Reformed American Dreams: Welfare Mothers, Higher Education, and Activism

By Sheila M. Katz

Reformed American Dreams explores the experiences of low-income single mothers who pursued higher education while on welfare after the 1996 welfare reforms. This research occurred in an area where grassroots activism by and for mothers on welfare in higher education was directly able to affect the implementation of public policy. Half of the participants in Sheila M. Katz’s research were activists with the grassroots welfare rights organization, LIFETIME, trying to change welfare policy and to advocate for better access to higher education. Reformed American Dreams takes up their struggle to raise families, attend school, and become student activists, all while trying to escape poverty. Katz highlights mothers’ experiences as they pursued higher education on welfare and became grassroots activists during the Great Recession.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Jul 12, 2019
• ISBN: 9780813594361

Book preview

Reformed American Dreams

Reformed American Dreams

Welfare Mothers, Higher Education, and Activism

SHEILA M. KATZ

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Katz, Sheila Marie, author.

Title: Reformed American dreams : welfare mothers, higher education, and activism / Sheila M. Katz.

Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018042830 | ISBN 9780813594347 (paperback) | ISBN 9780813594354 (cloth)

Subjects: LCSH: Low-income single mothers—United States—Social conditions. | Low-income single mothers—Education (Higher)—United States. | Welfare recipients—Employment—United States. | United States—Social policy—20th century. | Social movements—United States. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Social Classes. | EDUCATION / Higher. | EDUCATION / Inclusive Education. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Women’s Studies. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Discrimination & Race Relations.

Classification: LCC HQ759 .K34748 2019 | DDC 361.6/140973—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018042830

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2019 by Sheila M. Katz

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

To LIFETIME’s parents, in support of your tireless work fighting poverty; to activists and mothers fighting for better futures; to my parents for loving support; and to Dan for our future

Contents

List of Selected Abbreviations and Acronyms

Introduction

1 Reforming the American Dream

2 Pathways onto Welfare and into College

3 Reformed Grassroots Activism

4 Survival through College

5 My Education Means Everything to Me

6 Hope and Fear during the Great Recession

7 Graduating into the Great Recession

8 An American Dream for All

Afterword: Evolution of the American Dream

Appendix A: Methods Appendix

Appendix B: Profiles of Interview Participants in 2006

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

List of Selected Abbreviations and Acronyms

Reformed American Dreams

Introduction

1996

Higher education for the middle class, work first for the poor was the message millions of low-income single mothers in college received from the 1996 U.S. welfare reforms. For many, their American Dream of pursuing higher education as a route off of welfare and out of poverty ended on August 22, 1996. President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) that day, which created the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, and reformed the U.S. welfare system. This social policy shift ended welfare as a social entitlement program and emphasized a work first approach for the poor. Welfare reform drastically reduced higher educational opportunities for low-income single mothers. Unaware of this massive shift in American poverty policy, I started my junior year as a sociology major at the University of Georgia three weeks later. I walked into my first major-level course, Josephine Beoku-Betts’s Sociology of Poverty and Discrimination. She started the course with the simple question—What is poverty?—and asked each student to write down an answer. Most of us wrote down brief answers about meeting basic needs or not being homeless or hungry. The woman who was sitting in front of me wrote a long, detailed, personal narrative about being able to feed her son, buy essentials (such as toilet paper and tampons) not covered by food stamps, and being able to complete her higher education. The class was stunned. I was stunned, too, and then intrigued. Her openness on the first day of class about having been a teenage mom, going on welfare, living in poverty, and now being a college student was surprising, refreshing, startling, and graphic.

She was a single mother on welfare pursuing her college education, like me a junior-year sociology major, and very worried about how the recent welfare reform changes would affect her. Georgia’s welfare system was already less than fully supportive of her pursuit of higher education while on welfare, but she had fought her way through the bureaucracy of both the welfare system and the financial aid system to go to college. She had earned an associate’s degree at a community college and transferred to the University of Georgia for her bachelor’s degree. She was finally taking courses to complete her major and was just two years from graduating. Then welfare reform was passed. The new federal welfare policies were even worse for participants pursuing education, and she was deeply worried. She openly wondered how the new policies would affect her chance of completing her undergraduate degree. We became friends during that course, and I learned more about her experiences on welfare and in higher education over the next two years. We graduated at the same time in 1998 yet lost touch after graduation. Her perspective and perseverance stayed with me. Her trepidation and biting critique of welfare reform resonated.

