week 3 Reflection

from marriages, sometimes without suffering opprobrium. For women with children, however, such choices exact heavy costs: single mothers pay for their intimate decisions with their mate- rial security and with their rights. Government argues “child well-being” to justify its interventions into the associational autonomy of single mothers—especially if they are poor. Wielding the choice to bear children against the choice to not marry, government delivers some of the most severe blows to women’s equality. One need only examine welfare policy, which aims to end unmarried mothers’ marital status rather than their poverty, to see how.

I

Let me turn now to the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program (TANF), which the Personal Responsi- bility Act created when it “reformed” welfare 1996. In its famous “findings,” the TANF provision of the PRWORA blames countless social ills on Black single mothers; in its statement of pur- pose, TANF policy pledges to promote marriage, reduce out-of-wedlock births, and to “encourage the formation and maintenance of two-parent families.”5

Toward these ends, TANF subjects single mothers to work rules that deprive them of the right and the flexibility to make parenting decisions about the care needs of their children. It sub- jects them to paternity disclosure rules that vitiate their sexual and reproductive privacy. It subjects them to family formation rules, which confer social and financial fatherhood on biologi- cal fathers (and instantiate their legal rights) regardless of a mother’s say. In these ways and more, TANF punishes single motherhood, endangering the physical, emotional, and material security of poor mothers and their children, jeopardizing poor mothers’ custody of their own children, and negating their right to form intimate associations on their own terms.

As Public Vows convincingly demonstrates, governmental interference in intimate life—especially in the formation of fam- ilies through marriage—has almost always forwarded dominant societal and governmental goals for racial and gender order. That’s what anti-miscegenation laws were all about. That’s what coverture was all about. That’s what countless immigration and naturalization laws were all about, laws that restricted the entry of wives and women, or that stripped U.S. women of citizenship if they married non-citizen men.

TANF recapitulates the racialized, undemocratic, patriarchal tradition in its pronouncements and punishments regarding child- bearing and childrearing by single mothers. Marriage serves sev-

eral functions in TANF: it privatizes poverty; it reaffirms patri- archy; and it spotlights women of color as moral failures.

Noting the color of welfare and the color of nonmarital moth- ers who are poor,6 TANF proponents attribute the need for wel- fare to the moral or cultural def icits of racialized individuals rather than to racialized opportunities and economic conditions. For example, the 2000 Green Book, published by the House Ways and Means Committee, proclaimed in retrospect: TANF stakes itself to “the perspicacity of Moynihan’s vision” that “[B]lack Americans [are] held back economically and socially in large part because their family structure [is] deteriorating.”7 According to this argument, single-mother poverty arises from single moth- ers’ failure to choose marriage; in turn, the failure to marry is a

measure of single mothers’ impover- ished citizenship.

TANF’s most extensive efforts to push mothers into heterosexual fami- lies headed by fathers arise from its child support and paternity establish- ment requirements affecting mothers. These provisions do not go so far as to compel marriage or residential co-par- enting, but they do require mothers to maintain association with biological

fathers (so that they can inform on them!) even if mothers do not want biological fathers involved with their children. Under the paternity establishment provision, a mother must disclose the identity of her child’s biological father or must permit the government to examine her sex life so that it can discover the DNA paternal match for her child. Under the child support enforcement provision, a mother must help government locate her child’s biological father so that the government can collect reimbursement from him for the mother’s TANF benef it. A mandatory minimum sanction against families in which moth- ers do not cooperate in establishing paternity or collecting child support enforces government’s determination that a biological reproductive nexus constitutes a social family.

Numerous other TANF provisions and guidelines promote marriage either directly or by discouraging women from bear- ing children if they are not married. For example, executive branch guidelines for TANF implementation reward states for promoting marriage. The Department of Health and Human Services awards a TANF “high performance bonus” to states that most increase the percentage of children living in married par- ent families. Moreover, HHS guidelines specifically tell states that, given the purposes of TANF, they can develop pro-marriage policies with TANF funds.8 As a result, several states have used TANF funds to disseminate the pro-marriage message, to pro- vide marriage classes, or to reward actual marriage in the struc- ture of TANF benef its (as does West Virginia through $100

P U B L I C V O W S B Y N A N C Y F . C O T T

Wielding the choice to bear children against the choice to not marry, govern- ment delivers some of the most severe blows to women’s equality. One need

only examine welfare policy, which aims to end unmarried mothers’ marital status

rather than their poverty, to see how.

