At a rally and clothesline display on Capitol Hill, a member of LIFETIME, an organization of current and former welfare reci-pients, displays a t-shirt she created. Photo: Chris Pifer, AFSC

Flying well under the radar of public consciousness, the 2005 Deficit Reduction Act [5] authorized $100 million for the promotion of marriage for low-income women and an additional $50 million to support fatherhood initiatives for low-income couples. The authorization extends for five years, with a total allocation of $750 million. At the same time, Congress reauthorized the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) [6], originally passed in 1996 under Clinton.

The current Administration has been funding marriage promotion for at least five years, primarily through the Department of Health and Human Services. Most of this funding (in excess of $20 million) has been directed to programs for low-income women, especially those who are receiving welfare.

Taxpayers might assume that the program is driven by solid evidence from the social sciences that marriage does indeed result in a higher income for poor women. But there is no such evidence. This is a program driven by right wing ideology and a backlash against the social reforms of the 1970s and 1980s.

Welfare Past

In the 1960s and 70s, the welfare bureaucracy policed recipients in order to keep welfare costs down and to prevent fraud. "Man in the house" rules discouraged legal and common law marriage by threatening a cutoff of welfare eligibility. Raids were conducted on the homes of welfare recipients to try to catch them violating welfare rules. In some cases, women divorced their husbands in order to preserve their welfare payments. Here the power of the state and its interests coincided to produce a disincentive to marry.

With the arrival of the New Right as a powerful political movement, boosted by the ideologically compatible Reagan Administration, "pro-family" programs promoted an even more punitive attitude toward AFDC recipients. The Reagan Administration demonized welfare recipients by promoting the racist stereotype of the "welfare queen" -- constructed as a Black woman who cons the system out of tens of thousands of dollars while the (White) taxpayer must work hard for his or her money. This spin was remarkably successful with many voters, who returned Reagan to office in 1984, approving his stereotype of welfare recipients as unworthy and pathologically dependent. Describing this period, Michael B. Katz says: "What bothered observers most was not their (the poor's) suffering; rather, it was their sexuality, expressed in teenage pregnancy; family patterns, represented by female-headed households; alleged reluctance to work for low wages; welfare dependence, incorrectly believed to be a major drain on national resources; and [alleged] propensity for drug use and violent crime."

Welfare "Reform"

Since the passage of PRWORA in 1996, welfare rolls have shrunk by more than half and many welfare recipients have gone to work. This drastic reduction in the number of women who receive benefits has been driven by draconian measures -- imposing time limits on welfare, mandating "family cap" provisions, and excluding whole classes of people, such as documented and undocumented immigrants. Conservatives repeatedly assert that welfare reform has been a success. As a result, the poverty rate in the United States must be at an all-time low.

But the US Census Bureau's report for 2005, released in August 2006, details a grim picture of poverty in the US. The report finds that the 12.5 percent of people living in poverty in 2005 contains the highest percentage of people living in "deep poverty" since the government began keeping poverty statistics in 1975. That's because nearly half of those living in poverty are living below half the poverty line (the poverty line for a family of three, according to 2007 Health and Human Services guidelines, is $17,170).

Marriage in the United States

There is undoubtedly a link between single motherhood and poverty, and it is therefore likely true that an increase in single motherhood is a major factor in increased child poverty. But a growing body of literature that examines the increase in single motherhood among middle-class and professional women -- due to divorce, parenthood in a lesbian couple where the mother is usually counted as "single," or the decision to bear children without a partner -- calls into question the assertion that single motherhood is itself what leads to poverty. These middle-class mothers tend not to experience poverty as the result of bearing or adopting children. They may be attacked by the Religious Right for their "selfishness" in deciding to raise a child without a father present, but they are often praised by sociologists as women who have taken charge of their lives and are courageously exercising their own agency.

However, single mothers who are low-income, especially those receiving welfare benefits, are constantly criticized by the general public, and are held accountable for their single status rather than praised for finding self-fulfillment in motherhood. They are usually judged to be irresponsible, or simply unable to meet the child's needs, including the supposed need for a father or father figure.

