- Welfare recipients and culture of poverty
- In the chapters 2 and 7 of the book Flat Broke with Children, Sharon Hays tells us the story of U.S welfare from the inside of the welfare office, and also from the inside of mothers involved in welfare. She aptly describes the challenges that recipients of welfare face in the management of their families, work. Moreover, she tells the regulations and rules that pertain to welfare reform. Her research is hands on because it involves one on one interaction with the welfare recipients. The hands-on approach she takes makes her book, Flat Broke with Children, to be the first to explore the impact of welfare reforms on marriage, motherhood, and work in the lives of women. Additionally, it excellently portrays how welfare takes place in the welfare offices spread across the states and in millions of homes across the nation.
- Her second strength is that as much she is a high profile individual; she is able to conduct interviews with women from low socioeconomic class. She shows a strong will to get to know the welfare recipients deeply, forms easy camaraderie with them, and she opens her ears to their stories. Moreover, she helps get their opinions be heard in her book. She narrates their stories smoothly to in her book thus laying bare the reality in the welfare scheme for women. She met Andrea in 1999, and she records all she tells her about her job, the earnings, and her family situation (Hay 2003:51). This data Andrea can be used as a guide in analyzing the success of the welfare program.
- Elsewhere, the author displays some weaknesses in her research work on the welfare situation in the country. First she is a feminist, only interviewing women all through the research work. She has a strong bias towards women and strongly neglects men’s opinions. Men are also welfare recipients or their area trapped in poverty necessitating that they get welfare support to foot their bills. Moreover, the author is a generalist. She generalizes theories bordering on welfare reform and welfare recipients in the country. Her coverage was minimal; she only
observed two cities, Arbordale and Sunbelt City. Generalizing her findings in these two cities is myopic because the situation may be extremely different bin other parts of the country.
The cultural assumption that underpins welfare reforms Work Plan is that the relative number of welfare recipients has always been connected to fluctuations in the economy (Hay 2003:59). The rapid decline of welfare receipt in the late 1990s and the eventual slowdown when the economy started stalling in 2001 confirms this connection. The mistake about this logic of welfare reform is that it ignores the hardships of former recipients of welfare that are underemployed and unemployed. It also ignores millions who are still on welfare, and earnestly trying to cope with welfare reform rules (Blank 2003: 67). Moreover, they are still trying to be compliant with stated demand in America that they live the welfare. Mothers normally end up on welfare because they most are poor or single parents (Blank 2003: 67). Poor single mothers are likely to be live in dangerous neighborhoods, thus scaling their problems of supervision of children. Due to the costs involved child upbringing, most of these mothers will be indebted and dependent on family and friends. Welfare “trains” women for work through provision of low cadre jobs to them like serving fast food in restaurants, cleaning toilets, answering phone calls I call centers, and changing bed plans in hotels (Hay 2003:49). While on these jobs they earn some money for upkeep and also learn valuable employment skills. The Work Plan had some results including the realization that the people had no responsibility to address the inadequacies of low-wage work. Moreover, with the decline of welfare reform, more people have strived for independence thus helping maintenance of faith in the system. The rules also imply that children can be managed by simply putting them in childcare centers (Duncan and Brooks-Gunn 2000:190).
- Elsewhere, the “culture of poverty synthesis” refers to the situation where the poor remain poor because they are a constituent of a very unique culture that has twisted, pathological values and practices. They are trapped in “alien” culture of poverty. Teresa is a 27-year-old white mother with children and works as a street-level prostitute (Hay 2003:108).With such a job, there is no likelihood that she will get out of the poverty trap. All the money she gets will be used to feed, clothe, house, and feed her three children; hers is a hand to mouth kind of life. For Darla, she was raised on a military base and started sleeping with boot-soldiers way back when she was 16. This means she lacked a good grounding in education that could have provided with good financial fortunes for her life. For the burger barn syndrome, these are women who participate in cultural orientation which legitimize the use of welfare as a subsidy for single motherhood that encompasses staying at home (Hay 2003:183). For them, child-bearing, even those born before marriage, is more valuable than engaging in paid work and achieving self-sufficiency in terms of finances (Hay 2003:209). The author uses the term “candy store syndrome” to refer welfare mothers who get involved in a pattern of narcissistic consumption that includes the illegal consumption of drugs and a sexually promiscuous “partying” lifestyle. They treat such behavior as a legitimate way to seek pleasure, dull the pain of life at the bottom, and obtain a certain kind of cultural membership (Hay 2003:183). They seek pleasure through consumption, even illicit consumption of alcohol and drugs. The purchase of drugs, alcohol, and sexual experiences, as well as consumer goods and a career, will bring them the “Miller high life”. (Hay 2003:210). These mothers obtain their financial wellbeing through provisions of welfare.
- Moreover, the system screwed syndrome is a cultural configuration that rationalizes the use and abuse of welfare for those women who see big government, like big corporations, as a system that cares nothing for the poor and therefore deserves neither respect nor compliance. (Hay, 2003:183). The idea that overbearing, overpriced (or overly profiteering), bureaucratic big government and big corporations don’t care about the “little guy,” and therefore do not deserve our allegiance or deference or ethical behavior. (Hay 2003:211). Additionally the “Lorena Bobbit syndrome” refers to a cultural pattern that redefines the “family” in such a way as to make men more or less superfluous. (Hay 2003:183). The fantasy of castrating abusive and disappointing men (Hay 2003:211).
- All these syndromes are the result of low incomes, few job prospects, substandard living conditions (Hay 2003:180). All these mothers can find cultural support for their positions among the many poor women who are their neighbors, friends, and family members. All of them can, in this sense, draw strength from their shared cultural orientations (Hay 2003:183). The cultural logics relate to American culture because The majority of welfare mothers–all those “Decent” women who so clearly share mainstream American values but who have faced hardships that prevent them from achieving mainstream stability. (Hay 2003:181). As “socially alien” as this group of welfare mothers appears on the surface, and as much as they take positions that oppose the “mainstream,” once you get inside their lives and come to understand them, it becomes clear that they are also telling us a story that is ultimately familiar. This is true because even these
women, the most “improper” of welfare recipients, provide a sharply accentuated image of a broader cultural and economic trend that have impacted us all. (Hay, 2003:182-183).The behaviors of these mothers point to the statement “cultures of poverty are our culture”. None (of these welfare mothers) were blind to the stigma attached to their ideas and behaviors, and almost none were without ambivalence.
Works Cited
Hays, Sharon. Flat broke with children: Women in the age of welfare reform. Oxford University Press, 2003.
Duncan, Greg J., and Jeanne Brooks‐Gunn. "Family poverty, welfare reform, and child development." Child development 71, no. 1 (2000): 188-196.
Blank, Rebecca M. Evaluating welfare reform in the United States. No. w8983. National Bureau of Economic Research, 2002.
Pierson, Paul. "The new politics of the welfare state." (2001).
