suitable employment, it is always in the air: you wouldn’t be here
if you hadn’t done wrong; so where we send you is where you go
and what we tell you to do is what you do— because you deserve it
because you are bad.
So, in addition to suitable employment, the welfare system has
been—and will continue to be—preoccupied with what are called
“suitable homes” and with what can be called “suitable m orality, ”
something of a redundancy. Most AFDC programs were estab
lished by 1940; by 1942 over half the states had “suitable homes”
laws. These laws demanded that women meet certain social and
sexual standards in order to qualify for welfare benefits: illegitim ate
children, for instance, would make a home not suitable; any infraction of conventional social behavior for women might do the same; any overt or noticeable sex life might do the same. The women
could keep the children— the homes were suitable enough for
that— but were not entitled to any money from the chaste government. As Piven and Cloward make very clear, this meant that the women had to work doing whatever menial labor they could find;
they simply had no recourse. But it also meant that the state had
become the instrument of God: welfare’s mission, from the beginning, was to punish women for having had sex outside of marriage, for having had children outside of marriage, for having had children at all— for being women. With righteousness on its side, the welfare program and those who made and executed its policies punished women through starvation for having “unsuitable homes, ” that is, illegitim ate children.
Mothers and their dependent children are purged en masse from
the welfare rolls whenever a state government decides its purity is
being sullied because it gives money to immoral women. A typical
purge, for instance, took place in Florida in 1959. Seven thousand
families with over 30, 000 children were deprived of benefits because of the suitable home law. According to a report for the then Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, these families met
all the eligibility requirements for welfare but were denied benefits
“where one or more of the children was illegitimate. . . or where
the welfare worker reported that the mother’s past or present conduct of her sex life was not acceptable when examined in the light of the spirit of the law . ”9 Other states, including Northern states,
have done the same. By virtue of being illegitim ate, the children
are being reared in unsuitable homes; therefore, they can starve.
This is a fine exercise in state morality. The benefit to the state is
concrete: the women must do the cheapest labor; in economic
terms, welfare is a refined instrument of state power and of capitalism. In what looks like chaos, it accomplishes a serious goal—creating and maintaining a pool of degraded labor, cheaper than dirt. In terms of its other function, it is not so refined an instrument yet. It
is supposed to keep these women from having children; it is supposed to discourage them, punish them, force them to have fewer children. It is supposed to use the twin weapons of money and
hunger—reinforced by fear of suffering and death—to stop these
women from reproducing. Sterilization has a legislative history in
the United States: in 1915 thirteen states had mandatory sterilization laws (for “degenerates”); and by 1932 twenty-seven states had laws mandating sterilization for various kinds of social misfits. As
Linda Gordon said in
is on welfare. But when doctors sterilize Medicaid women, they
know they are acting in concert with the best interests of the government that administers welfare;
