Right-wing Women

and impinge on the welfare population in the same old and cruel

ways. The state is a jealous lover, except when it pimps.

Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) is the largest

federal welfare program: this is welfare for women and their dependent children. As of 1977, 52. 6 percent of the recipients were white, 43 percent were black, and 4 . 4 percent were designated as

“American Indian and other. ” Welfare fundamentally articulates

the state’s valuation of women as women; the condition of women

determines the philosophical bases and practical strategies of the

welfare system; * the racist structure of class provides a framework

in which women can be isolated, punished, and destroyed as

women. In the welfare system, racism increases the jeopardy for

black women in particular in a m ultiplicity of w ays. But the degradation built into the welfare system in general and AFDC in particular originates in social attitudes toward women: in sexual contempt for women; in paternalistic assumptions about women; in

moral codes exclusively applied to women; in notions of immorality that have no currency except when applied to women.

Women not on welfare are cruelly hurt by these same endemic

woman-hating attitudes; but women on welfare have nothing between them and a police-state exercise of authority and power over them in which and by which they are degraded because they are

women and the state is the real head of the household. AFDC

controls women who have no husbands to keep them in line; it

caretakes women, keeps them always hungry and dependent and

desperate and accessible; it keeps them watching their children go

*This is not to suggest that welfare does not have devastating consequences for black men. It is to suggest that the whole system, including its impact on black men, is ultimately comprehensible only when we understand to what extent the feminizing of the oppressed is part of public policy and therefore fundamentally related to the degradation of women as

a class.

hungry and underclothed and uneducated; it tells them exactly

what they are worth to their lord and master, the state, in dollars

and cents. In 1979 they were worth $111 per month in Alabama,

$144 per month in Arkansas, $335 per month in Connecticut, $162

per month in Florida, and so on. In Hawaii they were worth most:

$389 per month. In Mississippi they were worth least: $84 per

month. In New York State, with the largest welfare budget, they

were worth $370 per month. These were average payments per

month per family (for the woman and her dependent children).

Suitable employment standards, for instance, in whatever form

they appear, are used to degrade women: to punish women for

being poor by enclosing them in a terrible trap—they have children to raise and the only work they are offered will not feed their children, it is degrading work, it is a dead end, it is meaningless, it

is intrinsically exploitative; and women with husbands who have

some money or good jobs or steady jobs are being pressured to stay

home and b e go o d mothers. How is the mother in the welfare population supposed to be a good mother? The answer is always the same: she is not supposed to have had the children to begin with,

and she is not supposed to have any more, and her suffering is no

more than she deserves. The welfare system combines the imperatives of sex and money: get a man to marry and support you or we will punish you and yours until you wish you were all dead. The

welfare system also combines the imperatives of morality and

money: your shameless bad ways got you knocked up, girl; now

you be good or we are going to do you in. Even when the issue is