2010): 508–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

Examples of work highlighting the hidden welfare state and how the majority of government support has gone to straight, white, male Americans include Coll, Blanche D., Safety Net: Welfare and Social Security, 1929-1979 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Quadagno, The Color of Welfare; Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Lieberman, Robert C., Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Brown, Michael K., Race, Money, and the American Welfare State (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Howard, Christopher, The Hidden Welfare State: Tax Expenditures and Social Policy in the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kessler-Harris, Alice, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Katznelson, Ira, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold Story of Racial Inequality in America (New York: WW Norton and Company, 2005)Google Scholar; Poole, Mary, The Segregated Origins of Social Security: African Americans and the Welfare State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Canaday, Margot, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fox, Cybelle, Three Worlds of Relief: Race, Immigration, and the American Welfare State from the Progressive Era to the New Deal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012)Google Scholar; Boris and Klein, Caring for America; Katz, Michael B., The Undeserving Poor: America’s Enduring Confrontation with Poverty, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

Examples of work on the private welfare state include Gottschalk, Marie, The Shadow Welfare State: Labor, Business, and the Politics of Health Care in the United States (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hacker, Jacob S., The Divided Welfare State: The Battle over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Klein, Jennifer, For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America’s Public-Private Welfare State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Gordon, Colin, Dead on Arrival: The Politics of Health Care in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Quadagno, Jill, One Nation, Uninsured: Why the U.S. Has No Health Insurance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

112. Howard, The Hidden Welfare State, 140.

113. Katz, The Price of Citizenship, 293–94, 197.

114. In 2011, sociologist Monica Prasad warned that equating tax preferences with an expanded welfare state—that “not taking equals giving”—ignores how tax preferences reprivatize collective risk, erode state capacity, and suggest an antigovernment sentiment emblematic of the rise of neoliberalism. Prasad further suggested that the logical conclusion of these kinds of arguments—that the US welfare state is potentially more expansive and generous than European ones—is politically dangerous. But Prasad excluded the EITC from her critique on the basis that it refunds workers whose wages fall below a certain income threshold and therefore redistributes wealth. Prasad, “Tax ‘Expenditures’ and Welfare States,” 254.

115. Chappell, The War on Welfare, 107.

116. She went on to argue that these policy changes ended the “‘maternalist’ strand of US social provision, while expanding an employment-based strand in the context of disentitlement and the expansion of the significance of the labor market for Americans’ life chances and material conditions.” Orloff, Ann Shola, “Explaining US Welfare Reform: Power, Gender, Race and the US Policy Legacy,” Critical Social Policy 22, no. 1 (2002): 113 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quote on 97.

117. Tani quoted James C. Scott’s pronouncement that one should “never assume that local practice conforms with state theory,” in Tani, States of Dependency, 79–80. Ann Shola Orloff made a similar distinction in a 1991 article, Orloff, “Gender in Early Social Policy,” 252. Tani’s work also built on that of Suzanne Mettler, who argued that federalism led to gender bias in mid-century welfare policy, when maternalist Progressive Era reformers embraced state and local control. Mettler, Dividing Citizens: Gender and Federalism in New Deal Public Policy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Mettler, “The Stratification of Social Citizenship: Gender and Federalism in the Formation of Old Age Insurance and Aid to Dependent Children,” Journal of Policy History 11, no. 1 (1999): 31–58; Tani, States of Dependency, 288n29. On state and local governments as administrators of welfare and penal policy, see Kohler-Hausmann, Getting Tough, 24–25; William Crafton, “The Incremental Revolution: Ronald Reagan and Welfare Reform in the 1970s,” Journal of Policy History 26, no. 1 (January 2014): 27–47. Stephen Pimpare called for more histories of lived experience of welfare in 2007. Pimpare, “Toward a New Welfare History,” Journal of Policy History 19, no. 2 (2007): 234–52.

118. There is also resurgence in research on welfare rights, especially at the local level. Examples include Ervin, Keona, Gateway to Equality: Black Women and the Struggle for Economic Justice in St. Louis (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wilkerson, Jessica, To Live Here, You Have to Fight: How Women Led Appalachian Movements for Social Justice (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019)Google Scholar; Bermudez, Rosie, “Chicana Militant Dignity Work and Politics: Building Coalition and Political Solidarity in the Los Angeles Welfare Rights Movement,” Southern California Quarterly 102, no. 4 (2020): 420–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

119. Levenstein, Lisa, A Movement without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

120. Tani, States of Dependency, 11.

121. Tani described the SSA’s efforts to “to centralize, professionalize and unify a diffuse system of locally administered poor relief,” in Tani, States of Dependency, 29.

