Policy in Unresolved Conflict with Gender
One fourth of all children in America currently live in "near-poverty households" (Rivlin as quoted in Schorr, 1986, p. 79). Between 1935 and 1950, the elderly had been receiving the bulk proportion of all social welfare programs. Yet by 1970 there were more recepients of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) than any other program. Originally social welfare policy had been conceived and administered as aid to the elderly, now its function has become altered until it appears to be primarily offering aid to "dependent children of unmarried, divorced or abandoned women" (Berkowitz, 1988, p. 203). Is is possible that too much of the burden for children born into poverty has been placed upon the woman with an oddly heightened neglect of the would-be abandoning father? Re-examination of welfare and recent attempts at welfare reform suggest that more scrutiny of fathers in flight is needed.
Yet focus on this subpopulation, males who become the unexpectant fathers of children and then abandon their wives and babies, to date has been insufficient. More importantly, a stricter critical awareness of this subpopulation has led to at best mixed results and at worst dissatifying ones. During the early 1970s, politicians began to realize that illegitimate children in many states had "either no right to claim support from fathers or rights that were narrower than those of legitimate children" (Krause as cited in Cottingham, 1989, p. 220). Senator Russell Long campaigned to collect substantial funds from this defamed group, absentee fathers. Senator Long freely acknowledged that his own motivation for this campaign was two-fold: first, he sought financial reappropriation of funds, hoping that this collection of financial support from neglectful fathers would substitute for rising welfare payments; and second, he argued vociferously on moral grounds (Cottingham, 1989, p. 220). This ...