Felicia Kornbluh, Assoc. Prof. of History and Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at the University of Vermont. Her new book Ensuring Poverty: Welfare Reform in Feminist Perspective couples with her earlier work The Battle for Welfare Rights: Pol
Gender/Race & Poverty in America: How the politics of welfare makes us sick and tired of being sick and tired!
Whatever Fannie Lou Hamer was talking about soon became an impassioned plea for a change in the system that exploited the Deltas African-Americans. All my life Ive been sick and tired, she shakes her head. Now Im sick and tired of being sick and tired. Fannie Lou Hamer (1917 " 1977) who stood tall against the brutality, indignities, crushing poverty and intimidation of implacable racism
Our Guest, Felicia Kornbluh, Assoc. Prof. of History and Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at the University of Vermont. Her new book Ensuring Poverty: Welfare Reform in Feminist Perspective couples with her earlier work The Battle for Welfare Rights: Politics and Poverty in Modern America
Felicia Kornbluh argues that the subject of welfare reform always has been single mothers, the animus always has been race, and the currency always has been inequality. Yet public conversations about poverty and welfare, even today, rarely acknowledge the nexus between racialized gender inequality and the economic vulnerability of single-mother families. In Ensuring Poverty, Felicia Kornbluh and Gwendolyn Mink assess the gendered history of welfare reform and advance the ideas for a welfare policy that would respect single mothers' rights while advancing their opportunities and assuring economic security for their families. Kornbluh and Mink consider welfare policy in the broad intersectional context of gender, race, poverty, and inequality.
Since passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act by the Clinton administration, the gendered dimensions of antipoverty policy have receded from debate. Mink and Kornbluh explore the narrowing of discussion that has occurred in recent decades and the path charted by social justice feminists in the 1990s and early 2000s, a course rejected by policy makers. They advocate a return to the social justice approach built on the equality of mothers, especially mothers of color, in policies aimed at poor families.
produced by Mimi Rosenberg and Ken Nash
please notify us if you plan to broadcast this program - knash@igc.org
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