The Paradox of Welfare

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 c

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es their capacity and largely unmet need to function as nurturers. Robinson suggests that young teenage males often possess very strong, even if unrealistic, hopes for bonding with their potential offspring. Like teenage girls, teenage boys often believe that having a baby will produce feelings of euphoria, allowing them to feel both well-loved and a strong sense of accomplishment (Robinson, 1988, p. 7). Robinson contends that more often than the public-at-large recognizes, these would-be fathers would like to stay in the picture. He argues that teenage fathers all too often get lost in the "shuffle" (1988, p. 13), or worse are ousted from the scene's by the expectant mother's family's hositility which is fiercely and often unproductively directed at them (p. 12). Yet while motherhood remains a central ingredient within the societal constructions of femininity (Walby, 1990, p. 106), the positioning of fatherhood is much more tenuous. Ehrenreich in her 1983 study, The hearts of men: American dreams and the flight from commitment, documents that in the post-war period there has been a marked "flight from fatherhood" (Ehrenreich as cited in Walby, 1990, p. 106). Masculinity is no longer as tightly structured around notions

Category: Economics - T