2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

Scholars have shown that historically, welfare has not been considered a “right” for American women. Rather, women, especially women of color, have been considered “dependent” upon the welfare system, to the detriment of themselves and the nation. Scholarship on twentieth-century welfare rights activism has shown how women challenged gendered and racial assumptions and redefined what welfare meant for themselves and their families. This panel extends and complicates the narrative of the modern welfare rights movement by focusing on a broad range of welfare programs and constituents which intersected with competing definitions of American citizenship. The panel expands our understanding of welfare rights action as the welfare state expanded in the latter half of the twentieth century. The papers reveal how women across diverse geographical and political boundaries of the United States challenged popular impressions of who a “welfare recipient” was. Using the language and conception of “rights,” low-income women negotiated with and challenged governmental agents, confronting the boundaries which placed them outside of eligibility for welfare due to race, class, and colonial status. The papers will examine Native American women’s access to World War II dependency allowances; the construction of a broad welfare rights movement among rural white women in the Appalachian South in the late 1960s and 1970s; and African American women’s urban homesteading in the 1970s-1980s. These papers demonstrate how diverse women used citizenship as a construct and tool to combat discriminatory rhetoric and practice designed to limit their access to the American welfare state.