Linda Gordon's Welfare System

Linda Gordon's article is thoughtful, insightful and highly relevant. As governments slash poverty relief programs at all levels and as welfare-bashing reaches an all-time high, it is instructive to take a step back and look at how the current system developed.

Gordon argues that at a time when most Americans strongly supported spending on poverty programs, feminist women whom had access to the government as well as a strong desire to help poor women created a welfare system that is today typically looked down on and unpopular, is in many ways unsuccessful.

In her writing Gordon describes a welfare system with two groups, with one group created primarily for white working men and the second created by mainly middle class white women for low-income

white women (at the time African Americans did not receive much benefit from anything the creators of these relief programs did not particularly care for them).
The first group holds Old Age Insurance or Social Security Pension, Unemployment Insurance, Medicare and other programs, this group is relatively the more generous of the two, being federally funded, rights-based, and the fact that it served more people, typically people who would have been viewed as “better off”.
The second group, which includes Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and other means-tested programs, is needs-based, state- or locally-run, serves fewer and more vulnerable people and was invasive, for example how Gordan described when women receiving aid would be appointed their own caseworkers these caseworkers would usually surprise visit the women's homes to inspect their habits and could cut off the aid if they felt the women were not meeting certain criteria, going so far as to inspect their dirty clothes hampers and count how many toothbrushes were kept in the bathroom which in my opinion is a huge invasion of privacy.