women are the class controlled. The willingness of the doctors—
male medical professionals—to use these drugs on women systematically and the perceptions of women that lead them to do so are evidence of the expendability of women, the essential worthlessness of women when measured against a human standard as opposed to a standard of female function. One does not dump drugs on society’s best and brightest; nor is a drug habit encouraged in
those who have work to do, a future with some promise, and a
right to dignity and self-esteem. Through the use of drugs, the
doctors are doing their part in the social control of women. T hey
have shown themselves willing—even eager sometimes—to go further. Decades ago clitoridectomies were all the rage as doctors did their surgical bit to control sexual delinquency in women. Now,
after being out of fashion for a few short years, the doctors are
trying to bring psychosurgery back into style. In a violent society,
they say, it is more than useful; it is necessary. The ideal patient
for lobotomy is considered to be a black female. Her violence, apparently, is simply in being a black female. She is ideal for the operation because afterward she can still perform the functions for
which she is best suited: she can be female in all the conventional
ways, and she can still clean other people’s houses.
Surgeons, however, need step in only where welfare programs
have already failed to provide a pool of cheap black female labor.
In
Piven and Richard A. Cloward show that black women have been
given less money than white women in welfare payments and as a
result have had to do menial work to achieve the barest subsistence;
or have been kept off the welfare rolls altogether by administrators
who have manipulated regulations to exclude blacks, in keeping
with the racist policies of local or state governments. This pattern
of discrimination was particularly evident in the South, but it was
also found in other regions of the country:
There are many mechanisms by which Southern welfare departments deny or reduce payments to blacks, thus keeping them in the marginal labor market. The “employable mother”
rule [that a mother must work if the welfare agency determines
*A n important book that analyzes the economic value of racism under
capitalism but sadly fails to address the exploitation of women as such; as a
result, the social and sexual controls on the welfare population are understood superficially; the ubiquitous and almost self-renewing nature of the controls is not taken seriously enough— it is not recognized that as long as
the sexual oppression is intact, the controls will keep appearing, even if
reform seems to have eliminated them.
that there is appropriate work for her]. . . has been applied
discrim inatorily against black women: when field hands are
needed, Southern welfare officials assume that a black woman
is employable, but not a white woman. 8
These machinations of the welfare system are commonplace and
pervasive. A great effort has been made—contrary to public perceptions— to keep black women off the welfare rolls, to make them even more marginal and often even poorer than those on welfare.
The specifics can change— for instance, which women must work,
when, and w h y— but the kind of control the welfare system seeks
to exercise over poor women does not change. The first “em ployable mother” rule was invoked in Louisiana in 1943; Georgia adopted the same kind of regulation in 1952; in 1968 a federal court
in Atlanta struck down Georgia’s “employable mother” rule, which
