Teen Mother Welfare Reform

At a campaign rally in 1976 Ronald Reagan talked about welfare queens and poverty. He said, “She used eighty names, thirty addresses and fifteen telephone numbers to collect food stamps, social security and veteran’s benefits for four nonexistent deceased veteran husbands as well as welfare. Her tax free cash income alone has been running 150,000 thousand dollars a year.”The welfare system is full of gender stereotyping. Stereotyping is when we make perceptions on what we make about others. In the past forty years America welfare system has been designed around Reagan’s fake welfare queen (Black, Sprague). This slur has had negative effects for the families on welfare that urgently need support and are struggling. This paper will discuss the lies of the welfare queen and how it originated and its negative effects on African American families and young girls.

The American Public never loved social welfare programs, but it did not necessarily want them dismantled. In fact, by the early 1990s, nearly 50 percent of all households drew on government benefits from Food stamps to social security to mortgage interest tax deductions.

What would happen if the government made changes to the welfare system? There are approximately 110,489,000 of Americans on welfare. Many people benefit from what the system has to offer: food stamps, housing, health insurance, day care, and unemployment. Taxpayers often argue that the individuals who benefit from the system, abuse the system; however, this is not entirely true. Many of the people who receive benefits really and truly need the help. Even though some people believe welfare should be reformed, welfare should not be reformed because 40% of single mothers are poor, some elderly people do not have a support system, and college students can not afford to take extra loans.

Reynolds uses her own personal experience to help support her argument by using multiple examples of when she is at work and sees the misuse of welfare at first hand. This helps her make a connection with the audience and shows her honesty. She further argues with using a metaphor to help support her argument “if you build it, they will come” to suggest a resemblance between welfare and people, meaning if an individual were to receive welfare they will feel financially stable and therefore, never feel motivated to search the job field. These ideals not only help make a connection, but help show her authority as an educated woman who supports finding a new way to make the welfare system more manageable, free from bias, and free from injustice. Reynolds wants the reader to think about when people abuse the welfare system, in particular the food stamps, and wants them to think is it fair for a working class citizens to be required support multiple people who abuse the system that get food or items they themselves cannot possess because it is too expensive and to think about if it was fair to that child or baby that was not thought about

During the early 1960s, welfare fraud became increasingly popular and was featured in numerous magazines. It wasn’t until Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1976 on the platform of fixing welfare problems and used the Chicagoan woman as an example, without explicitly saying her name, to demonstrate welfare fraud that the phrase became popular. Since then, the defaming label applied to poor mothers has been associated with gender and racial implications, further shaping the discourse of welfares’ effects on poverty. The “welfare queen” can be analyzed by two competing explanations: Oscar Lewis’s theory of the culture of poverty and the social construction of race, also known as racial formation.

In the year 1976 welfare queen was introduced by Ronald Reagan within the public discussion about poverty. This person was known for using a bunch of alias to receive government assistance. For as long as forty years, U.S. welfare approach has been composed around Reagan's mythical welfare queen—with genuine outcomes for the real families critically requiring support. In spite of the fact that it was Reagan who gave her the most noticeable identity, the welfare queen rose up out of a long and profoundly racialized history of doubt of and bitterness toward families accepting welfare in the United States. Accordingly, welfare reform made a system that expects the most exceedingly terrible from families looking for help, and in this manner additionally

Both Mimi Ambrovitz’s “Regulating the lives of women” and Mink and Solinger’s “Welfare; A documentary of U.S. Policy and Politics” addresses an overarching theme of patriarchy and gender and racial roles that have continued since the late 1600’s in America. Even further, they explain the different forms of welfare and welfare regulation that was seen in the colonial and industrial era and how the ever-changing ideologies of what a women’s role in the household has shaped welfare policies. Abromovitzt discusses the policies implemented that ensure economic prosperity but also the continuation of a strong patriarchy within the United States in the 1600’s. While Mink and Solinger further the idea of women’s roles in welfare policy into the late 1800’s and early 1900’s.

The third image is that of the welfare mother… the new version that sees the welfare mother as breeding animals who have no desire to work, but are content to live off the state (Woodard Mastin, 273). This character is typically not a major or supporting character within the story. This stereotypical black woman is part of a protagonist’s hardship that they must overcome in some way. One example of this character in popular culture is from the film Precious, which was released in 2009. In this film, the protagonist, Precious has been impregnated by her father twice and if forced to live with her abusive mother. Both women in these film represent this stereotype of the welfare mother but her mother is the one who depends on the government’s help to support herself. In one scene, the mother tells Precious that she needs to quit school and go to welfare to get the help she needs to support her family. In reality her mother only wants the food stamps and other government help for herself. She still receives some welfare from Precious but wants more now that precious has two children. In another scene, she explains through a voice over that her mother collects the welfare for her children as well as herself. A social worker then enters the scene to ask about the child and the mother’s work finding status, she tells her that she has tried finding work but has not been successful (Precious). But in other scenes during the film she is just sitting in the house

