“Welfare Is a Woman’s Issue”

Background: In this Ms. magazine article, Johnnie Tillmon, one of the founders of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), illustrates the connections between welfare rights and women’s liberation. Welfare recipients, largely female, adopted much of the outlook that was sparked by the civil rights movement and the women’s movement. Since the 1930s, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) often had been doled out in a discriminatory, condescending manner, especially toward women of color. Led by groups like the NWRO, poor people challenged the system’s long-standing paternalism and proclaimed welfare to be a right of citizenship. NWRO chapters sprouted in forty-five cities; welfare recipients led demonstrations for better treatment and fought for special grants for housing, food, and children’s school clothing.

I’m a woman. I’m a black woman. I’m a poor woman. I’m a fat woman. I’m a middle-aged woman. And I’m on welfare.

In this country, if you’re any one of these things—poor, black, fat, female, middle-aged, on welfare—you count less as a human being. If you’re all those things, you don’t count at all. Except as a statistic.

I am a statistic.

I am 45 years old. I have raised six children.

I grew up in Arkansas, and I worked there for fifteen years in a laundry, making about $20 or $30 a week, picking cotton on the side for carfare. I moved to California in 1959 and worked in a laundry there for nearly four years. In 1963 I got too sick to work anymore. Friends helped me to go on welfare. . . .

Welfare’s like a traffic accident. It can happen to anybody, but especially it happens to women.

And that is why welfare is a women’s issue. For a lot of middle-class women in the country, Women’s Liberation is a matter of concern. For women on welfare, it’s a matter of survival.

The truth is that A.F.D.C. is like a supersexist marriage. You trade in a man for the man. But you can’t divorce him if he treats you bad. He can divorce you, of course, cut you off anytime he wants. But in that case, he keeps the kids, not you.

The man runs everything. In ordinary marriage, sex is suppose to be for your husband. On A.F.D.C. you’re not suppose to have any sex at all. You give up control of your own body. It’s a condition of aid. You may even have to agree to get your tubes tied so you can never have more children just to avoid being cut off welfare.

The man, the welfare system, controls your money. He tells you what to buy, what not to buy, where to buy it, and how much things cost. If things—rent for instance—really cost more than he says they do, it’s just too bad for you. . . .

Maybe it is we poor welfare women who will really liberate women in this country. . . .

Source: Rosalyn Baxandall, Linda Gordon, and Susan Reverby, eds., America’s Working Women: A Documentary History—1600 to the Present (1976).