1 This paper will offer a very brief intellectual history of “the black family” and its relation to public debates about welfare and poverty. The paper will first discuss Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s infamous The Negro Family: The Case for Nation Action (1965) and reactions to his controversial claims about the “matriarchal” character of low-income, black families. The paper will then trace the ways Moynihan’s ideas—or at least related ideas—underlay conservative and liberal analyses about poverty and its connection to black, female-headed families.

Tangles of Pathology

2 Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s The Negro Family: The Case for National Action put “the black family” at the center of national policy debate in 1965. Moynihan prefaced his relatively short report with this shocking claim: “The gap between the Negro and other groups in American society is widening. The fundamental problem, in which this is most clearly the case, is that of family structure. The evidence... is that the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling.” (Rainwater and Yancey 43).

3 For Moynihan, “crisis” or “deterioration” of the black family was evident from the relatively high rates of marriage dissolution, “illegitimacy,” and the proportion of families headed by women—roughly 25% when Moynihan wrote the report. More evidence for Moynihan was the fact that black families were increasingly “dependent” on public assistance by which he referred to the means-tested Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). [1] (Rainwater and Yancey 52-58). “The steady expansion of this welfare program,” he wrote, “can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States.” Moynihan worried that slavery, urbanization and high rates of black male unemployment transformed the black family—or, more precisely, the lower-income black family—into a “matriarchy.” This was not good for black people, Moynihan contended, as it put them outside the conventions and norms of American life. More importantly, this “matriarchy” created a “tangle of pathology” that propelled the “cycle of poverty and deprivation” among blacks in the United States (Rainwater and Yancey 76). Thus at a crossroads in the history of the civil rights movement, a moment when blacks looked to government for aggressive action against discrimination and an expanded welfare state, Moynihan argued that “matriarchy” was the issue of concern.

4 Moynihan was not the first to scrutinize aspects of black family life. Indeed, Moynihan’s report drew heavily from the work of E. Franklin Frazier, black sociologist and pioneering scholar on the black family in the United States. Frazier devoted considerable attention to the issue of black family “disorganization,” a confusing and value-laden term used to describe families that diverged from the patriarchal, nuclear family norms and attendant sexual mores (Frazier 2001). Frazier even contended that “disorganization” was related to social problems like crime and juvenile delinquency (Frazier 1950). Yet, as a number of scholars have recently pointed out, nowhere did Frazier argue that patterns of black family life produced deprivation, independent of outside forces. Moynihan reversed cause and effect (Platt 2001; Semmes 2001).

5 Moynihan’s analysis provoked enormous controversy. Lee Rainwater and William Yancey captured many of the immediate reactions in The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy (1967), reactions that would anticipate debates about “the black family” and its relation to poverty in the United States for decades to come. Moynihan’s thesis was supported by some in government—most notably President Johnson. Johnson included the crisis-in-black family thesis in his June 4, 1965 address at Howard University. While pointing to jobs, housing, and health care as pressing concerns, he also suggested, echoing the report, that the “breakdown of the Negro family structure” was a key obstacle with respect to black progress: “Unless we work to strengthen the family... all the rest: schools and playgrounds, public assistance and private concern, will never be enough to cut completely the circle of despair and deprivation”(Rainwater and Yancey 130).

6 Many—though certainly not all—civil rights leaders dismissed the “tangle of pathology” contention and argued instead that black people simply needed government intervention for jobs, health care and other social goods. Some intellectuals, like Herbert Gans, conceded the point about black pathology, but explained black “cultural deprivation” as a result of “lack of opportunity”(Rainwater and Yancey 450) while William Ryan expressed concern that Moynihan took “a few pieces of census data and [drew] forth portentous conclusions about the ‘fabric of society’ and ‘family structure’ and ‘structural distortions in the life of the Negro American’”(Rainwater and Yancey 463).

Moynihan’s Unintended Legacy

7 As Stephen Steinberg notes, the controversy “crystallized issues, exposed conservative assumptions and racial biases that lurked behind mainstream social science, and prompted critics of the report to formulate alternative positions that challenged the prevailing wisdom about race in America”(Steinberg 120-21). Against the views presented by Moynihan, subsequent scholarship documented the range and diversity of black family life, as well as the resilience of kinship ties in the face of persistent racial oppression. Historical and demographic studies challenged the notion that black family structure was in “crisis” or “deteriorating” by demonstrating the extent to which patterns of black family life diverged from those of whites for at least a century, and probably longer (Hill 1972; Stack 1974; Gutman 1976; Jones 1985; Ruggles 1994).

8 However, while some scholars of the black family approached the topic with an eye towards understanding how trends in the economy and in public policy conspired against black individuals and their families (St. Pierre 1991; Browne 2000), most scholars have taken “intra-family relations,” “organization,” or “structure” as the matter of inquiry, and thus reproduced Moynihan’s focus on “the black family” rather than on the political and economic processes that structure inequality among blacks in the United States. [2] Of course, it is these processes that are most vital to low-income people, black and otherwise, no matter the ultimate form their intimate attachments might take.