America is a great nation that posed as a symbol of happiness and freedom for many people around the world. The government provided the people with many benefits for needy people, such as free health care plan, food stamp, etc. all of those good stuffs is provided to the people that are living in the U.S. However, that is also making people became lazy and abuse the welfare system. One example is that how teenage mothers are not avoiding teen births, most of them are having more babies at the age of eighteen to nineteen again after having an offspring already at the age of fifteen to sixteen. Evidence of teen pregnancy rates in our country today is so

Since the 70’s the term Welfare Queen has been used to describe our nation’s poor single mothers that receive welfare benefits instead of being gainfully employed. Society’s misconception is that they can be found buying fake Gucci purses out of the trunks of late model BMWs in gas station parking lots and appear on Snapchat, Twitter, and Instagram. These undereducated young mothers seem like cunning, conniving, county con artists that celebrate their poverty and hide the fact that being a welfare recipient affords a lack luster lifestyle that leaves them broke and stressed out once they log off of their social media sites. These women are the unchallenged authority on how to buy anything on EBT and the fabulous food stamp life. They portray a lifestyle that welfare critics will never stop talking about. Royalty that isn’t so royal – America’s Welfare Queen. This term has led to prejudice, misunderstandings, and society’s misconception of welfare recipients.

In the 1960s there was a major effort to address the problem of poverty in America. The most significant component was called "Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). AFDC was passed in last period of vigorous liberal reforms in the 20th century. By the 1980s welfare programs like ADFC were under attack on the grounds that they perpetuated rather than relieved poverty. The simple argument was that by providing poor people with a "handout", welfare programs encouraged dependency rather than autonomy and responsibility. AFDC provided single women with incentives to have children outside of marriage in order to get welfare payments, and thus the system also undermined the family. Since there were no time limits and no work requirements, AFDC fostered a culture of passivity and irresponsibility. Conservatives also asserted welfare was riddled with fraud by "welfare queens" who drove Cadillac's and lived better than many hard-working wage earners. Liberals were also unhappy with the program. Some thought the programs were too stingy and still left children in poverty. Others felt that the specific structure of the programs had certain perverse effects called poverty traps. Since you had to earn below a certain level of income in order to qualify

The book Evicted makes Arleen and other mothers appear lazy because of their dependence on welfare checks to be given to them. It’s obvious that Arleen does depend on welfare checks, however she’s not unemployed like the book says. Taking care of children is a job in its own, so the blame for single mother’s dependency on welfare check lies with the loss or abandonment of the father. Fathers who abandon their kids are the reason why we’ve noticed the feminization of poverty. With more and more moms being abandoned they must to pay an unfair amount of rent, food for her kids, and work outside the house. For any person, this is a tall order so no wonder we’ve seen an increase in women falling below the poverty line. Even though there’s programs

It is critical to look at the issue of single mothers on welfare from an interdisciplinary perspective, and to understand that there are many facets of gender inequality that cannot be solved by any one solution. Rather than focusing only on lack of income and assets, it is important to understand the deep-seated structural causes of poverty. The women’s studies approach

It's Diana's turn at the tiny glass window. Her face burns red with shame as she is handed her monthly check. Two small children tug at her dress, their stomachs growling from a day without food. She looks down at her two children, her face filled with pain and guilt. What had happened to their happy life? With just the stroke of the pen across a divorce decree, Diana and her children were thrust into the humiliation of the welfare line. For two years now, Diana has tried to get back on her feet, but with only a high school diploma, she can't find a job to support her family. Getting a college degree is her only way out, but her check isn't enough to afford daycare, so she's stuck accepting welfare.

What is viewed as immoral changes as society changes. However, across America’s history, whatever is tied to immorality seems to also be tied to the perception of the poor. Stereotypes about what it means to be poor and certain behaviors of the poor have always had the connotation that these behaviors are immoral, that is, seen as deviant, unclean, and undeserving of any help. Indeed, “throughout American history- and arguably to this day- poverty has been blamed on poor morals and poor habits” (Wagner, 2005, p. 57). The idea is that people who are poor have somehow made themselves poor through their own moral misdeeds, and the only way out of poverty is to reclaim a pure and moral work ethic to rejoin society and to be deserving of public aid. As an example of the thread of the poor being tied to perceived immorality, the nineteenth century in America gave us poorhouses, which separated the “unclean” poor from those who worked hard for a living. In the twentieth century, a shift in society’s views of single mothers caused these single mothers to be viewed as immoral, resulting in a significant decrease in assistance given via Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), now Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), as part of the welfare reform that occurred in 1996. Both of these policies in American history highlight the public desire to shun those who are viewed as immoral, putting much of the stigma on the poor that actively inhibits the poor from