Working Poor Women's Unpaid Labor: Part II

Within our course material, and specifically within the NPR stories that we've listened to, there are vast gaps between those of the opinion that welfare has been effective and those who think that it has not.

While those who champion welfare are correct in that there are less people enrolled in that system than ever, at the same time, enrollment increased for other programs such as Medicaid, food stamps and disability benefits. Vivyan Adair, Associate Professor of women's studies at Hamilton College, argued that welfare needs to work to educate, instead of recipients being ushered into work but still needing to depend on services, where cannot be self-sufficient.

Robert Rector, senior research fellow of domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation, argued that welfare is working positively because poverty numbers have declined in children and in single mothers. He believes the problem with welfare is that the whole system needs reform instead of simply getting mothers into the work force or offering them educational opportunities.

In Ajay Chaudry's "Putting Children First," the mothers in his sample use a variety of adaptive strategies after their welfare bouts have ended.


Chaudry's recommendations to make the system work to the advantages of the people begins with having the government increase funding for children's programs and making sure that the system is totally synchronized and usable. The system must also be usable and aware of the people who are to benefit from it and with whom it interacts: modern working women who are single mothers. In doing this everything must be made simpler, and redone from the ground up. Systems must work together for the benefit of children, their education and their well being by making programs available, flexible and seamless in their transitions from one stage of life to the next. Finally, the biggest, most sweeping and daunting recommendations from Chaudry is to work toward a society that has eradicated poverty as a whole. While this is the most far off of his ideas, it is certainly the most ideal and would be better than living in a society where we deal with existing poverty instead of proactively preventing it from happening.