The so-called welfare queen is among the most potent, persistent, and pernicious stereotypes ever deployed in modern politics. Popularized by Ronald Reagan, then weaponized by other conservatives, the welfare queen represents Americans’ ugliest assumptions about who receives public assistance.
The woman first smeared by this dubious title was Linda Taylor of Chicago, who was indicted for welfare fraud in 1974. Reagan hyperbolically claimed during his 1976 presidential run that she collected $150,000 in government assistance a year, including welfare benefits and food stamps (the true total was about $40,000, spread over multiple years). The Chicago Tribune reported that she drove a Cadillac and vacationed in Hawaii, while a photo in The New York Times showed Taylor emerging from a court date, elegantly coiffed and draped in a fur-trimmed coat. But as criminal as she may have been, Taylor was no more “typical” of Americans on welfare than Bernie Madoff was “typical” of investment bankers.
Nevertheless, the archetype of the welfare queen was powerful enough to elevate welfare reform to a national crisis and to help propel Reagan to the White House four years later. The welfare queen was “symbolically terrifying,” the historian Rick Perlstein told the Chicago Tribune in 2019. “There were a thousand Linda Taylors, waiting to bankrupt your city.”
In fact, as the political scientist Anne M. Whitesell argues in a new book, Living Off the Government?, much of U.S. social policy in the post-Reagan era is a direct reaction to the welfare queen’s perceived moral defects. “The public identity of the welfare queen—the poor, single African American woman whose poverty was caused by her own laziness and promiscuity—is still the driving force in creating welfare policy,” she writes. The results, she argues, are public policies that calcify racial and gender stereotypes of people in poverty while failing to provide the help they actually need.
Whitesell’s book provides a critical reminder of the extent to which U.S. social policy reflects value judgments about the poor, not the realities of their circumstances. These judgments, moreover, are untempered by the perspectives of the poor themselves, who Whitesell argues are utterly voiceless in the political and policy debates that often dictate the most intimate details of their lives. As a result, the myth of the welfare queen reigns largely unchallenged, to the detriment of the nation’s most vulnerable citizens.
In her opening chapters, Whitesell charts the rise of the welfare queen as the apotheosis of a long and sorry history in the United States of treating poverty as a condition of moral deficit, not economic need.
Beginning in colonial times, Whitesell writes, industrious Puritans who venerated work as a godly virtue saw poverty largely as the consequence of sloth, although they did make allowances for those who fell on hard times through no fault of their own. Thus rose the notion of the “deserving” poor, which Americans have embraced ever since.
In Whitesell’s analysis, “deserving” has historically meant white women who were formerly married (that is, widows), while the Black welfare queen has become the epitome of undeserving poverty. As a case in point, Whitesell documents the evolution of public welfare programs beginning with the “mothers’ pensions” adopted by many states in the early 1900s, which were largely for the benefit of widows with young children. At the time, Whitesell writes, Progressive Era reformers “were concerned that women working outside the home would have an adverse effect on their children and lead to the disintegration of the family unit.” Public benefits would enable them to stay at home and tend to the domestic obligations of child-rearing. Similar sentiments animated the creation in 1935 of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the federal program intended to support state-level mothers’ pension programs.
But this generosity persisted only so long as beneficiaries were white, Whitesell argues. In 1931, for instance, only about 4 percent of mothers’ pension recipients were minorities. When the demographics of welfare recipients shifted, as it did in the 1960s and ’70s, public perceptions of welfare changed as well. Thanks to incessant media coverage of urban slums and sensational scandals like that of Linda Taylor, many Americans came to believe that the “typical” welfare recipient was a single Black mom in the inner city—even though the overwhelming majority of recipients were, and still are, white. By the 1970s, opinion polls found that most Americans believed that welfare recipients were “on relief for dishonest reasons” and that the nation was spending too much on welfare. In 1986, a White House report Whitesell cites condemned AFDC as “an enabler—a program which enables women to live without a husband or a job.”
Implicit in these condemnations, Whitesell argues, was that the women “enabled” to live in this way were undeserving of government help because they were Black. “Black mothers have always been expected to work, from slaves required to work in the field immediately before and after giving birth, to Black women serving as domestic help for white families,” Whitesell writes. To be a Black woman on welfare was automatically to be a welfare queen, living in violation of societal expectations and at society’s expense.
Ultimately, these racialized resentments found expression in public policy, through welfare reform in 1996. This legislation, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, eliminated the federal entitlement, AFDC, and replaced it with a time-limited program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). Many of its provisions, Whitesell argues, aimed to punish the shortcomings of the welfare queens perceived to dominate the nation’s welfare rolls. Work requirements, for instance, were meant to counteract recipients’ presumed “laziness” by conditioning benefits on proof of activity.
Meanwhile, provisions like the “family cap” targeted their alleged promiscuity. Under the family cap, states could set a maximum allowable benefit per family, regardless of the number of children in the household. Citing the fellow political scientist Gwendolyn Mink, Whitesell argues that this provision is “rooted in the stereotype of [welfare recipients as] ‘reckless breeders who bear children to avoid work.’ ” The family cap’s purpose, Whitesell writes, is “to stop ‘welfare queens’ from having more children to increase their benefits and the overt concern about the number of ‘out-of-wedlock’ births, which is largely viewed as a Black problem.” In fact, she finds, states “with a higher proportion of Blacks and Hispanics in the population” are more likely to implement family caps.
Whitesell’s book also addresses a central reason why the trope of the welfare queen carries such sway: because she is pure abstraction. While the idea of the welfare queen is omnipresent in policy making, poor people themselves have no representation in the halls of Congress or in state legislatures. The Americans most affected by welfare policy have little to no say in their own destinies and are often pawns in broader ideological disputes.
Although civil rights groups, unions, and other advocates can offer surrogate representation to some extent, Whitesell writes, their interests do not always align with those of poor Americans, nor are Americans on welfare necessarily their top priority. As a result, the lack of representation means that poor Americans are relatively defenseless in the face of interest groups advocating policies to their detriment. Business interests in need of low-wage labor, for instance, may favor shorter time limits and tighter work requirements, Whitesell argues. And indeed, she finds, research confirms that is the case in some states.
The primary audience of Living Off the Government? is academic, but general readers will find its narrative on the history of welfare to be instructive and eye-opening. Students of poverty policy will also appreciate the detailed examinations of current welfare policy—such as work requirements and time limits—that Whitesell uses to introduce each chapter. And Whitesell’s reexamination of welfare policy through the lens of racial and gender bias should be enlightening even for experts. Her insights on the lack of political representation should also serve as a wake-up call to advocates who presume to lobby on poor Americans’ behalf. Whitesell falls short, however, in not providing a description of what adequate representation could look like and, more importantly, what policy changes she imagines such representation could effect.
Nevertheless, her book is a valuable addition to scholarship on the limitations of American social policy. Most crucially, it offers an important warning about the prejudices that can warp public policy and institutionalize them still further.