2001

The Institute for Women’s Policy Research hosted a feminist social policy conference in Washington, D.C., in June 2001. Welfare reform was approaching its first reauthorization, and feminists from across the country gathered to discuss the upcoming policy battle. In one session, single mothers from California who had completed higher education while on welfare gave presentations about their experiences and their grassroots activism to challenge welfare reform’s restrictive educational policies. They discussed their perspectives on welfare reform, welfare reform’s impact on low-income single mothers in higher education, and their activism on this issue. During that session, a light went on in my head. As a graduate student of sociology at Vanderbilt University, I had just completed my course work and was trying to figure out how to combine my interests in poverty, access to higher education, and gender into a qualitative doctoral dissertation. The session reminded me of my friend from the University of Georgia. After that moment, I turned my attention more directly to studying and understanding welfare reform and the experiences of low-income student parents, especially women attending college while on welfare.

2003

The institute hosted another conference in Washington in June 2003, and I attended another panel about welfare reform and access to higher education. At the conference, there was much discussion of the upcoming 2004 election, and feminists in attendance expressed concern about the stalled reauthorization of the welfare reform legislation. At the session about welfare reauthorization and higher education, the activists from California who had made presentations in 2001 discussed their experiences and perspectives. The panel was chaired by the founder and executive director of the grassroots organization Low-Income Families’ Empowerment through Education (LIFETIME), and it included a few mothers who were leaders of the organization. After the session, I introduced myself to them. We started chatting about the session and the issues. We went to lunch to talk more. Over the next two hours in the hotel’s lobby restaurant, we dug into these issues and recognized a shared passion and perspective. I mentioned that I was in the process of moving to Berkeley, California, and would be living in the University of California, Berkeley’s family student housing. They invited me to volunteer with their organization to learn more about student parents’ activism under welfare reform in California.

I started volunteering with LIFETIME in October 2003, after my move to California, and I eventually became a part-time paid staff person, a position I held until December 2006. From LIFETIME’s members I learned about the experiences of low-income families who participated in California’s welfare program, California Work Opportunity and Responsibility to Kids (CalWORKs). The families active with LIFETIME were pursuing higher education while on welfare, and I saw directly how they struggled through college and with welfare requirements. I learned about welfare rights activism and their experiences working to improve welfare policy.

2006

On a chilly September afternoon in 2006, I met Keisha, a twenty-year-old black community college student and mother of one. Keisha was six months pregnant with her second child and had been on CalWORKs since the birth of her first. The afternoon we met had been particularly stressful for both of us: I had conducted a morning interview on another campus that had run late and rushed across town through congested traffic to Keisha’s campus. Keisha was late for the interview because her two-year-old daughter was sick. We almost missed each other outside the campus library. However, at the end of the interview, Keisha gently grabbed onto my arm, took a deep breath, looked into my eyes, and said, I really liked this interview. People are always asking me questions. The welfare workers want to know all my business, all my numbers, but they never want to know my story. You wanted to know my story. She squeezed my arm and left. That moment, and countless others during my research, illustrates the lived reality of mothers pursuing higher education after welfare reform in the United States: the reformed welfare system was more interested in women’s numbers than their experiences, stories, or perspectives. However, on that September afternoon, Keisha told me not just her numbers but also her story. She explored the meaning of her education, her pursuit of the American Dream, and her journey on welfare.