By examining the scant research that has actually asked welfare recipients what they would like in their lives, we learn that a large percentage of single low-income mothers would like to be married at some time. They seek marriages that are financially stable, with a loving, supportive husband who has no addictions and does not threaten their children. Welfare recipients, like many other US women, often aspire to a romantic notion of marriage and family that features a white picket fence in the suburbs. According to the proponents of "marriage promotion" programs, women and men just need a little nudge to encourage them to take the step that will lead in the direction of that picket fence -- to marry and stay married.

But very often, a low-income woman's life experience teaches her another lesson. Many low-income women see their children as their greatest accomplishment (as do many mothers of all classes) and are clear that their job is to take care of them. That means providing a safe environment and "being there" for them. Contrary to the characteristic middle-class view of teenage childbirth as the curtailment of a young woman's chances for success, low-income mothers often credit their early motherhood with keeping them away from a life of drugs, or crime, or violence. Marriage is a goal, but financial stability and the children come first.

Barriers to Marriage

Most researchers agree that in the minds of the white public, a welfare recipient is an African American woman, though to date Blacks have never been the majority of welfare recipients. The slander and demonization of women of color, especially African American women, so characteristic of discussions of welfare, are part and parcel of the structural racism that pervades US society.

Race accounts for several barriers to marriage in low-income communities of color. The disparate incarceration of men of color, job discrimination, and police harassment are three barriers that are race-specific. Others barriers are universally present for low-income people: low-quality and unsafe housing, a decrepit and underfunded educational system; joblessness; poor health care; and flat-funded day care for six consecutive years are some of the challenges faced by low-income women and men. These burdens make it difficult to set up stable, economically viable households, and also put stresses on couples that do marry.

But it is not these barriers that current federal and state marriage programs address. Most programs favored by the Bush Adminis-tration focus on developing relationship skills and encouraging the mother and father of a newborn to marry. Some of the programs to improve a woman's relationship with her partner, such as those of The Gottman Institute [7], are respected within the field of psychology and do not contain a religious component. But far too many, such as Marriage Savers [8] and the Northwest Marriage Institute [9], are Biblically-based or driven by rightist ideology about gender roles within the family which should disqualify them as providers of neutral counseling for couples. It is currently impossible to monitor all the opportunities for those receiving federal and state money to pressure welfare recipients in ways that make them feel threatened if they do not participate in a marriage promotion program.

There is widespread agreement among researchers that the two greatest predictors to leaving poverty are education and a good job. Yet the 2005 Deficit Reduction Act cut the funding available for welfare recipients to participate in education and Congress refused to raise the minimum wage for six years until 2007. It is clear that, in the fight to end poverty, ideology often trumps facts.

Fighting for Real Solutions

Rather than a benign intervention, federally funded marriage promotion is ideologically-driven experimentation with the lives of low-income people. It promotes marriage only for certain people, excluding lesbian and gay couples; it serves as a smokescreen to give the appearance of addressing poverty while actually drawing money away from proven methods of poverty reduction; it is an attempt to elevate a patriarchal version of family structure; it denigrates the role and abilities of single mothers; and it furthers the stereotype of welfare recipients as socially and economically handicapped without the presence of a male provider. Meanwhile, the real risks faced by women from violent male partners continue to receive too little attention, and right wing organizations argue each year that battered women's shelters should be defunded because they destroy families.

Women's movement organizations are fighting fiercely to oppose the bipartisan support that exists for marriage promotion and fatherhood programs. Legal Momentum [10] in Washington, DC, LIFETIME [11] in San Leandro, CA, and the Council on Contemporary Families [12] in Chicago, IL are just three organizations that try to educate the public and unmask these programs.

We should call for Congressional hearings into the selection of federal grantees and the content of their programs to provide marriage "training" so that we can learn about how the programs operate and their consequences for low-income women and men. Advocates and those in solidarity with low-income single mothers should work to support legitimate, proven methods of fighting poverty and thoughtfully oppose misguided experiments that will not further draw money and attention away from those proven programs.