Rebecca Thorpe has provided a thoughtful and astute review of my book, and I greatly appreciate her insights. Three points merit a response.

The review emphasizes, rightly, the need to ground any analysis of workfare within a clear understanding of “the nation’s broader history of social provision.” Thorpe’s point that a longer time horizon reveals that “opposition to public assistance for the poorest among us is the norm” is well established in the literature. It informs the book’s historical narrative of policy development, from the deficiencies of Progressive-Era precursors to federal welfare programs, to the echoes of English Poor Law principles in debates in the 1960s, to the inadequacies of policy responses to the Great Recession. It is the promise of a departure from this historical norm, I argue, that makes the New Deal (even with its limitations) an appropriate starting point for an inquiry into the shift from welfare to workfare. The relevant historical question, taken up in The Workfare State, is how and why core elements of the New Deal approach were dismantled rather than shored up in subsequent decades, and why the Democratic Party—proud architects of the New Deal—played a leading role in the process.

The review also raises a concern about whether the analysis of the Democratic role in building workfare “obscures crucial changes in the composition of the political parties” that occurred as Southerners left the Democratic Party for the Republican Party in the 1980s and 1990s. These shifts in party composition were indeed substantial and consequential, and are detailed in my discussion of the elections of 1984 and 1994 (Chapters 6 and 7). But what was most important in transforming policy was not the migration of members from one party to the other, nor the hardening of the Republican position on social welfare. It was instead the shift in the Democratic Party’s position, driven largely by Southern Democratic leaders over several decades, and the alliances they struck with Southern Republicans in the 1990s. On issues of work and welfare, the regional realignment and ideological polarization of the parties did not sharpen the debate between divergent Republican and Democratic positions, as might have been expected. Instead, they created a new middle ground, forged by Southerners from both parties and legislated in the 1990s. The policy outcome—including an expanded EITC program and the dismantlement of AFDC—was closer to the positions held by Southern Democratic congressional leaders in the 1970s than to the stated policy positions of either party at the beginning of the 1990s.

Finally, the review’s call for “theorizing race and gender beyond the South” is an excellent one, and the point that liberal Democrats (as well as Southern conservatives) have embraced work incentives and requirements is well taken. The policy debates over the Public Welfare Amendments, Work Experience and Training program, and Family Support Act (examined in Chapters 1 and 5) demonstrate that many liberal Democrats reached for policies to promote work not only as a matter of compromise with conservatives but also because they saw work as a quick fix to urban unemployment, the rise in single-parent families, and other complex social challenges rooted in unresolved racial and gender hierarchies. Both my book and Thorpe’s review of it remind us that the dilemmas raised by workfare policies—ultimately embraced by conservatives and liberals alike—have long reflected the double standards and double binds confronting poor women and people of color who are caught between rising work requirements in public assistance and an unforgiving low-wage labor market.

Thorpe’s reference to Senator Schumer’s op-ed provides a fitting conclusion to this exchange. It underscores the fact that issues of work and welfare remain pressing and unresolved, as Democratic leaders seek to recapture the mantle of a party that can level the playing field for working families, while the current administration seeks to advance workfare through new work requirements on safety-net programs ranging from food stamps to Medicaid.