Volume 11, Number 3, 2002 69

monthly bonus for TANF families in which parents are married). Another TANF provision gives incentives to states to reduce

“illegitimacy.” The “illegitimacy bonus” provides extra money to states that achieve the greatest reductions in nonmarital births without increasing their abortion rates.9 The bonus gives states a green light to interfere in unmarried women’s intimate family decisions, including reproductive decisions—such as by offer- ing bonuses to unmarried pregnant women who agree to relin- quish their babies at childbirth; by pressuring unmarried pregnant recipients to marry; or by encouraging or rewarding long-term contraception by unmarried women who are poor.

Abstinence-only education is yet another prong of the federal effort to prevent childbearing by unmarried women. This provi- sion of the 1996 welfare law pays states to teach “groups which are most likely to bear children out-of-wedlock” that “sexual activity outside the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psy- chological and physical effects” and that one should “attain[] self-suff iciency before engaging in sexual activity.”10

These and other TANF provisions compromise poor mothers’ rights, more so if they never have been married. The rights compromised include intimate association, reproductive and sexual pri- vacy rights, not to mention the right to parent one’s own children. These rights abuses are not the haphazard detritus of welfare policy. Rather, they are the arsenal of marriage promotion among poor women with children. To all mothers who might want to choose non- marriage, TANF’s rights abuses send an unmistakable warning to find a man and stand by him. To mothers who are unmarried and poor—disproportionately mothers of color—TANF’s rights abuses teach that the only path out of poverty is through mar- riage or marriage-like f inancial association with biological fathers. In these ways, welfare policy makes unmarried moth- ers’ economic insecurity an opportunity for public intervention in private choice and an excuse for impoverishing unmarried mothers’ citizenship.

II

Although the 1996 welfare law was plenty heavy-handed in promoting marriage and punishing mothers’ independence, inter- est currently abounds among policy makers to make that heavy hand even stronger. The block grants to states that fund the TANF program expire in 2002 and the need to reauthorize TANF spend- ing has become an occasion to consider how TANF might be reformed. Many issues are on the table, ranging from how much to spend to whether to allow adult recipients to go to school to

how much work should be required. Views on these matters vary across the political spectrum. Less varied are views about TANF’s role in engineering marital family formation. Among conserva- tives, moderates, and even among liberals can be found propos- als to augment TANF’s capacity to promote marriage and fatherhood, as well as to prevent sex and reproduction outside of marriage.

One goal of the family formation agenda is to make fathers pay for families. As Senator Evan Bayh put it in a recent issue of the Democratic Leadership Council’s Blueprint magazine, “we . . . have to make specific demands of American men. . . . [D]o not bring children into the world until you are prepared to sup- port them.”11 Another goal, as Will Marshall, president of the

DLC’s Progressive Policy Institute stated it in Blueprint, is to promote mar- riage as a way of choking off inde- pendent or nonmarital childbearing, which he calls the “‘feeder system’ for both welfare and child poverty.”12 Still a third goal of the family formation agenda is to return poor mothers and their children to the patriarchal family by withholding economic security unless they do so.

The most extreme calls to turn wel- fare into a marital family formation pol- icy come, not surprisingly, from the Republican right wing. Robert Rector

of the Heritage Foundation, for example, has urged policymak- ers to set aside $1 billion in TANF funds annually for marriage promotion activities; to offer incentives and rewards to parent who marry; and to create an affirmative action program in pub- lic housing for married couples.13 Another leading proponent of fatherhood and marriage is Wade Horn, the Bush Administration’s Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services for welfare, who supports such proposals as rewarding women “at risk of bearing a child out of wedlock” with annual payments of $1000 for f ive years if they bear their f irst child within marriage and stay married.14

President Bush’s proposal for TANF reauthorization, not sur- prisingly, advances the family formation agenda. The proposal begins by amending TANF’s current goal of encouraging the for- mation and maintenance of two-parent families to read “to encourage the formation and maintenance of healthy two-parent married families and responsible fatherhood.” It goes on to redi- rect the $100 million “illegitimacy bonus” to fund research and demonstration projects “primarily directed at building strong families, reducing out-of-wedlock pregnancies, and promoting healthy marriages.” It also redirects $100 million in “high per- formance bonus” funds to support state-level pro-marriage activ-

B O O K S I N R E V I E W

The bonus gives states a green light to interfere in unmarried women’s intimate family decisions, including reproductive decisions—such as by offering bonuses

to unmarried pregnant women who agree to relinquish their babies at

childbirth; by pressuring unmarried pregnant recipients to marry;

or by encouraging or rewarding long-term contraception by

unmarried women who are poor.

