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Reformed American Dreams Welfare
Mothers, Higher Education, and
Activism
Sheila M. Katz
New Brunswick (New Jersey):
Rutgers University Press, 2019 Paperback. ix+223 p. ISBN
978-0813594347. $28.95
Reviewed
by Eileen Boris University
of California, Santa Barbara
This longitudinal study of poor single
mothers on welfare began as ethnography but now reads as history. Sociologist
Shelia M. Katz conducted her first interviews in 2005 with recipients of
CalWORKs, California Work Opportunity and Responsibility to Kids program, who
fought against caseworkers, the trauma of domestic violence, and the
difficulties of attending college while caring for children. She undertook
follow-up conversations in 2008 and in 2011, after the Great Recession. Published
nearly a decade later, Reformed American
Dreams explores the impact of education on such lives. It evokes a time when
grassroots groups thought they could contain the fraying of the social safety
net, before the challenges that even greater inequality poised in the season of
COVID-19. Katz convincingly argues that “social structural inequalities and
social policy failures” [9] rather than “individual deficiencies” have exacerbated
the struggle against poverty. An American Studies perspective comes
garbed in social science and participatory research. Katz frames the everyday
knowledge of grassroots activists and women on “welfare” around one of the
field’s founding tropes, “the American Dream,” to expose its limits. She combines
human capital theory with understanding of the structural detriments of poverty
to explain that “women were striving to increase their human capital, make
themselves less structurally vulnerable in society, and lift their families out
of poverty, while fighting for structural change” [31]. To develop categories
of analysis, she offers the visions and wisdom of poor mothers themselves, who
in seeking to enhance their own employability through higher education had to confront
changes in social assistance that put work first as a solution to poverty even
if available jobs paid too little to make ends meet. The 1996 Personal
Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (PRWOA) replaced Aid to Families with
Dependent Children (AFDC) with Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF),
adding time limits and restricting the counting of education as a “work”
activity. California proved more lenient in this regard, but women still
struggled with finishing school before their welfare eligibility ran out. Attempting to navigate the mismatch
between the rules of welfare and the workings of financial aid, while
circumventing the reluctance of caseworkers to inform about available services,
women came to critique ideologies of individual success and personal
responsibility to survive and even flourish despite the stigmatization
associated with the “welfare queen.” Katz’s interlocutors, a racially and
ethnically diverse group of nearly 50 women, transform the meaning of success
from individual achievement and material rewards to “collective dreams of
engaged communities, social justice, and involvement in social change” [171]. Women
called for basic needs for housing, food, education, and health care as a
right. They recognized, as one explained, “the American Dream—it doesn’t exist
. . . mostly it’s not even possible. But they want you to believe it so that
you keep working in the place that you’re working in . . . Poverty and
malnutrition are a matter of policy, not a matter of resources…” [144]. A college degree makes a difference,
but so did leadership development and political education through grassroots
social justice organizations like LIFETIME, Low-Income Families’ Empowerment
through Education founded at the University of California, Berkeley by welfare
recipients. LIFETIME offered information and support but also training to
change policy. Members testified in Sacramento and demonstrated in Washington,
D.C. It generated policy alternatives as well as survival guides. As one
recalled her participation in LIFETIME, “it was just so empowering” [138]. Katz
volunteered and later worked for this organization, which gave her entrée to
the world of student mothers on welfare. LIFETIME leaders, Katz discovered,
framed their narratives differently than other student mothers, speaking of
rights over shame and moving beyond individual obstacles to social and
political ones. By listening to the women, Katz crafts
categories of analysis. She reconceptualizes barriers into pathways that
“demonstrate the mix of opportunity and constraint inherent in the gendered
institutions in which their lives are embedded” [35]. Interview transcripts
graphically describe these pathways: domestic violence, unexpected pregnancy,
substance abuse, unemployment, and “unmarried partners with a crisis of care”
[56]. As other scholars have shown, poor women see little advantage to marrying
their male partners when a combined income would jeopardize social assistance. She
also parses various “survival narratives,” “personal ‘hidden transcripts’ and
‘inside ideas’,” deployed “to convince themselves to persevere” [89]. These
women told themselves to deal with the real costs of combining higher education
with motherhood while on welfare: mental stress, student debt, and time
deficits, especially when it came to being there for children. Survival
narratives include: failure is impossible, outsmarting the system, and one day
at a time. The women learned time management, became savvy in finding
resources, and relied on friends and family, especially for child care. Education meant everything. Interviewees
saw it as essential to bettering themselves in the labor market, providing what
one called a “financial passport” [107]. Going to school turned them into role
models for their children, whose own education improved as a result. They
gained, as another one proclaimed, “knowledge that can never be taken away from
me” [110]. They enhanced their self-esteem and felt they were in a position to
help others. While their children were proud, not all partners or family were
supportive, though many tried. In documenting high expectations, Katz
captures the aspirations of women before they hit the difficulties of an
economic downturn that dashed the hopes of many. She considers “mothers who
completed college while on welfare can be viewed as canaries in the coal mine
of our urban labor markets” [149]. The difficulty of finding lasting jobs in
their fields with benefits and decent wages anticipated the problems that an
increasing number of workers have faced since 2011. Even those re-interviewed
who were doing “OK” [156] (40% of them), were worried. Another group had cut their
budgets but saw themselves “surviving” [159], but others remained stuck in
poverty and a few were “going through hell” [161]. Most of these mothers
proposed an inclusive American Dream. Katz, in turn, offers policy
prescriptions based on this research that are standard left-liberal ones:
access to affordable education, “universal health care, affordable housing,
expanded public transportation networks, and implementing a living wage” [166].
She finds hope in the early opposition to the election of Donald J. Trump. For those of us who mobilized against
what we called in the 1990s “welfare deform,” as I did as part of the Women’s
Committee of 100 for Welfare Justice, and continued to follow events, the early
chapters covered familiar ground. Nonetheless, there is much to praise about
this study. Katz eschews the notion that she as the researcher is giving voice
to poor women; they already have a voice. Their authority supersedes the
academic experts that Katz cites throughout. The most powerful sections are
block quotations from the interviews. Despite the plethora of social science
research on welfare reform, Katz has illuminated the significance of higher
education and the safety net, both of which require progressive reform least
they collapse under the weight of a greater depression. We could do worse than
learn from student mothers on welfare.
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