9 In the period following the release of Moynihan’s report, the black female-headed household became the central representation of poverty in contemporary American society, and the reasons have more to do with politics and public perception than with reality—there were and are today far more female-headed families that are white and poor. In its benign manifestation, concern about black female-headed households reflected the simple desire among social scientists to understand what accounted for the increasing likelihood that black children will live in households headed by women. This number changed from roughly 20% in 1960 to 53% by mid-1990s (APSE Report 1997). Children in families headed by single or lone parents, especially women, are much more likely to live in poverty than those who are not. However, the fact that increasing proportions of black children live with a single parent cannot be said to drive the “cycle of poverty” as many have argued. Rather, the number of black children who live in poverty is largely a function of relative wages and government policy in terms of tax, cash and non-cash benefits. Indeed, the relatively high rates of child poverty in the United States reflects the simple fact that, compared to its peer nations, the federal government does less to reduce poverty among children, and less to ensure that women receive adequate wages (Quadagno 1994 183-84; Christopher 2002).

10 But a number of conservative social scientists obscured this fundamental point. Charles Murray’s Losing Ground (1984) was perhaps most important in this regard. Murray argued that the social welfare policies failed to eliminate poverty, stripped the poor of any incentive to work, and made them more dependent on public assistance. Murray was thus able to question the basis of Johnson’s Great Society. Unemployment, “illegitimacy,” crime and other social problems were the unintended consequences of social welfare provision. In response to Murray’s provocative thesis, critics pointed out that the Great Society did reduce poverty, especially among the elderly. They also challenged Murray’s contention that poor people chose welfare over work (Greenstein 1985). In retrospect these criticisms were in vain, for in the tenth anniversary edition of Losing Ground Murray could correctly assert that his once controversial view had become “conventional wisdom.” Why? By then the political and intellectual context had shifted significantly to the right. When Moynihan offered his analysis in 1965, he did so at an historical moment when the federal government was expanding its efforts to address racial and economic inequality in the United States. This included Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, the Open Housing Act of 1968, affirmative action and a number of other measures. Murray made his observation when the federal government was in full retreat from these commitments.

11 Social science scholarship was in retreat as well, as documented by Stephen Steinberg in Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy (1995). Steinberg shows how erstwhile supporters of racial equality—like public intellectual Nathan Glazer—would become some of the staunchest critics of affirmative action, the one policy from the civil rights era that sought equality as a result (Steinberg 1995). In Poverty Knowledge (2001), Alice O’Connor follows developments in poverty research in the United States that pushed the field away from larger, troubling questions about “political economy and culture of late twentieth-century capitalism,” towards safer foci on the behavior and individual characteristics of the poor. From the late 1960s on, a series of concepts were advanced to explain the persistence of poverty—“culture of poverty theory,” “dependency” and the behaviors of an urban “underclass.” The black female-headed family was at the center of many of these formulations.

12 The use of the concept of “underclass” offers an example of racist, gendered imagery with respect to America’s poor. Though never an empirically verifiable population, the “underclass” was said to represent a subset of the poor, set apart by “behaviors” that put them at variance with the mainstream, for example out-of-wedlock childbirth, criminality, unemployment, antisocial behaviors and welfare dependency. There never was consensus about which criteria demarcated the “underclass” from other poor Americans, but at the heart of underclass imagery was the black (and latina) mother—it was, after all, her reproductive habits that drove the cycle of poverty. The feminized underclass thus deflected attention away from the political and structural dimensions of poverty, towards the “behavior” and especially the reproductive choices of black (and latina) women (Reed 1999; Abramovitz and Withorn 1999; O’Connor 2001 269).

Ending Welfare As We Knew It

13 The political fortunes of the Republican Party round out the context in which Murray’s views came to reflect conventional wisdom. By 1994, the year of the “Republican Revolution,” liberalism as a guiding philosophy had been effectively routed. In that election year, Republicans seized control of Congress, and unfurled their “Contract with America.” The stunning success of the Republican Party in 1994 followed Clinton’s failed attempt at health care reform and the controversy surrounding gays in the military. The Republican Revolution also reflected the importance of the Religious Right, a political movement that mixed evangelical Christianity to a rightwing political agenda.

