They think you ain't much of nothing: The social construction of the welfare mother

Welfare reform is in the forefront of the political and social agenda in the United States. This research examines the ways that women on welfare interpret welfare use. From in-depth interviews with 47 women who received cash assistance in 1995, we examined the theories behind their accounts of the stigmatizing of welfare recipients and why they and other women, use the welfare system. Although the respondents tended to blame the social structure, the welfare system itself or fate for their own economic circumstances and welfare use, they often invoked popular and mainstream individualist and cultural "victim-blaming" theories to explain other women's reliance on the system. Many women believed popular constructions of the welfare mother as lazy and unmotivated and evaluated their own situation as distinctly different from the norm. The hegemony of the individual perspective is a strong and stubborn barrier to dealing constructively with poverty and welfare reform.