70 The Good Society

ities. It further requires states to end “discrimination” against two-parent married families enrolled in TANF—for example, by applying the same work rules to single mothers that apply jointly to parents in married families. Finally, the Bush proposal requires states to submit marriage promotion plans as a condition of receiving a TANF block grant. These state plans would have to provide explicit descriptions of state marriage promotion activ- ities. They also would have to establish annual numerical goals for marriage so that the federal government can measure the suc- cess of state efforts.15

In addition, Bush Administration proposals related to TANF call for $20 million in grants to faith based and community groups to “encourage and help fathers to support their families and avoid welfare, improve fathers’ ability to man- age family business affairs, and encour- age and support healthy marriages and married fatherhood.”16 The Bush budget for 2002, meanwhile, has earmarked $135 million for abstinence-only edu- cation—a 33 percent increase over cur- rent spending—to forward the goal of two-parent family formation by pre- venting nonmarital pregnancy and child- bearing.17

Marital family formation is not a con- servative fringe issue. It is a juggernaut that has been working its way through Congress since 1998. Beginning with the first “Fathers Count Act” in 1998, proposals have offered biological fathers of TANF children ways to improve their financial status so that they can fulfill their breadwinner role; they have encouraged residential fatherhood, often without con- sidering the custodial mother’s wishes; and they have promoted marriage. None of these bills has yet become law, but they have been quite popular, passing the House of Representatives by thun- dering bipartisan majorities in 1999 and 2000.18

These bipartisan majorities have not been accidental. They reflect the fact that policymakers and policy experts who travel in more liberal circles also endorse the use of social policy to teach, encourage, cajole, and reward marriage. Wendell Primus, of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, for example, has argued the importance of marriage for poverty reduction, and Jesse Jackson Jr., a leading progressive in the House of Representatives, introduced a fatherhood bill in the 106th Congress.19 Bipartisan interest in ending single mothers’ poverty by bringing or forcing biological fathers into their families cre- ates a very strong likelihood that TANF reauthorization will cen- trally feature efforts to marry poor single mothers off of welfare.

Democratic sympathy for the family formation agenda shows up in several of the Democratic TANF reauthorization bills. In the Senate, Senators Evan Bayh (D-Indiana) and Tom Carper

(D-Delaware) would reform TANF to promote marriage and “responsible fatherhood” through pro-marriage counseling and mentoring, through pro-marriage media and education cam- paigns, and through similar initiatives designed to convince par- ents to stay married.20 Other indications of Democratic interest in promoting marital family formation include provisions in Senator Jay Rockefeller’s TANF bill that encourage “the forma- tion and maintenance of 2-parent families and healthy marriages and reduc[e] nonmarital births.”21

In the House of Representatives, a TANF bill sponsored by Congressman Ben Cardin (D-Maryland), the ranking Democrat on the welfare subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee, redirects the “illegitimacy bonus” into a “family for-

mation fund” much as does the Bush proposal. Although the Cardin bill does not mention marriage per se, like the Bush proposal it would support research and demonstration projects “(i) pro- moting the formation of 2-parent fam- ilies; (ii) reducing teenage pregnancies; and (iii) increasing the ability of non- custodial parents to financially support and be involved with their children.” Given the limited, heterosexual defini- tion of family imposed by the Defense of Marriage Act, Cardin’s promotion of

“2-parent families” can only mean father-mother families and hence the Cardin bill, like the Senate bills and the Bush pro- posal, encourages marriage or at least marriage-like coupling between heterosexual adults.

III

Pure and simple, what the family formation agenda is about is engineering the structure of poor mothers’ families. It’s about Big Brother dictating what families should look like, and about punishing families that don’t look “right” by privatizing their poverty. This threatens personal, cultural, and associational free- doms, not to mention the economic well-being of families that deviate from the prescriptive norm.

