Reading and Discussion Questions
Felicia Kornbluh, The Battle for Welfare Rights
Introduction
1. This book documents the brief but dramatic course of a national poor people’s movement that demanded “welfare rights” during the 1960s. Approximately when did it begin and end? Had you ever heard of this movement before?
2. What major points does the author make about how the story of this movement alters our view of the post-1945 period as well as of the African-American civil rights movement and the second wave of feminism?
3. What does Kornbluh write about why the movement for welfare rights in the 1960s is either forgotten or dismissed as an error? Does she agree or disagree?
Chapter 1
4. Who were the key actors and organizations in the emergence of the movement in New York and California?
5. What issues were key to mobilizing poor people before demands for “welfare rights” became explicit?
6. Kornbluh describes a strike by New York welfare workers in January 1965. What kind of alliances did this create and why were they important to the future of the movement?
7. Who was Jacobus tenBroek? Who was Saul Alinsky? Who were Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward?
8. What specific influences shaped welfare rights organizers in California?
Chapter 2
9. How welfare recipients understood the meaning of equal citizenship is a theme that the author stresses throughout the book. What exactly does she suggest their view of citizenship was? What practical evidence does she offer in terms of how welfare recipients organized?
10. What role did motherhood play in shaping the demands of many welfare recipients?
11. Describe the importance of “minimum standards” elaborated by welfare bureaucracies.
12. Who had the authority to determine the household budget of a particular welfare recipient in the 1960s? Why did it matter?
13. What was the most successful early strategy in local welfare organizing?
14. What is a guaranteed income?
15. The National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) was founded in 1967. Dignity was one of its basic principles. What did dignity mean to NWRO activists at the time?
Chapter 3
16. What was a “fair hearing”? What role did this procedure play in building the movement? Why was this a form of “legal civil disobedience”?
17. What role did law and lawyers play in building the welfare rights movement? How was this like and unlike the roles of other middle-class professionals?
18. How did the legal strategies pursued by activists express their ideas about equality and citizenship?
19. What impact did the dramatic increase in hearings have on New York’s welfare bureaucracy? How did the city respond?
20. By definition, hearings were vehicles for individual grievances. Why does Kornbluh present them as the most effective movement-building effort among welfare rights advocates?
Chapter 4
21. Kornbluh offers several explanations for the emergence of organized backlash against welfare programs and recipients in the mid-1960s. What are they?
22. Making poor people aware of the benefits to which they were legally entitled was an important goal of activists that also threatened to undermine their efforts. Explain.
23. Why did the equation between freedom and paid work, which was so important to many feminists in the 1960s, pose a major dilemma for welfare rights organizations?
24. Why were the 1967 amendments to the Social Security Act controversial?
25. What relationship did the welfare rights movement have with Martin Luther King, Coretta Scott King, and the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign?
26. How did the presidential campaign of 1968 illustrate the increasing political difficulties faced by the movement?
27. At the end of this chapter, Kornbluh concludes: “The welfare rights movement lost power because most white voters opposed everything it stood for.” Explain her argument. What is your response to it?
Chapter 5
28. How and why did welfare activists extend their consumer-oriented campaigns from the state to the private market? Give an example of such a campaign.
29. Do you think about access to a credit card as an emblem of citizenship and “rights”? Why or why not? What was the position of 1960s welfare rights activists on this issue?
30. Do you think the example of the welfare rights movement suggests more differences or similarities between claiming rights on the basis of production (i.e. paid labor) and claiming rights on the basis of consumption?
31. What was a “shop-in”?
32. What difficulty did activists face in trying to make income-based discrimination legally visible that others had not faced with race- and/or gender-based discrimination?
33. How did welfare recipients’ demands as consumers promote anti-welfare sentiment?
34. Why were activists skeptical of the food stamp program? Why did they think it had the same problems as the flat grants proposed in place of minimum standards?
Chapter 6
35. What was the Family Assistance Plan (FAP)? Why did Richard Nixon, a Republican president, propose such a major expansion of aid to the poor in 1969?
36. What position did the NWRO take on the Family Assistance Plan?
37. What impact did the Vietnam War have on national welfare policy and activism after Nixon’s election?
Chapter 7
38. Kornbluh describes conditions in the early 1970s as especially bad for welfare rights activism. Why? What had changed?
39. One proposal to help NWRO survive would have emphasized universal employment and the recruitment of low-wage workers to the movement. Why was this controversial? How did this illustrate the challenges that welfare rights activists in building coalitions with civil rights activists, feminists, or even other poor people’s advocates?
40. What were “conformity hearings”?
41. What did Goldberg v. Kelly accomplish for the movement? What did it fail to accomplish?
Conclusion
42. At least two major developments were responsible for the death of welfare rights in the early 1970s. What were they?
43. Kornbluh argues that the movement’s importance rested in its vision of American citizenship, and especially its conception of the relationship between wage labor and citizenship. Explain.
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