122. On “full rights feminists” and a more positive vision of social policy, including welfare, see also Cobble, Dorothy Sue, For the Many: American Feminists and the Global Fight for Democratic Equality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021)Google Scholar.

123. Tani, States of Dependency, 83. While mostly male lawyers saw the state’s promise as “fair treatment and rational decision making,” mostly female social workers envisioned the state’s responsibility as an obligation “to meet human need, respect human dignity, and acknowledge human interdependence.” Tani compares the male rights vision as part of the promise of positive law and the female rights vision as being more in line with statutory law and T. H. Marshall’s “social rights.” In Tani, States of Dependency, 82–83, 91, quotes on 82 and 83.

124. Tani, States of Dependency, 209.

On the regional transformation of public assistance at the hands of Southern Democrats, see Bertram, Eva, The Workfare State: Public Assistance Politics from the New Deal to the New Democrats (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

125. Even if they were not always granted benefits, their claims “subtly strengthened the notion of poor citizens as rights holders.” Tani, States of Dependency, 135.

126. Kohler-Hausmann, Getting Tough, 122. Sandwiched between sections on New York drug laws and California sentencing policy, Kohler-Hausmann devotes a section of the book to a discussion of welfare in Illinois and California. Other works parsing the tensions between the redistributive and punitive state include Kohler-Hausmann, Julilly, “Guns and Butter: The Welfare State, the Carceral State, and the Politics of Exclusion in the Postwar United States,” Journal of American History 102, no. 1 (June 2015): 87–99 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Morgan, Kimberly J. and Orloff, Ann Shola, ed., The Many Hands of the State: Theorizing Political Authority and Social Control (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

127. Kohler-Hausmann, Getting Tough, 2, 4.

128. Kohler-Hausmann, Getting Tough, 140.

129. Kohler-Hausmann, Getting Tough, 140.

130. Kohler-Hausmann, Getting Tough, 6.

131. Kohler-Hausmann, Getting Tough, 164.

132. Kohler-Hausmann, Getting Tough, 159. In response to press coverage that played up the image of the “welfare queen” in Illinois, nonrecipients sent tips to authorities, strengthening the surveillance apparatus and lending it legitimacy, in Kohler-Hausmann, Getting Tough, 192–93.

133. Even though inadequate grants made welfare cheating necessary, often as unreported income earned from working outside the home, politicians relentlessly slandered recipients as lazy and greedy, in Kohler-Hausmann, Getting Tough, 169.

134. Kohler-Hausman, Getting Tough, 179.

135. Other scholars have traced the hardening of the boundaries of citizenship to this era of welfare policy. Historian Sarah R. Coleman drew connections between the Nixon administration decision, backed by the Supreme Court in Mathews v. Diaz (1976), to bar states from providing federal welfare benefits to undocumented immigrants and the PRWORA’s exclusion of authorized immigrants. Sarah R. Coleman, The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021), 107, 108. See also Fox, Cybelle, “Unauthorized Welfare: The Origins of Immigrant Status Restrictions in American Social Policy,” Journal of American History 102, no. 4 (March 2016): 1041–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the contours of Native American and Puerto Rican citizenship, see Amador, Emma, “‘Women Ask Relief for Puerto Ricans’: Territorial Citizenship, the Social Security Act, and Puerto Rican Communities, 1933–1939,” Labor 13, no 3–4 (2016): 105–29Google Scholar; Mary Cameron Klann, “Citizens with Reservations: Race, Wardship, and Native American Citizenship in the Mid-Twentieth-Century American Welfare State” (PhD diss., University of California-San Diego, 2017).

136. This account of welfare reform is part of an emerging corpus of historical work on this topic. Examples include Cooper, Family Values; Briggs, Laura, How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics: From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017)Google Scholar; Geismer, Left Behind. For a postmortem on welfare reform from the perspective of an activist scholar, see Gwendolyn Mink, Welfare’s End (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).