The rights won by women since the 1960s are at risk here. George Bush wants to “improve fathers’ ability to manage fam- ily business affairs.” Will Marshall and Daniel Lichter want to prevent unmarried women from having babies. Evan Bayh wants to teach men “not to bring children into the world” until they can pay for them. One way or another, perpetrators of marriage promotion designate marital fathers the kingpins of legitimate family life.

Think for a minute what this will do to women’s reproductive rights. These rights—especially the right to make choices about abortion—are grounded in the constitutional notion that

P U B L I C V O W S B Y N A N C Y F . C O T T

The family formation agenda should not be confused with an agenda to support families. In fact, family formation provi-

sions in both the Bush and the Bayh- Carper TANF reauthorization proposals go hand in hand with harsh new work

requirements, while all of the proposals mentioned here continue to neglect the

educational and wage opportunities that precondition economic security.

Volume 11, Number 3, 2002 71

women—not husbands, not boyfriends, not male sexual encoun- ters, not sperm donors, but women—get to decide whether or not to bear a child. But according to Senator Bayh, men “bring children into the world.” Dressed in the appealing language of “responsible fatherhood,” Bayh’s call for men to refrain from childbearing “until [they] are prepared to support” children gives biological fathers standing as childbearing decisionmakers and thereby imperils a right that is foundational to women’s equal and independent personhood.

Among fundamentalist patriarchalists, the argument that wel- fare policy should be about family formation is racially-charged and gender-ideological; it turns on what conservatives call their “family values.” The conservative family formation agenda is predictable: it was central to their attack on welfare in the 1980s and 1990s, and it was constitutive of their plans for TANF. Among moderates and liberals, most of whom embrace gender and racial equality as their goals, the argument is more instru- mental and accordingly more insidious. Often, it is linked to the observation that families with residential, marital fathers tend to be better off than families without them. As Daniel Lichter reported in the January issue of the DLC’s Blueprint, “only 6 percent of married couples with children are poor, compared with 36 percent of female-headed families.”22

The income disparity between married and mother-only fam- ilies is not surprising, because married-parent families often have two incomes and because a father’s income is generally larger than a mother’s. Rarely does the marriage lobby compare the incomes of single-mother to single-father families. In 2000, gen- der-based income disparities among single parent families con- signed the majority of nonmarital female-headed families to economic distress and more than a third of them to abject poverty. Nonmarital male-headed families enjoyed far greater economic security, with fewer than 25 percent earning less than $20,000 annually and only 16 percent earning less than $15,000. Further, whereas a third of nonmarital male-headed families earned more than $50,000, only 15 percent of nonmarital female-headed fam- ilies did so.23 Avoiding these facts permits the conclusion that it is family structure rather than inequality that makes and keeps single-mother families poor.

Contemporary welfare reform instantiates marriage as the sine qua non of worthy citizenship. Except as a warning, wel- fare reform has little bearing upon the rights or lives of child- less adults or of unmarried parents who are not poor. But to be a poor and unmarried mother in the United States today is to be unworthy of full citizenship—to be deprived of the rights that have guaranteed equal personhood since Loving.

We each do not stand on equal footing as participants and actors in public life if we each are not guaranteed decisional autonomy and relational equity in private life and if we do not all share the same freedoms to form and sustain families of our

own choosing. Given the long history of government’s gender and racial regulation of intimate life and the nexus among such regulation and political, economic, and cultural inequality, the struggle for intimate rights—to marry or not to, to bear children or not to, to parent our own children—has been a crucial dimen- sion of race and gender democratization in the United States. Though stingy and disciplinary, welfare once contributed might- ily to the struggle for intimate rights by enabling poor women to choose children, to parent them, and to do so while exiting or avoiding marriage. In contrast, welfare now expressly impedes nonmarital motherhood among poor women by withdrawing rights and enforcing poverty. Given the racially disparate distri- bution of poverty,24 welfare’s marriage vise restores the color line to intimate freedom that Loving, in its day, took away.

Gwendolyn Mink is a professor of women’s studies at Smith College

Endnotes

1. According to a poll conducted by Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center in late March 2002, by a margin of 79 to 18 per- cent, Americans said they preferred government to stay out of the business of promoting marriage. Reported in David Broder, “An Unlikely Marriage Broker,” Washington Post, March 31, 2002.

2. Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1, 12. 3. Boddie et al v. Connecticut, 401 U.S. 371 (1971). See also

United States v. Kras, 409 U.S. 434, 444, distinguishing between unconstitutional state-imposed financial hurdles to divorce and con- stitutionally permissible bankruptcy filing fees.

4. New Jersey Welfare Rights Organization v. Cahill, per curiam (1973).

5. PL 104-193, Title I, Sec. 101, Sec. 401. 6. In 24 states in 1999, women of color composed more than

two-thirds of TANF enrollments. Relatedly, the decline in welfare caseloads has been more pronounced among whites than among women of color. Meanwhile, the percentage of single parent fami- lies among Blacks (62.3 percent) is more than twice that among whites (26.6 percent) and the nonmarital birth rate is substantially higher among non-Hispanic Blacks (73.4) and Latinas (91.4) than among whites (27). U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Ways and Means, 2000 Green Book: Overview of Entitlement Programs, 106th Congress, 2nd Session (Washington, DC, 2000) pp. 1238, 1239 (table G-4), 1521.

7. ibid., p. 1519. 8. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Admini-

stration for Children and Families, Off ice of Family Assistance, Helping Families Achieve Self-Sufficiency: Guide for Funding Services for Children and Families through the TANF Program (Washington, DC, 2000) pp. 3, 19.

9. ibid., Sec. 403(a)(2). 10. PL 104-193, Title IX, Sec. 912. 11. Evan Bayh, “Demanding Responsibility from Men,”

Blueprint Magazine, Democratic Leadership Council (January 22,

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72 The Good Society

2002), http://www.ndol.org/ndol_ci.cfm?contentid=250090&kaid= 137&subid=258.

12. Will Marshall, “After Dependence,” Blueprint Magazine, Democratic Leadership Council (January 22, 2002), http://www.ndol.org/ndol_ci.cfm?contentid=250080&kaid=114&sub id=143.

13. Robert Rector, “Implementing Welfare Reform and Restoring Marriage,” in Stuart M. Butler and Kim Holmes, eds., Heritage Foundation, Priorities for the President (Washington, DC, 2001) pp. 71–97;

14. Wade Horn, “Wedding Bell Blues: Marriage and Welfare Reform,” Brookings Review, vol. 19, no. 3 (2001) pp. 39–42.

15. Bush Administration, Working Toward Independence (February 26, 2002) p. 20.

16. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, President’s Budget for HHS, FY 2003: Ensuring A Safe and Healthy America (Washington, DC, 2002) p. 84.

17. ibid., pp. 22–23. 18. U.S. House of Representatives, H.R. 3073, Fathers Count

Act of 1999, 106th Congress, 1st Session (Washington, DC, 1999); H.R. 4678, Child Support Distribution Act of 2000, Title V, 106th Congress, 2nd Session (Washington, DC, 2000).

19. U.S. House of Representatives, H.R. 4671, The Responsible Fatherhood Act of 2000, 106th Congress, 2nd Session (Washington, DC, 2000).

20. “The Bayh/Carper ‘Work and Family Act,’: An Outline for TANF Reauthorization,” http://bayh.senate.gov/~bayh/workand- fambillsum.htm. See also, U.S. Senate, S. 653, Responsible Fatherhood Act of 2001, 107th Congress, 1st Session (Washington, DC, 2001).

21. United States Senate, S. 2052, Sec. 303, “Family Formation Fund,” (A)(i), 107th Congress, 2nd Session (2002).

22. Daniel T. Lichter, “Promoting Marriage,” Blueprint Magazine, Democratic Leadership Council (January 22, 2002) http://www.ndol.org/ndol_ci.cfm?contentid=250087&kaid=114&sub id=144.

23. Data gathered from U.S. Census Bureau, America’s Families and Living Arrangements: Population Characteristics (June 2001), especially Table 2: “Family Groups By Type and Selected Charac- teristics of the Family.”

24. In 1999, 25.4 percent of non-Hispanic white single mother families lived below the poverty line as compared to 46.1 percent of African American and 46.6 percent of Latina single mother fam- ilies. U.S. Census Bureau, Poverty in the United States, 1999 (Washington, DC, 2000) table B-3.

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Volume 11, Number 3, 2002 73