{"id":1370,"date":"2019-12-12T21:39:56","date_gmt":"2019-12-13T02:39:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/?p=1370"},"modified":"2019-12-16T16:24:54","modified_gmt":"2019-12-16T21:24:54","slug":"womens-welfare-a-matter-of-survival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/stamas\/womens-welfare-a-matter-of-survival\/","title":{"rendered":"Women\u2019s Welfare: A Matter of Survival"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Johnnie Tillmon<\/p><\/div>\n

The wage discrimination women faced led many to rely on funding from the government to survive. Johnnie Tillmon\u2019s “Welfare is a Women\u2019s Issue\u201d, published in Liberation News Service<\/em> in 1972, examines the unfair treatment women on welfare faced, and called for a restructuring of the entire welfare system of the 1960s. Tillman begins the essay bluntly stating, \u201cI\u2019m a woman. I\u2019m a black woman. I\u2019m a poor woman. I\u2019m a fat woman. I\u2019m a middle-aged woman. And I\u2019m on welfare\u201d (106). Her choppy lines demand that the reader attend to each component of her description. She goes on to explain that if you qualify as any of those previous statements, \u201cyou count less as a human being,\u201d and if you are all of them, \u201cyou don\u2019t count at all. Except as a statistic\u201d (106). As a 45-year-old mother of six who is on welfare, Tillmon has seen the inequity women face first hand, especially those in the working class. Tillmon paints a moving image of the direct discrimination women face, and how they are actively pushed into this position. She explains that \u201c44% of all families are headed by women\u201d (107), meaning there is no man in the picture. In this case \u201ca woman with just three kids,\u201d who is \u201cearning the full federal minimum wage of $2.00 an hour, is still stuck in poverty\u201d (108). And that only if this woman is paid the full minimum wage, which is unlikely. As Tillmon writes, \u201cThere are some ten million jobs that now pay less than the minimum wage, and if you\u2019re a woman, you\u2019ve got the best chance of getting one\u201d (108). Working class women had no way of supporting themselves, or their families. The oppression they faced was insurmountable, made worse by the vicious stereotypes (their laziness, for instance) to which they were subjected.<\/p>\n

Tillmon\u2019s document challenges the unfair policies of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (A.F.D.C), an organization that decided welfare aid at this time. As she discusses the unfairness of the A.F.D.C\u2019s current system, she describes a welfare woman\u2019s relationship with the A.F.D.C as a \u201csupersexist marriage\u201d where \u201cyou trade a man for the man\u201d (107). In this example \u201cthe man\u201d is the current welfare system in place that controls exactly how much money women receive. Tillmon discusses the rule that no family with an \u201cable-bodied\u201d man in the home is allowed to qualify. Thus, if a family is poor and needs welfare, the man must leave the house. The family must disband in order to get enough money from the government to survive, perpetuating inequality and stereotypes against the working class. The wage discrimination women face already strips them of the ability to support themselves and a family. As Tillmon argues, \u201cThe problem is that our country\u2019s economic policies deny dignity and satisfaction of self-sufficiency\u201d to \u201cthe millions who suffer every day in underpaid dirty jobs\u2014and still don\u2019t have enough to survive\u201d (108). No matter what she does as a black woman who is poor, Tillmon will never be self-sufficient because of the intersectional oppression she faces as a black working class woman.<\/p>\n

Tillmon\u2019s organization was the National Welfare Rights Organization (N.W.R.O). It was founded by George Wiley in 1966, and Tillmon was appointed as the leader in 1972. This group \u201cput together [their] own welfare plan, called Guaranteed Adequate Income (G.A.I), which would eliminate sexism from welfare\u201d (109). In this new plan there would be no discrimination or categorization of any kind: \u201cyou\u2019d get paid according to need and family size only,\u201d and it would pay attention to the department of labor\u2019s estimates on what sufficient costs of living would be. Overall, Tillmon\u2019s fight for women\u2019s welfare fit more than perfectly into the feminist movement, and empowered working women to fight for what they deserved.<\/p>\n

Tillmon, Johnnie. “Welfare is a Women’s Issue.” Rpt. in The American Women’s Movement, 1945-2000: A Brief History with Documents, e<\/em>dited by Nancy Maclean. Bedford\/St. Martin’s, 2009. Print.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The wage discrimination women faced led many to rely on funding from the government to survive. Johnnie Tillmon\u2019s “Welfare is a Women\u2019s Issue\u201d, published in Liberation News Service in 1972, examines the unfair treatment women on welfare faced, and called … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2256,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stamas"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2256"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1370"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1370\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1520,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1370\/revisions\/1520"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}