Against the Current, No. 23, November/December 1989
Julia Wrigley STEPHANIE COONTZ (“The Pitfalls of Family Policy,” ATC 22) incisively
argues that tie left should not develop a family policy. She points out
that programs designed to prop up families don’t get at the roots of
poverty. They deflect attention from structural inequalities, such as
massive unemployment, that create hardship for families and individuals
alike. Coontz also reminds us that families themselves can be
oppressive, a feminist insight that has almost been forgotten in the
conservatism of the 1980s.
Yet there is another, more provocative, theme in Coontz’s article. This
theme is not always consistently stated, and Coontz seems to back away
from it at points, but it underlies her case against a family policy.
Coontz expresses grave doubts about government social-welfare programs.
She develops an argument that the modern privatized family arose jointly
with the capitalist slate.
State officials wanted families strengthened because they provided
bulwarks against more collective forms of solidarity. Coontz writes,
“Both state institutions and private families in America were
constructed in opposition to other forms of solidarity and mutual aid.”
Thus, Coontz emphasizes the repressive aspects of social- welfare
programs. With reservations, she accepts a view popularized by
Christopher Lasch and others, which stresses that government programs
provided a vehicle for “experts” to intrude in the lives of others.
In this context Coontz is ambivalent even about public education. She
acknowledges that previous forms of mutual aid and social welfare had
failed, and that government programs were therefore necessary, but
argues such programs were second-best alternatives to grassroots
collective aid and support.
“[There were] several progressive, or at least necessary, aspects to the
development of state education and welfare institutions. But it is
important to understand that the twin ideals of an economically and
emotionally self-sufficient private family and bureaucratically
organized state were alternatives to the cooperative, egalitarian
visions found in some sectors of the workers’ movement and even among
many middle-class utopians.”
Coontz is not alone in her doubts about social-welfare programs. In the
late 1960s, many radical writers argued that had been imposed on a
reluctant working class as a means of social control.(1) <#N1> This view
has since declined in popularity, perhaps as sustained attacks on public
education in the 1980s have made the left more aware of its value.
But from another angle, feminist writers have begun dissecting
social-welfare programs and showing the sexism that has shaped them.(2)
<#N2> They have argued that government programs penalize those families
deemed morally unfit, including, most particularly, women-headed
households. More generally, they have decisively shown that men have
more often received aid as a form of entitlement, while women have been
subjected to humiliating interrogations and to supervision of their
behavior, as in the notorious man-in-the-house” rules governing AFDC
recipients.(3) <#N3>
Coontz’s analysis has its own twists, but I would link it with this
larger body of work that has raised doubts even among those on the left
about how to evaluate struggles for social-welfare programs. Most
conclude, as Coontz does herself, that on balance these programs have
been “necessary” and progressive, but the tone has been grudging as is
Coontz’s own.(4) <#N4>
It is this doubt about social-welfare programs that I would like to
address in this comment. I will argue that redistribution of economic
burdens and caregiving burdens through social-welfare programs marks a
tremendous working-class victory and also a positive step toward gender
equality, in spite of the distorted and gender-biased nature of most
such programs.
I will further argue that there is little reason to believe capitalists
have supported the growth of family privacy in the way described by
Coontz. I will take up this latter point first.
Family Privacy
In suggesting that collective obligations have been undermined, Coontz
argues that capitalists imposed notions of family privacy on
working-class families, as well as on the more privileged.
It is hard, however, to read the history of American social-welfare
policy and believe that capitalists put priority on reinforcing the
nuclear family. Middle-class families used their resources to buy space,
protection from outside disruption and a stable milieu where their
children would associate with their class peels and absorb the cultural
and educational values that would aid their social mobility.
Nineteenth and early twentieth-century working-class parents had a
harder task. They had to struggle to keep their families together, a
struggle made more desperate as standard forms of aid required that
their children be taken away.
When parents proved unable to support their children, they often had no
recourse but to put them in public institutions. Urban poverty resulted
in hundreds of thousands of children being consigned to grim orphanages,
even when they had a parent living.
Historians estimate that in New York City in the 1890s at least one in
every thirty-five children lived in a public orphan asylum.(5) <#N5> In
1899 the city cared for 15,000 children at a cost of $15 million.(6) <#N6>
As the number of destitute families grew, it proved expensive to
maintain the asylums, whatever the deprivation of the children within
them. So established, however, was the practice of taking the children
of the poor from their parents that middle-Class reform women who
established day nurseries had to defend goal of keeping poor families
together.(7) <#N7>
Given this history, it is hard to see how capitalists worked to
reinforce families. I would argue, rather, that a long and sorry history
shows they care not at all for the families of the poor. They are happy
to break them up if they believe that is the cheapest thing, as shown
not only by early forms of aid that required the separation of parents
and children, but also by the history of AFDC.
