Flat Broke with Children: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform

By Sharon Hays

Book Overview

Hailed as a great success, welfare reform resulted in a dramatic decline in the welfare rolls--from 4.4 million families in 1996 to 2.1 million in 2001. But what does this "success" look like to the welfare mothers and welfare caseworkers who experienced it? In Flat Broke, With Children, Sharon Hays tells us the story of welfare reform from inside the welfare office and inside the lives of welfare mothers, describing the challenges that welfare recipients face in managing their work, their families, and the rules and regulations of welfare reform.
Welfare reform, experienced on the ground, is not a rosy picture. The majority of adult welfare clients are mothers--over 90 percent--and the time limits imposed by welfare reform throw millions of these mostly unmarried, desperate women into the labor market, where they must accept low wages, the most menial work, the poorest hours, with no benefits, and little flexibility. Hays provides a vivid portrait of their lives--debunking many of the stereotypes we have of welfare recipients--but she also steps back to explore what welfare reform reveals about the meaning of work and family life in our society. In particular, she argues that an inherent contradiction lies at the heart of welfare policy, which emphasizes traditional family values even as its ethic of "personal responsibility" requires women to work and leave their children in childcare or at home alone all day long.
Hays devoted three years to visiting welfare clients and two welfare offices, one in a medium-sized town in the Southeast, another in a large, metropolitan area in the West. Drawing on this hands-on research, Flat Broke, With Children is the first book to explore the impact of recent welfare reform on motherhood, marriage, and work in women's lives, and the first book to offer us a portrait of how welfare reform plays out in thousands of local welfare offices and in millions of homes across the nation.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195132882
• ISBN13: 9780195132885
• Release Date: February 2003
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 6.4" x 1.0" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

Every woman in America should read this book

I picked up this book to do a research paper on the topic of welfare reform. This book has been both enlightening and frightening in its information and the arguments put forth by the author. The research is amazingly thorough and well documented throughout the text. Hays points out many contradictions concerning the goals set forth by the Personal Responsibility Act. The bottom line is that we are living in a society that is still grossly unequal in terms of sex, race, and class. I especially appreciated the realism that the ideals and provisions of welfare reform fall far below any sort of real hope of mobility in terms of the demands of an evolving global market place. This book is not just about welfare reform; it is indicative of a society that we are becoming - one that undermines the care of our nation's children and welfare for struggling families and most especially the plight of single mothers.

"Reform" Sucks

This book will prove enlightening to anyone who is concerned with the consequences of "welfare reform." Flat Broke, while "putting a face on" reform, provides the analytical tools with which to understand the crux of the welfare dilemma. The dilemma is not unique to those women who must turn to public assistance, it is one faced by all those that live within American culture. Work and family. We all know the struggle - at least in some form.Hays does an excellent job illustrating how welfare recipients DO pursue mainstream ideals, DO foster mainstream American ideals. . . but are systematically denied the ability to live up to our cultural ideal of middle class. As always, those at the bottom bear the brunt of our cultural contradictions more than any other social group.

Incredibly insightful

Hays does a remarkable job of revealing the cultural logic behind welfare reform. In the process, we do not "just" learn about welfare recipients and their values, we learn something about our own values. It becomes very clear in reading this book that we must resolve the tensions that all families (and especially women) feel when it comes to which comes first: work or family. Only then can we figure out what is fair and good to ask of welfare mothers. I strongly recommend this book to anyone who seeks a better understanding of the paradoxes and contraditions in our laws regulating the family.

Reality vs. Rhetoric

The old cliche' of welfare and women who sit home eating well and driving nice cars is just that-Ms. Hays reflects the stories of the real women and children affected by our belief in the Horatio Algier syndrome. Too many variables exist to allow the cliche' of welfare and families to continue. The stories in this book are real people, real families who are experiencing the backlash of our punitive welfare reforms. This is not a book per say, but real people, people we care about, who are speaking to us. We need to listen.