Welfare Reform and the American Dream

A tension emerges when the ideals of the American Dream are contrasted with the realities of welfare reform. A contradiction exists between our collective consciousness and our social policy. Despite a pull yourself up by your bootstraps discourse, the 1996 welfare reform policies devalued and severely restricted participants’ access to higher education. The reformed policy required low-income mothers to conform to strict regulations and meet stringent work requirements or face severe sanctions. Welfare reform policies arose from prevailing public opinion and false assumptions by politicians that welfare mothers were morally different from middle-class Americans. Welfare reform was based on the assumption that it was necessary to change low-income single mothers’ attitudes about work and responsibility for their children. The argument that they had deficient morality presupposed that welfare mothers were not interested in pursuing the American Dream through hard work or higher education. U.S. welfare reform policy blamed them for their poverty, single-parent status, and low economic position in society. The deficient morality argument in regard to low-income single mothers is neither new nor limited to the debate about welfare reform. Nor is it supported by extensive research about low-income women’s lives. To address these tensions, I explore the ideology of the American Dream and how it presents a paradox for welfare reform. I examine how extensive changes made to the U.S. welfare system in 1996 prioritized work first policies for low-income parents, mostly single mothers, and restricted educational opportunities for those on welfare.

The assumptions about single motherhood that drove the 1996 welfare reforms were not novel ideas, but they did reinforce the historical debate over the deserving and the undeserving poor. Welfare reform policy evolved from these decades-old misrepresentations of motherhood, women’s morality, and the role of women’s work. The result was the work first message of welfare reform. Yet, the reality is that low-income women have always worked. The hitch is that women’s wages and the conditions of their work are simply not enough to pull a family out of poverty—especially in the U.S. economy after welfare reform. And these economic conditions are getting worse. The role of higher education is more important than ever.

Some of the least advantaged workers in the American labor market—welfare mothers—can benefit the most from opportunities to pursue higher education. Therefore, this book studies how mothers on welfare pursued higher education as a pathway to the American Dream after welfare reform. In the chapters that follow, you will read the personal narratives of sixty-three mothers in the San Francisco Bay Area as they explore how and why they pursued their dream of completing higher education while participating in the reformed welfare system. They tell the stories of their academic endeavors and their activism. They relate their experiences after graduation, building careers, and surviving the Great Recession.

Purpose and Central Research Questions

A simple sentence opens and frames Sharon Hays’s Flat Broke with Children: A nation’s laws reflect a nation’s values.¹ My research started just as Hays’s iconic book was published, and my study builds on hers by finding that although our nation believes in higher education for the middle class, it legislates work first for the poor. In Jennifer Hochschild’s study of low-income African Americans, she found that most poor blacks … see two paths to achieving their dreams: education and work.² Most of the women in my research had worked at some point before going on welfare, and that work was not helping them achieve their dreams. In many cases, their work was not even enough to get them out of poverty. My book takes up the tensions between the ideology of the American Dream and the reformed welfare system. I explore the ideologies of the American Dream and the 1996 welfare reforms to frame how mothers on welfare who are pursuing a higher education—half of whom are student activists—challenge prevailing assumptions about mothers on welfare. Mothers on welfare are not morally different from other Americans, and the frame of the American Dream can explain their actions. They are trying to achieve goals similar to those of other Americans, such as providing for their families, by pursuing a higher education.

Many Americans value higher education and self-sufficiency and support the ideology of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, yet welfare mothers who are trying to pull themselves up out of poverty through higher education face structural barriers from the welfare system and shaming from society. Therefore, these central research questions guided my research: What factors lead mothers to pursue higher education while participating in the reformed welfare system? What challenges do they encounter? What resources help them pursue education? What role do grassroots activism or advocacy social service organizations play? How does being involved in grassroots activism affect their experiences? Are women on welfare upwardly economically mobile after they complete higher education? How did they fare during and after the Great Recession? What implications do their experiences and perspectives have for changing poverty policy or affecting other social policies? And what does the American Dream mean to them, and how do they pursue it?