Coontz is not alone in arguing paradoxically, that AFDC’s history shows
that capitalists put great value on families. Others have made this
claim, usually arguing that the specially derogatory treatment meted out
to AFDC recipients, as opposed to, say, social-security recipients,
shows that those outside the moral boundaries of family life suffer a
social penalty. The existence of the penalty shows the strength of the norm.
I think a more straightforward argument better fits the facts.
Capitalists did not drive down the payments of AFDC recipients because
of moral outrage and support for privatized families; rather, they used
moral outrage to keep the poorest and least socially powerful people
living at the barest subsistence.
They saved money by doing so and helped create a lasting stigma for
social-welfare programs. They had the political means to oppress AFDC
recipients, while working-class pressure elsewhere reduced their ability
to treat other types of aid recipients in the same crudely demeaning manner.
If capitalists wanted to keep families together, why would they devise,
and enforce, policies that deprive women and children of aid if they
live with the child-ten’s father? To me, the message is clear: Families
are expendable for those without the social power to demand the means to
keep parents with children. Those without this social power, as in the
case of many working-class families in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries and many poor Black families much longer, can be
denied even the right to maintain households shared by all family members.
The current immigration law shows continuing state indifference to
families. The amnesty law excludes spouses and children of those
legalized. More than 3 million people have gained the possibility of
legal residence, but their families are not allowed to join them.
The resulting tragedies do not interest those who devised the law. In
August 1989, a fourteen-year-old boy from Jalisco, Medco, tried to cross
the bonier illegally to join his father, who had secured permanent
resident status in Los Angeles. A border patrol vehicle ran him down and
killed him. Mourners at his funeral recognized the risks but said they
had no choice but to have their children run the gauntlet of border
crossings.(8) <#N8>
Ideology Versus Policy
This is not to deny that capitalists ideologically promote the family.
They are more than happy to extol family life when it takes the socially
legitimate form of a heterosexual couple with children. This, after all,
gives license to attack all those who choose another mode of life,
whether they be single mothers on welfare or gays or lesbians. These
attacks create deep political divisions between different racial and
ethnic groups and between those with different sexual preferences, and
create a politically acceptable means of keeping welfare payments low.
For decades, politicians and establishment ideologues have attacked
those receiving social, welfare benefits. They savage the poor as lazy
and undeserving, and often, as cheats using government money for
promiscuous life styles.
These attacks have had a political payoff. Many American workers are
hostile toward those receiving welfare or unemployment insurance,
despite their own economic vulnerability. Maintaining these perceptions
helps those in power reduce social-welfare costs and limit political
challenges.
But this is only part of the story. While they may talk a good game,
capitalists have not rushed to support those lauded as upholding family
values. For the most part, differences in the political and economic
power of groups explain variations in their treatment. Single mothers on
AFDC lack the political strength of unionized, blue-collar workers. The
U.S. social-welfare system discriminates against those in seasonal,
domestic, or irregular employment.
Industrial workers do much better, but they have only won unemployment
insurance, old-age assistance and disability benefits through political
struggles. Corporate leaders have opposed benefits that might reduce
workers’ need for a job or willingness to accept low wages.
These economic interests override ideological interests in promoting one
particular type of family. United States politicians and employers fight
tooth and nail against the principle of universalism—the provision of
benefits to all, without regard to need or ‘moral’ status—because they
recognize its enormous political risk. Such programs found in many
Western European social democracies, help unify the poor and the working
class (while obtaining some middle-class support), and they cost a lot
of money. Ideological pronouncements about families are window dressing
but do not affect this larger political equation.
Social-Welfare Programs
Coontz believes that state officials wanted to reinforce families to
reduce the power of other collectivities. As part of this, she suggests
that government programs were second-best alternatives to more
collective forms of mutual aid in working-class communities.
This links to a broader argument Coontz makes about what she terms the
“crisis of social obligation.” In her view, capitalist social relations
have helped create a withdrawal from individual commitment and a sense
of caring and obligation between people.
No longer do people willingly shoulder the burden of caring for
dependents. Instead, they pass such obligations off to the government or
other institutions. Rather than accepting a cycle of dependency and
caring, where they are sometimes in the debt of others and sometimes the
ones doing the giving, they have a narrow “tit-for-tat” view of social
obligation.
This argument has several problems. Coontz does not describe alternative
forms of mutual aid that could have been developed as opposed to
state-funded programs. She writes that cooperative working-class
communities and middle-class utopians had other visions of how to
provide social support, but she does not tell us what they were.
In reality, other forms of social welfare had decisively failed long
before government programs were established in the United States.
Utopians may have envisioned other ways to organize aid, but concretely,
people needed to organ-ire political struggles to secure concessions
from employers and from the state. Within this historical reality, those
with socialist or radical views sought the most progressive alternatives.
