In an era of reduced caseloads and increasingly decentralized administration, those involved in the welfare rights movement face a number of challenges. In this thought-provoking new book, Rose Ernst suggests that chief among these challenges is the dominance of the racial ideology of color blindness. Relying on in-depth interviews with women activists in the welfare rights movement in different parts of the United States, Ernst explores the frames (“discursive patterns”) that these women employ when they talk “about race, class, and gender in welfare politics” (p. 13). She finds that the language of color blindness has infused the thinking of many of the white women activists and serves to undermine internal and external movement cohesion. Throughout the book, the voices of individual women emerge clearly in lengthy and fascinating excerpts from her interviews, although there is less attention to how and in what ways the discursive patterns employed by these women shape welfare rights organizing more broadly. With its rich detail about women active in the welfare rights movement, The Price of Progressive Politics should be of interest to scholars of welfare politics, gender and race politics, and social movements,

Ernst begins the analysis by revisiting the way in which the National Organization for Women (NOW) was focused on the priorities of white, middle-class women. She points out that the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) was actually formed on the same day in 1966 as NOW, and she presents their relative lack of joint action as an example of the ways in which race, class, and gender complicate social movement organizing. Through analysis of NOW newsletters, Ernst demonstrates that the issue of welfare in general or the NWRO in particular were largely absent from the issues that received attention from NOW leadership during the 1960s and 1970s. As she explains, the way in which NOW characterized paid work as central to the independence of women ignored the history and interests of low-income women of color.

Ernst, however, wants to move beyond pointing out the ways in which NOW presented an agenda that only addressed the needs of certain women, to argue that “this tenuous alliance without an authentic coalition between the two movements partially enabled the premature demise of the welfare rights movement's alternative conceptions of the meaning of work for women” (p. 20). Looking at more recent politics, she also suggests that “the development of the mainstream women's movement in the 1960s may have unintentionally restricted the strategic choices available to welfare rights activists in the 1990s debate over welfare reform” (p. 19). This is an interesting argument, and I would have liked Ernst to spend more time expanding on the ways in which NOW “limited the development of framing discourses available to the welfare rights movement” (p. 19).

The heart of the book is focused on describing the different frames employed by women active in welfare rights organizations around the country and highlighting how these frames differ across racial and ethnic lines, as well as across organizations. Ernst's starting premise is the importance of “race and class consciousness” frames that recognize intersectionality, the way in which race, class, and gender identities are “multiplicative,” not additive. Without this recognition, the welfare rights movement, in her view, ends up “reflect[ing] and reinforc[ing] processes of marginalization pervasive in society at large, which … undermine[s] the movement's social change goals” (p. 13).

This is a central problem for the current movement since she finds that many white women active in welfare rights organizations (20 out of 27 of the white women that she interviewed) employ a color-blindness or cosmetic color-blindness frame that denies the overarching significance of race in the welfare system. For example, gender and class color-blindness frames create a hierarchy of identities in which gender and/or class are the “overriding concern,” not race (p. 66). Cosmetic color blindness openly discusses race but focuses on how race is important symbolically for perceptions about the movement, rather than recognizing race as a “focal point of social justice struggles” (p. 63). Ernst argues that it makes sense that these white women often fall back on the language of color blindness, given that this is the dominant racial ideology in contemporary US society. But, she argues, doing so “inhibits welfare politics in a variety of ways … by minimizing or obfuscating the importance of racism in both the welfare system and social, political, and economic systems more generally … and creat[ing] rifts within and between welfare rights organizations” (p. 38).

Perhaps not surprisingly, Ernst finds that it is most often women of color activists who recognize the intersectionality of race, class, and gender in their discourse about welfare. However, she finds an organization in Minnesota in which all of the women utilize a race and class consciousness frame, and spends some time trying to explain this aberration. She concludes that “shared multiracial decision-making power, combined with an organizational structure that eschews” professionalization and instead relies on unpaid low-income activists is “critical to creating shared race and class consciousness frames” (p. 139). Ernst does not really have enough information about how the views of these women may have evolved over time (or a large enough sample of other institutions) to be able to establish convincingly the causal claims that she is making in this section of the book, but the relationship between institutional structure and the individual frames employed by these women within that structure is an interesting question and one worth thinking more about.

Ernst's conclusion about the benefits of a small budget and no paid staff also raises questions about what constitutes “success” for these welfare rights organizations, and she tackles these questions directly with a discussion of Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward's (1977) Poor People's Movements. The author argues that while they were interested in “critical moments of mobilization,” her focus is on a movement in a period of “abeyance” (p. 134). Consequently, a focus on policy outcomes as indicative of success is too narrow. The long-term view of movement success should include the goal of “refocusing of movement energy on the interconnectedness of issues of race, gender, and economic justice” in pursuit of broader social change (pp. 139–40).

Implicit in this expanded definition of success is the causal claim that the discourses utilized by these women activists help shape movement outcomes. However, while there is rich detail in terms of establishing that different women within the various welfare rights organizations use different frames to talk about welfare, there is much less detail in terms of establishing the consequences: that these different frames create rifts between and within organizations and weaken the welfare rights movement overall.

The final chapter of the book “grapples with the implications of these discourses for the contemporary welfare rights struggle as a coherent social movement” (p. 141). While this chapter offers some tantalizing suggestions about the ways in which these differing frames impeded a recent attempt to form a national coalition, it is relatively light as to detailed information about the way in which these frames clashed. Ernst, who was a participant observer at the annual meeting of this fledgling coalition, says that she is “only able to provide a general picture of the dynamics of this meeting out of respect for those involved” (p. 147). While this is understandable, it makes the chapter a little anticlimatic in terms of its ability to illustrate the way in which the diverging frames that she has explicated in the preceding chapters “embody and reproduce conflict between organizations attempting to maintain a national movement.” Further development of this connection between the “micro” (frames employed by individual women activists) and the “macro” (movement dynamics) is an important area for future research.