You’ve Gotta Work the System to Survive: The Economic Survival Strategies of Welfare Mothers

• In Event: 411 - Section on Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 13. Economic Inequality and Survival

Abstract

Although sociologists have paid great attention to effects of federal and state welfare reform and the economic consequences of families receiving government aid, less is known about how welfare recipients experience and negotiate, what the public and government has labeled, welfare fraud. Drawing from eighty-five interviews with welfare mothers, this paper provides an analysis of how impoverished women in the Greater Boston area negotiate the competing demands and interests of the welfare system and economic survival for their families. First, I examine the three principle avenues welfare mother’s secure unreported additional economic resources for their families: employment strategies, network strategies and agency strategies. Second, I discuss two key discourses—the “Robin Hood Theory” and “Blaming the Welfare Queen” used to frame welfare mother’s economic decision making in the context of welfare fraud. In the “Robin Hood Theory” women use the knowledge gained by the experiences of their larger social networks to strategically apply for government benefits in order to get critical resources their families needed. Women legitimize their actions by framing the welfare system as a corrupt social institution that created the need to break the rules. On the other hand, “Blaming the Welfare Queen” was employed by women as a social distancing stigma management tactic to preserve the self-image and self-respect of welfare recipients. By ascribing the welfare queen stereotype to “other” welfare recipients, welfare mothers constructed themselves as “deserving” welfare recipients and “good mothers” despite breaking the rules.

Author

• Melissa Ann MacDonald, American International College