Research That Reflects Welfare Mothers’ Lived Experiences

In this study, I focused on individual women’s experiences of attempting to increase their human capital in the face of structural barriers. Instead of focusing on personal barriers through the examination of large data sets, my ethnographic research centers its analysis on women’s lived experiences, and therefore this study challenges traditional approaches to welfare research. In answering the research questions for this study, I used a grounded theory approach to consider academic perspectives on poverty—structural theories and human capital theory—as mothers on welfare explained their on the ground experiences in higher education. This allowed the theory to emerge from the data to show which aspects of these women’s lives, if any, support existing poverty and sociological theories. Through this exploration, I also drew conclusions about theoretical approaches to poverty that women used in their narratives. As some of the most disadvantaged people in our society and in higher education, and an underexplored group in sociology, the women in this study provide a unique perspective on life choices; social narratives around the role of higher education; the use of human, social, and cultural capital; and their rationales for undertaking this endeavor.

The research that I engage in is feminist, applied, sociological, and activist. I identify myself as a scholar-activist, as articulated most clearly by Sara Goldrick-Rab.³ I use my skills as a social science researcher to conduct sociological research so that we can engage in creating social policies informed by diverse and high-quality research. Given this, I am highly critical of the idea of giving voice to marginalized populations. I do not give my participants a voice. They have voices—loud, proud, and strong ones. They use their voices to express their experiences on welfare, in college, and in activism. They use their voices to engage in policy debates. They volunteered to have their voices be part of my research on this topic. They contributed their voices to this project in the hope that they can make a difference in the social policies that they have lived experiences using. I am a researcher who asked them about their experiences. They told me. And they invited me into their lives to see for myself. The collection of their voices and my analysis is what I hoped to write about in this book.

Through qualitative longitudinal research in the San Francisco Bay Area, I explored why and how mothers pursued higher education while participating in the reformed welfare system. I conducted this ethnographic research in Oakland and San Francisco from October 2003 until May 2011 through forty-five in-depth qualitative longitudinal interviews in 2006, focus groups with eighteen additional participants in 2007, and ongoing participant observation with a total of sixty-three mothers pursuing higher education while participating in the welfare system. I conducted follow-up interviews in 2008 with twenty-five of the forty-five original interview participants. In the spring of 2011, I conducted another round of follow-up interviews with thirty-five of the original participants, which gives this study a 78 percent retention rate. The research participants were single mothers on CalWORKs with dependent children and were enrolled in (or had recently graduated from) higher education programs as their welfare work activity.

The San Francisco Bay Area was ideal for this research because, compared to other states, in California the laws and social policies are generous in allowing educational programs to count as welfare activities under the TANF program. It was also ideal because of the presence of LIFETIME. Founded in 1996, LIFETIME was an independent nongovernmental organization that was started as a support group for and by mothers on welfare who attended the University of California, Berkeley. It grew into a statewide organization and was one of the few grassroots welfare-rights organizations in the United States.

Single-mother families in California accounted for approximately 70 percent of the state’s welfare caseload in 2004, and all adults on CalWORKs have dependent children. Therefore, single mothers are the largest category of adults on welfare in California. In California during the period of this study, approximately 12 percent of the state’s welfare-to-work single-parent participants were engaged in vocational education, which is primarily how CalWORKs classified participants pursued higher education. The participants were enrolled in programs through the California Community Colleges, California State University, or University of California systems, with only a few attending local private colleges. Twenty-four of the participants were involved in LIFETIME as members, clients, or leaders, and the other twenty-one had no or only minimal involvement with the organization. The participants ranged in age from eighteen to fifty-one, with a median age of thirty-three. The median number of children that participants had at the time of their first interview in 2006 was two.

Interview participants were recruited on an ongoing basis from the early fall of 2005 until the late fall of 2006, through the community colleges and universities located within each county and through LIFETIME. Recruitment was focused on the office on each campus that served students on CalWORKs, such as the Extended Opportunity Programs and Services (EOPS) and Cooperative Agencies Resources for Education (CARE) offices at the community colleges and the special centers for student parents at the universities. I recruited participants at three sites in Alameda County and two in San Francisco County. The first interviews were done in person, usually on the participant’s campus or at the advocacy organization.

