Rich in Needs: the forgotten radical politics of the Welfare Rights Movement

• In Event: 1250 - Social Science and Social Justice: Engagements Past, Present and Future

Abstract

Through extensive archival research and contemporary interviews, I examine how the mostly poor, black, female participants in the Welfare Rights Movement asserted their right to full autonomy over their families, consumption, sexuality, and their own time, to live not only meager but occasionally luxurious lives, decoupled from waged work.
In doing so this study makes a number of correctives to existing literature: Far from being loyal adherents to gendered divisions of labor and middle-class values, as many scholars have claimed, I demonstrate that participants of the movement developed robust critiques of capitalism, marriage, motherhood, U.S. imperialism, and more.
This paper examines the analyses proffered by the welfare rights movements in an attempt to understand how activists more generally confront and make sense of seemingly eternal and enduring institutions. How do people attempt to forge an analysis and an alternative to institutions that are assumed to have no alternative?
As working class people continue to struggle to obtain basic necessities of despite working full time jobs, we may begin to view welfare activists— the frustrations and challenges they faced, as well as the alternatives they proposed— as modern day Cassandras, signaling not only the problems of a society that emphasized work as the solution to all its ills, but also prescient in the alternatives they imagined.

Author

• Wilson Sherwin, CUNY Grad Center