14 Among the central concerns of conservative evangelical Christians was the alleged decline of “family values,” indicated by rising divorce rates and greater numbers of single or lone parent households (Diamond 1995; Hodgson 1996). Nowhere was the lack of values more apparent, conservatives argued, than among black families—particularly those headed by single women (Coontz 2000). The fact that black children were far more likely than white children to grow up in households headed by single parents, and more likely to be dependent on public assistance, proved to many that perhaps Moynihan had been right all along. Few mainstream politicians could make this point explicitly. But when then Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich wrote that “No civilization can survive for long with twelve-year-olds having babies, fifteen-year-olds killing one another, seventeen-year-olds dying of AIDS, and eighteen-year-olds getting diplomas they can’t read,” his readership knew exactly who he had in mind (Gingrich 1995). [3]

15 Indeed, the conservative ascendancy had everything to do with race. The civil rights agenda of President Johnson began the slow but steady conversion of Southern whites to the Republican Party. Other policies of the 1960s and early 1970s—affirmative action, open housing, busing and a range of Great Society programs—provoked a backlash among many Northern, working class whites who had long been part of the New Deal coalition (Hardisty 1999; Klinkner and Smith 1999). [4]

16 This conservative shift pushed Democratic Party politics in the 1990s. Determined to avoid the defeat handed to Mondale in 1984 and Dukakis in 1988, a centrist faction within the party, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), decided to push the party to the right and to end the public’s association of the Democratic Party

with tax and spend policies that contradict the interest of average families; with welfare policies that foster dependence rather than self-reliance; with softness toward perpetrators of crime and indifference toward its victims; with ambivalence toward the assertion of American values and interests abroad; and with an adversarial stance toward mainstream moral and cultural values.

17 In 1996 Bill Clinton fulfilled his promise to “end welfare as we know it,” and through the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), “the black family’’—or really the female headed black family, was again central to that debate, albeit in more implicit ways. Coming two years after the Republican’s “Contract with America” promise to “toughen” the terms of welfare provision, PRWORA established Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) which limited eligibility to a maximum of five years and required most welfare recipients to work for their benefits. Administered by states through block grants, TANF replaced AFDC, a fundamental entitlement that had stood, with modifications, for sixty years.

18 To the shock of many on the Left—including then Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan [5]—the welfare reform act was written to be needlessly punitive. The policy required recipients to work but offered no guarantee of jobs, or of other services—like health care, childcare and assistance with transportation. States would set eligibility rules and determine the level of benefits. Moreover the law has as a central aim an imposition of patriarchal, nuclear “family values” on welfare mothers, clearly delineated in the language of the bill. PRWORA will

(1) provide assistance to needy families so that children may be cared for in their own homes or in the homes of relatives;
(2) end the dependence of needy parents on government benefits by promoting job preparation, work, and marriage;
(3) prevent and reduce the incidence of out-of-wedlock pregnancies and establish annual numerical goals for preventing and reducing the incidence of these pregnancies; and
(4) encourage the formation and maintenance of two-parent families.

19 Ironically, liberal policy researchers, chiefly David Ellwood of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, had earlier conceived of a similar policy. Ellwoods’s plan called for work requirements but would have also supplemented work with policies like health care and stricter enforcement of child support payments. Ellwood also called for “transitional assistance” in the form of job training and placement, child care, and help with transportation. These provisions were mostly lost in the policy that became law because of arbitrarily imposed budgetary constraints, the fact that much of the welfare-to-work initiatives were emerging from states (as a result of the Family Support Act of 1988), and finally, Clinton’s need to establish himself as a New Democrat, one that would do something about “dependency” and “illegitimacy.”

20 Analysts who evaluate TANF start with the most obvious point: TANF is not an anti-poverty program. If welfare recipients manage to pull themselves and their children above the official poverty line, that is an unintended effect of the policy. The goal of TANF is to move welfare recipients into jobs that can provide, in theory anyway, self-sufficiency. Thus, while most welfare recipients report working more than twenty hours a week, they are mostly working at jobs that pay low wages with few benefits. Further, “transitional assistance” in the form of health care, child care, and Food Stamps is not uniformly available, partly because of difficulty with utilization. As a result, the current “safety net is less effective at supporting the neediest families than AFDC was” (The Urban Institute 2003).

21 Congress will reauthorize PRWORA this year. Many politicians—including New Democrat Hillary Clinton—want welfare recipients to work more hours. Many conservative lawmakers also hope to strengthen efforts to promote family and arrest “illegitimacy.” The Bush administration wishes to buttress the law’s goal of promoting marriage and so is seeking $300 million to help in that endeavor. Indeed, so determined is President Bush to impose patriarchal, nuclear “family values” among low-income families, that in May of this year he directed the Department of Health and Human Services to give $990,000 dollars to a program in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and another $544,400 to a program in Nampa, Idaho, to “provide counseling and other supportive services to parents who are interested in marrying each other” (Associated Press, 12 May, 2003).

Conclusion

22 Marriage promotion will not resolve the most pressing issues of poor individuals and their families in the United States, more generous provisions of social welfare will. Americans face greater economic hardship—measured in terms of official poverty rates—than their European counterparts. Compared to peer nations, the United States offers little in the way of subsidy for child care, and only grants unpaid family leave. Despite spending the most in the world on health care, the United States has upwards of 40 million Americans who have no health insurance. Roughly a quarter of these are children. Race, or more precisely racism, lies at the heart of this story.

23 “The black family,” or more precisely, the “female-headed black family” has served as metaphor for all that is wrong with American families, a powerful symbol used to hide the flaws and limitations of social welfare provision in the United States.