Andrea Dworkin - Right-wing Women

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

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 Woman's B ody , Woman's R ight: “The sterilization campaign tended to identify economic dependence with hereditary feeble-mindedness or worse. ” 10 It has been proposed over and over again: if these women are going to keep having these bastards, after the second or third or fourth, we have the right to stop them, sterilize them—for their own good and because we are paying the bills. Sterilization has been practiced on poor women piecemeal. So far there is no judicial carte blanche that extends the power of the state explicitly to the tying of tubes because a woman

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; 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