The early data collection for this study occurred during ongoing policy uncertainty surrounding the TANF program. TANF is required by federal law to be reauthorized every five years. The first reauthorization was scheduled for late 2001, which was delayed due to the events of and national response to September 11. After eleven temporary extensions over five years, TANF was reauthorized on February 6, 2006, as part of the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005. Therefore, the temporary extensions and eventual reauthorization were an ever-present concern during the early interviews I conducted.

In August and September 2008, with a grant from the National Science Foundation, I conducted follow-up interviews with twenty-five of the original forty-five participants. In 2009, I interviewed many of the advocates and advisors who helped introduce me to participants in 2006. In 2011, with a grant from the National Poverty Center, I conducted a final round of follow-up interviews with thirty-five of the participants. I was able to find more of the participants in 2011 than in 2008 due to social media connections and help from the advocates. The second and third interviews were conducted in restaurants, coffee shops, or over the phone, depending upon the participant’s preference. Interviews lasted between thirty minutes and three hours and were audiorecorded and transcribed. I used ATLAS.ti qualitative data analysis software for coding and analysis, using grounded theory.

Chapter Outline

In the chapters that follow, I explore women’s on-the-ground narratives about pursuing higher education while in the reformed welfare system and their activism to change welfare policy. In chapter 1, Reforming the American Dream, I discuss academic theories of poverty and the history of welfare policy and explore how welfare reform affected access to higher education for low-income mothers. The American Dream permeates the national collective consciousness with democratic and meritocratic values, but it also promotes capitalist and materialistic values as normative. The American Dream focuses on middle-class values and provides a frame for middle-class Americans to pursue these goals. Yet what does our current social safety net indicate about the ideals of the American Dream? What are our national assumptions about how low-income people should pursue it? To address these tensions, this chapter examines how extensive changes in 1996 to the U.S. national welfare system prioritized work first policies for low-income parents, mostly single mothers, and restricted educational opportunities for those on welfare. Chapter 1 demonstrates that mothers on welfare are not morally different from their more affluent counterparts and that their decision making is also rooted in the ideology of the American Dream.

In chapter 2, Pathways onto Welfare and into College, the women in this study found themselves at a point in their life where they recognized that they were faced with multiple barriers to self-sufficiency and wanted to change course. This led them to apply for welfare and enroll in higher education. These two events happened in any order, sometimes very close together in time and sometimes years apart. The mothers’ circumstances that led them onto welfare and into higher education challenge the commonly used frame in research after welfare reform: the barriers to employment or self-sufficiency argument. As this chapter will illustrate, the mothers in this study experienced multiple barriers to self-sufficiency, yet they enrolled in and completed higher education nonetheless. Many oft-cited barriers in the literature since welfare reform shaped the circumstances of the women in this study as they pursued higher education while on welfare. The mothers did not view their situations as barriers but as necessary experiences to pursuing higher education. The women made a conscious choice to return to school despite the welfare system’s prodding them into work first activities. Participants cited one of five situations as the central reason they applied for welfare and enrolled in higher education: surviving domestic violence, prolonged unemployment, recovery from substance abuse, an unexpected pregnancy, and balancing unmarried partnerships. This chapter concludes with a discussion of how these circumstances do not prove mothers’ individual deficiencies but instead illuminate social structural inequalities and social policy failures in our society.

Chapter 3, Reformed Grassroots Activism, explores how LIFETIME engaged in grassroots activism after welfare reform and how mothers on welfare come to be involved with grassroots welfare-rights organizing and to develop an activist consciousness. The chapter opens with vignettes of the organization’s protests and political work and then describes the varying levels of participants’ engagement with the organization: as parent leaders, clients, and potential participants. One of the central research questions that drove this project asked how the narratives of mothers involved with grassroots advocacy and activism differed from those who were not involved. Participation in grassroots advocacy organizations helped the mothers on welfare that I interviewed by providing them with peer-based emotional and advocacy support and empowering them to externalize the shame associated with being on welfare. In addition, this chapter examines the ways that the LIFETIME mothers’ narratives differed from the narratives of mothers who were not involved with the organization.