137. Kornbluh and Mink, Ensuring Poverty, ix.

138. Kornbluh and Mink, Ensuring Poverty, 23.

139. Kornbluh and Mink, Ensuring Poverty, 1, quote from PRWORA.

140. Kornbluh and Mink, Ensuring Poverty, 17.

141. Kornbluh and Mink, Ensuring Poverty, 43.

142. Kornbluh and Mink, Ensuring Poverty, 54, 65–67, 69, quote on 69.

143. Before this in 1993, Representative Mink hosted a conference to bring a feminist perspective to welfare reform debates, inviting antipoverty activists, lawyers, and scholars including Richard Cloward and Linda Gordon. Participants’ remarks were published in a 1993 special issue of Social Justice, edited by Gwendolyn Mink. In Kornbluh and Mink, Ensuring Poverty, 62–63. On the life and politics of Representative Mink, see Wu, Judy Tzu-Chun and Mink, Gwendolyn, Fierce and Fearless: Patsy Takemoto Mink, First Woman of Color in Congress (New York: New York University Press, 2022)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

144. Kornbluh and Mink, Ensuring Poverty, xiv.

145. Bryce Covert, “The Not-So-Subtle Racism of Trump-Era ‘Welfare Reform,’” New York Times, May 23, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/23/opinion/trump-welfare-reform-racism.html; Michael D. Shear, Miriam Jordan, and Caitlin Dickerson, “Trump’s Policy Could Alter the Face of the American Immigrant,” New York Times, August 14, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/14/us/immigration-public-charge-welfare.html.

Kornbluh and Mink argued that “In the second decade of the twenty-first century many white voters spoke the language of welfare reform fluently even though the system it described had ceased to exist.” Kornbluh and Mink, Ensuring Poverty, 131.

146. On how progressives in the 2010s did not talk about welfare, Korbluh and Mink, “Preface,” in Ensuring Poverty, ix–xviii.

147. Eight million people in the United States, disproportionately Black and Latinx, still slipped into poverty between May and October 2020. Jason DeParle, “8 Million Have Slipped into Poverty since May as Federal Aid Has Dried Up,” New York Times, October 15, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/15/us/politics/federal-aid-poverty-levels.html.

148. Melena Ryzik and Katie Benner, “Biden’s Aid Package Funnels Millions to Victims of Domestic Abuse,” New York Times, March 18, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/us/politics/biden-domestic-violence.html; Dottie Rosenbaum, Zoë Neuberger, Brynne Keith-Jennings, and Catlin Nchako, Food Assistance in American Rescue Plan Act Will Reduce Hardship, Provide Economic Stimulus (Washington, DC: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, updated May 7, 2021), https://www.cbpp.org/research/food-assistance/food-assistance-in-american-rescue-plan-act-will-reduce-hardship-provide.

149. Laura Wheaton, Linda Giannarelli, and Ilham Dehry, 2021 Poverty Projections: Assessing the Impact of Benefits and Stimulus Measures (Washington, DC: Urban Institute, July 2021), https://www.urban.org/research/publication/2021-poverty-projections-assessing-impact-benefits-and-stimulus-measures; Jason DeParle, “Pandemic Spurs a Record Drop in Poverty,” New York Times, July 28, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/28/us/politics/covid-poverty-aid-programs.html; Ben Casselman and Jeanna Smialek, “U.S. Poverty Fell Last Year as Government Aid Made Up for Lost Jobs,” New York Times, September 14, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/14/business/economy/census-income-poverty-health-insurance.html.

150. Bryce Covert, “The End of “the End of Welfare as We Know It,” New Republic, August 20, 2021, https://newrepublic.com/article/163321/pandemic-relief-poverty-reduction-welfare-reform-democrats.

151. Fact Sheet: The American Families Plan, The White House, April 28, 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/04/28/fact-sheet-the-american-families-plan/; Emily Cochrane, “Senate Democrats Begin $3.5 Trillion Push for ‘Big, Bold’ Social Change,” New York Times, updated September 21, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/09/us/politics/senate-budget.html. Calls to make the CTC permanent have come from activist and advocacy groups, think tanks, politicians, economists, and beyond. Examples include Gregory Acs and Kevin Werner, How a Permanent Expansion of the Child Tax Credit Could Affect Poverty (Washington, DC: Urban Institute, July 2021), https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/104626/how-a-permanent-expansion-of-the-child-tax-credit-could-affect-poverty_1.pdf; Sumbul Siddiqui, “Congress Should Make Child Tax Credit Permanent,” Boston Globe, August 2, 2021, https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/08/02/opinion/congress-should-make-child-tax-credit-permanent/; Paul Krugman, “Why Not Make the Kids Alright?” New York Times, September 21, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21/opinion/child-tax-credit-poverty.html.

152. Center on Social Policy and Poverty at Columbia, “3.7 Million More Children in Poverty in January 2022 without Monthly Child Tax Credit,” February 17, 2022, https://www.povertycenter.columbia.edu/news-internal/monthly-poverty-january-2022.