and the government does not hesitate to pay the doctor for his good deed. So far, the strategies
of the state in stopping women on welfare from having children
have been crude. The government has tried to police their sexual
relations, enforce chastity, keep men out of their homes, punish
them for having illegitimate children, starve them and their children: state policy is one of absolute, cruel, murderous paternalism.
Welfare policy has usually been interpreted in terms of its impact on black men. From the state (police) side, the effort is to keep a shiftless man from living off the welfare benefits of a woman; to
keep men from defrauding welfare by using benefits intended for
women and children; to get black families back into the patriarchal
mode, that is, headed by males, for reasons of traditional morality
or economics; to force black men to marry black women and be
legally responsible for the children. From the antiracist side, w elfare policy has been seen as a blanket effort to destroy black men or the black fam ily, which, when headed by a woman, is seen as inherently degraded. The absent black male is the political focus and priority. But neither side penetrates to the real meaning of welfare
policy because both sides keep their eye on the man as the significant figure in the drama. The state, obviously, does not intend any economic dignity for that man or that same state would not promote black male unemployment in its economic policies and create a situation, through welfare, in which husbands are forced to abandon women and children so as to be sure they do not starve. From the antiracist perspective, the efforts of welfare have been deeper
and far more malevolent than can be realized if its impact on men
is seen as prim ary, because the effort has been to stop or significantly diminish reproduction through social control of women.
The notion that the state has acted to promote the conventional
male-dominated fam ily (by persecution of unmarried mothers, for
instance) is only superficially viable. If that were its real interest,
other state policies would support that same goal. Instead, welfare
policy has directly concerned itself with controlling women. The
most intrusive and degrading regulations back from the beginning
of welfare all have to do with women as women: all have to do with
a gender-specific regulation of motherhood and sex. These policies
all articulate the reproductive worth of women on welfare to the
state, and that value is almost entirely negative. *
The causes of the need for welfare (from the human, not the
state, point of view) are in the systematic economic discrimination
against women, with black women suffering the most stark eco
*The one positive value is that the women and their progeny are cheap
labor, as discussed previously in this chapter.
nomic deprivation, and in the systematic sexual degradation of
women. Welfare is the barest maintenance for those who, being
female and poor, would otherwise slowly die. Those kicked off the
welfare rolls in the endless quest for those who are poor but pure
get jobs where they are paid
provides shit. They work, keeping those upholders of the Protestant work ethic happy, and go hungry at the same time. The poverty of women is appalling. As of December 1981, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that unemployment for females who
headed households was nearly twice that of males who headed
households: 10. 6 percent for the women; 5. 8 percent for the men.
Gay Talese, who wrote about the sex industry, found it meaningful in terms of sexual liberation that the women in massage parlors giving him handjobs were college graduates and
meaningful—but in terms of what women have to do to earn
