When the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRA) was passed in 1996, the United States public was told that welfare as we knew it was over, that the cycles of dependency experienced by the poor would come to an end as initiatives stressing work, family, and responsibility would enable people to move from poverty to self-sufficiency. While some welfare reform critics argue that this new era of “workfare” does little to alleviate poverty and leaves needy individuals and families to fend for themselves, Anna Marie Smith takes a somewhat different approach. In her extensively researched and richly textured new book, Smith, a progressive feminist, makes it abundantly clear that the problems with welfare reform are more insidious than simply a failure to provide economic support for the needy. Welfare reform, far from signaling a withdrawal by the state from the lives of the poor, marks the intensification of state intervention into the lives of poor, single mothers. According to Smith, this new era of welfare reform, which she labels “paternafare,” must be seen for what it is, an effort to “lay the blame” for poverty at the feet (or the uterus?) of poor women in ways that ultimately undermine their rights to privacy and self-determination.
Paying careful attention to both state and federal policy, Smith walks the reader through the dizzying array of programs and initiatives that now regulate the sexual and reproductive lives of poor women in the name of alleviating poverty. Again and again she reveals such policies as the family cap, paternity identification and child support enforcement, abstinence education, and marriage promotion to be not only cumbersome and inefficient but also threatening to poor women's sexual and reproductive rights. For example, under Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) policies, some states explicitly promote marriage or fatherhood or encourage poor women to give their children up for adoption. In other states, the message to poor women regarding childbirth and child rearing is less explicit but no less powerful: States are given bonuses if they reduce the number of illegitimate births, and poor, single mothers are often forced to put their kids into foster care “temporarily,” only to face great difficulty getting them back later on. Such policies and practices, Smith argues, fail to acknowledge the structural factors that contribute to poverty and the complexities of poor women's lives that may make being single far more appealing than heterosexual marriage. Instead, they are justified by a problematic ideology that sees “poverty as the fruit of immoral and pathological behavior on the part of deviant heterosexual women … and legitimates the neoliberal transfer of the obligation to support the poor from the State to the private patriarchal household” (p. 118).
As despicable as paternafare may be, Smith is not particularly surprised by its emergence or its popularity. She sees the welfare reform of the 1990s as an extension of earlier efforts to tie economic health to the regulation of sexuality, locating it in the context of what Michel Foucault identifies as biopolitics. According to Smith, “In some respects, today's welfare mother could be regarded as a ‘sexual subject’ who is analogous to the other symbolic targets identified by Foucault: the homosexual, the masturbating boy, the Malthusian couple, and the hysterical woman. All of these targets support complex social panic discourse and expert interventions designed to bring individuals within disciplinary institutions and to transform an unruly mass into a well-policed population” (p. 54). What makes the contemporary phenomenon different, what makes today's welfare reforms “postdisciplinary,” is the superficiality of the initiatives: “[T]he soul craft that Foucault teaches us to search for in disciplinary technologies is largely absent. When welfare reformers wax eloquent about the value of work, counseling, self-help groups, and marriage-related interpersonal skills workshops, they are largely using caring and nurturing words to legitimate the exposure of the poor to the brutal low-wage labor market… In practice, TANF's rehabilitative rhetoric has not given rise to the widespread investment in dialogical counseling reminiscent of the caseworkers' home visits… It has instead contributed to a regime that prioritizes blocking needy mothers from entering the program… TANF's therapeutic discourse serves largely as a legitimating cover story for the application of the blunt instrument of economic penalization” (55).
Smith's book is grand in scope. Not only does it explore the nuances of paternafare policy and ideology, it also engages social theory and offers suggestions for future policy changes. Welfare Reform and Sexual Regulation presents a challenge, then, to welfare reformers and feminists alike, particularly those who may have supported the reform or see elements of a feminist politics within it. Smith reminds us that while it is not enough for poverty activists to focus on welfare's failure to end poverty without attending to issues of sexual regulation, it is also not enough for feminists to fight for reproductive rights without attending to issues of poverty. If poverty and sexual regulation are not theorized and analyzed together, and complicated by attention to race, a truly just society will never come about. Resistance strategies and just public policy requires, Smith suggests, understanding the more complicated and insidious dimensions of welfare reform illuminated in this book.
While those new to the welfare reform debates might find Welfare Reform and Sexual Regulation a bit overwhelming in its detail and feminists familiar with the debates might find some of its arguments well-rehearsed, there is more than enough in this compelling book to satisfy policy experts and feminist theorists alike while inspiring a more general audience to imagine a future in which the rights of poor women are better protected.