In chapter 4, Survival through College, I relate how the mothers I interviewed constructed survival narratives to give meaning to their struggles to pursue higher education while on welfare and to explain how they resisted the reformed policies. To the student mothers, survival meant engaging in whatever activity they could to provide for themselves and their children within their moral framework, while using available resources to complete school and participate in the welfare system. The mothers also articulated their on-the-ground survival strategies to meet their families’ material needs. Their survival strategies reveal the social, economic, and personal costs of pursuing higher education while on welfare. This chapter shows how the women persevered through school, critically assessed the failures of welfare reform, and used covert forms of resistance to welfare policies. Their survival narratives illustrate the contradictions between the value of education in American society and the policies of welfare reform—specifically, how the institutional goals of the two often conflict. The mothers’ narratives are individual, as I explore in the first section of the chapter, yet also collective in critiquing the welfare system through grassroots activism, which is explored later in the chapter, and in other ways.

Chapter 5, My Education Means Everything to Me, considers the meanings and expectations the mothers shared about their education. This chapter demonstrates that mothers on welfare do not have deviant views of work, marriage, and personal responsibility. Their educations mean everything to them, and they pursue higher education to realize normative ideals of the American Dream. The expectations that mothers hold for their education resemble the reasons why other Americans pursue higher education: for labor market advancement, as role models for their children, for self-empowerment, and to give meaning to their lives. Mothers reflected on their families’ view of their educational journey and how higher education has affected their children. Therefore, the findings of this chapter challenge the prevailing ideas about welfare mothers as morally deficient. The mothers cited their education as the most effective use of their sixty months of time-limited welfare aid and believed it would enable them to escape poverty. Women in this study provide a unique perspective on educational choices and motivations, expectations about the power of a college degree, and social narratives around the role of higher education.

Chapter 6, Hope and Fear during the Great Recession, is based on the second round of interviews that I conducted with participants in August and September of 2008, amid bank bailouts and failures, housing foreclosures, and high levels of unemployment. A moment of national crisis ensued. At the same time, Barack Obama was running for president. The possibility of electing our first black president gave many Americans, including most of the women in this study, great hope. Many mothers graduated from college that year, others transferred to a state university from a community college, and many were looking for postcollege career-track jobs. Participants expressed the profound tensions of this time. This chapter also examines how the grassroots activism that the mothers engaged in while in college played a role in their early postcollege experiences or affected their career or educational goals after they achieved their first educational goal. Mothers discussed how they experienced great hope, deep fear, and ongoing uncertainty. They noted that their feelings were profoundly personal, but their anxieties were typical of the worries of Americans during the Great Recession. This chapter also discusses the impact of the women’s education and graduation on their children and families.

Graduating into the Great Recession, chapter 7, is based on the third set of interviews that I conducted in the spring of 2011. It examines the impact of the Great Recession on the mothers and how their perspectives changed in response to the recession. The meaning of their education, which in chapter 5 was everything to them, had changed slightly by 2011: they valued their education as an asset that no one could take away from them, but they expressed their reduced expectations of its power. Furthermore, this chapter explores the question of whether participating in grassroots advocacy and activism helps mothers better endure economic downturns. My research finds that involvement in grassroots activism helped mothers finish higher education programs, but their community involvement and activism while they were in college also helped them advance in the labor market. This chapter then discusses how the mothers’ behaviors and attitudes toward money, time, and consumption changed in response to the Great Recession. Their experience with LIFETIME had a positive impact on their perspectives, behavior, and economic conditions during the recession. The close of this chapter reflects on what the mothers believe our society should learn from the Great Recession, especially as it relates to economic security for low- and middle-income families.

In chapter 8, An American Dream for All, the closing chapter of the book, I explore how the mothers are still pursuing an American Dream, while being critical of the American Dream. The chapter explores what our national safety net could look like if we believed more in the democratic and meritocratic elements of the American Dream than in the capitalist and materialist ones. Over the course of the research, most of the women earned a bachelor’s degree, and several went on to