ABSTRACT
In conjunction with NWRO’s national lobbying effort, welfare rights activists around the country waged grassroots campaigns to ensure their dignity, an adequate income, and the right to welfare. They pursued a multi-pronged strategy that combined legal campaigns with building takeovers; the development of welfare rights handbooks with organized boycotts; marches and rallies with public testimony. They organized to increase monthly benefi ts, guarantee protection of their civil rights, and raise public awareness about the diffi culties of living on an AFDC budget. Their campaigns constituted a demand for a “right” to welfare that sought to revamp a program that had historically designated those on AFDC as recipients of charity. They argued that a decent income, based on the living standards of those around them, was a right that should not be tied to waged work, that the poor were not responsible for their own poverty, and that the nation could and should provide for them. Women on welfare claimed assistance based on their work as mothers who were raising the next generation of citizens. By justifying state assistance as mothers, welfare rights activists redefi ned the meaning of work to take into account the unpaid labor of social reproduction. Their arguments that mothering was productive and meaningful work that ought to be supported by the state also challenged racial and gendered characterizations of women on welfare as unproductive, “lazy,” and unworthy of support.
