Andrea Dworkin - Right-wing Women

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

was w idely considered to have negated the force of that rule in the

states where it existed; and yet in 1967 Congress had required

states to make mothers on welfare report for work or work training— a law erratically enforced and therefore subject to the same abuses as the old “employable mother” regulation. The kind of

control welfare exercises over poor women does not change because

the population welfare is designed to control does not change:

female.

The question of suitable employment is raised persistently

within the welfare system: what is to be expected of women with

children? should they work or stay home? what kind of work are

they offered or forced to take? is that work entirely determined by

prejudgments as to their nature— what can and should be expected

of them because they are female, female and black, female and

white, female and poor, female and unmarried? In New York C ity,

women on welfare say that they have been strongly encouraged by

welfare workers to turn to prostitution, the threat being that the

individual woman may in the future be denied welfare benefits be­

cause the caseworker knows the woman could be making big bucks

on the street; or in emergencies, women on welfare are told to raise

the money they need by turning a trick or two. In Nevada, where

prostitution is legal, women on welfare have been forced off welfare because they refused to accept the suitable employment of prostitution; once it is a legal, state-regulated job, there is no basis

for refusing it. Prostitution has long been considered suitable employment for poor women whether it is legal or not. This is particularly cynical in the welfare system, given the fact that women on welfare have been subjected to “fornication checks”—questioned about their sexual relations at length, questioned as to the identity of the fathers of so-called illegitimate children, questioned

as to their own sexual habits, activities, and partners—and have

been denied welfare if living with a man or if a man spends any

time in the domicile or if having a sexual relationship with a man.

Their homes could be inspected anytime: searches were common

after midnight, when the welfare workers expected to find the contraband man; the courts put a stop to late searches but daytime searches are still legal. Beds, closets, and clothes were inspected to

see if any remnant of a male presence could be found. Sometimes

criminal charges of fornication were actually brought against the

mothers of illegitimate children; the purpose was to keep them

from getting welfare. For instance, in one typical case, a New

Jersey woman was convicted of fornication and given a suspended

sentence; she was forced to name the father, who went to prison.

Welfare workers were allowed to interrogate children concerning

the social and sexual habits of their mothers. Women on welfare

have even been required to tell when they menstruate. Women on

welfare have had no rights to sexual privacy; and in this context,

turning them toward prostitution goes right along with refusing to

allow them private, intimate, self-determined sexual relations.

Prostitution is the ultimate loss of sexual privacy. Gains made in

the courts in the 1960s to restore rights of privacy to these women

are being nullified by new welfare policies and regulations designed

to control the same population in the same old w ays— practices

that reappear in new guises but are built on the same old attitudes

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