A Big Net: The Welfare Rights Movement in the Appalachian South

In the late 1960s-1970s, local white women, federal antipoverty workers, and legal aid lawyers organized welfare rights groups in the coal fields of eastern Kentucky. These activists claimed “welfare rights” as a broad banner, which attracted miners with disabilities, widows, and single mothers. They soon organized with other welfare recipients across the mountains, African American activists, and as members of the National Welfare Rights Organization. As scholars of welfare have shown, in the mid-twentieth century, mounting concerns about welfare dependency exploded when Black women gained greater access to federal welfare programs. In the popular histories of Appalachia, a parallel narrative of welfare as a social ill developed, but this one included white, unemployed men and their wives who resided in the economically depressed Mountain South. Policy makers attempted to make sense of their supposedly hopeless condition, drawing upon a range of explanations from economic dependence to mental defectiveness, and, at the same time, racialized images of welfare recipients came to dominate the American political imagination. This paper tells the story of poor white women’s welfare activism in Appalachia, considering how it played out in regional and national politics. What did the activists envision and achieve? How and when did they work against the tide of sexist and racist rhetoric, and how did the growing anti-welfare sentiment limit their goals? What do we learn about the knotty intersections of race, gender, class, and region when we consider welfare rights from the perspective of rural white women in the Mountain South?