In practice, only the government has the resources to really
redistribute care-giving burdens. Caring for dependents requires
sustained commitment and sustained resources. By the early twentieth
century, the great majority of American children, even in the South,
stayed in school at least from ages six to twelve.(9) <#N9>
This meant that parents had long periods when they had to support their
children, and they often had the burden of aged parents as well. Social
provision for the care of dependents was extremely limited, with the
needy thrown back on the grossly inadequate resources of their
communities. Black women, whatever their family status, faced
exceedingly harsh and discriminatory treatment; of the small amounts of
aid that were available from public and private sources, they got the
least and were often excluded altogether.(10) <#N10>
Given the economic vulnerability facing the great majority of the
population, it is not surprising that in the United States, as
elsewhere, government social-welfare programs had enormous appeal in
promising some basic security. To achieve this security, including such
programs as old-age pensions and expanded public schooling, required
intense and lengthy political struggle, with setbacks as have occurred
during the 1980s. In all the Western capitalist states, working-class
parties and trade unions have fought during the twentieth century for
medical care, old-age assistance, public housing, aid to the
handicapped, children’s support and public education.
Of course, the historical reality of how American social-welfare
programs were won is complex. Particularly at the state and local level,
middle-class reformers were often influential in shaping benefits and in
administering programs. In some states and cities, middle-class women
took the initiative in formulating American social-welfare policy, while
in countries such as Germany a rigid male-dominated state bureaucracy
allowed no room for outsiders.(11) <#N11>
Urban middle-Class reformers generally had a different agenda from
corporate leaders, being both more interested in social control and less
concerned about program costs. Some of these reformers supported the
labor movement, at least erratically, while others were much closer to
business interests. The shape of programs depended in part on the
pattern of alliances.(12) <#N12>
Why Capital Resists
Depending on the class forces and social conditions in different
countries, some social-welfare benefits were easier to gain than others.
In some countries, conservatives had reasons for supporting particular
social-welfare benefits. In France and Germany, for example, of-forts to
secure various forms of children’s aid were eased by nationalistic and
right-1st concern over falling birth rates. Children had value as future
workers and as army conscripts.(13) <#N13>
In some parts of the United States, efforts to secure public education
were similarly eased by conservative concern over the socialization of
immigrants. However generally capitalists resisted such programs, both
because they are very expensive and because the working class is harder
to drive into submission if it has basic economic, educational and
medical rights.
In the United States, capitalists and state officials have resisted
expansion of the welfare state with particular ferocity. The lack of a
working-class political party has meant there has been little leverage
for securing medical and social rights.(14) <#N14>
The United States has such an incomplete social-welfare package that
referring to it as a “welfare state,” as do many academic writers, seems
a cruel joke. Its social-welfare are not only limited in scope, but
deformed by means tests and other stigmatizing features designed to
restrict benefits and create intraclass resentment Women have suffered
the most from these features, which are most evident in pro-grains such
as AFDC.
We need to recognize clearly, though, that while women have been
specially victimized by gender-biased policies, they have paradoxically
also gained greatly from expanded social services. Because women live
longer than men, they make up the bulk of social-security recipients,
even though men are favored by rules governing eligibility and benefits.
Less directly, social-welfare benefits have aided women by reducing
burdens that have traditionally fallen to them. As the chief caregivers
for children and the elderly, the two main categories of dependents
benefit when these groups receive forms of social aid, such as public
education and medical care, that lessen women’s caregiving tasks.
Thus, in spite of important gender bias in social-welfare programs,
women’s freedom and autonomy have been fostered by a slow and partial
shift in caregiving burdens away from individual women, including, most
particularly, women in their roles as mothers and daughters.
Even the partial attainment of social-welfare benefits, in however
cramped and distorted a form, has been a striking political victory. And
correspondingly, the stripping away of those benefits in the United
States and Britain in the last decade has been a sharp political loss.
Just as there was no agency or community that could pick up the slack in
the nineteenth century, there is none now.
Declining social programs mean hardship and, since the economic and
practical burdens of caregiving must be shifted onto individuals, this
decline can lead to strained personal relationships between caregivers
and dependents. While Coontz stresses the shifting of obligations to
others, it can work the other way. Where caregiving burdens are too
great for caregivers, resentment and desperation can undermine attachment.
Social-welfare programs, by making burdens manageable, do not remove
personal obligations between people. They merely remove the
vulnerability that can make people shy from commitments.
Those with handicapped children, for instance, do not have reduced love
or responsibility for them simply because their children might get
social-welfare services (all too rare these days). Instead, the services
can lighten parents’ daily sense of responsibility and make it easier
for them to have emotional energy to direct toward their children.
It is where resources are fewest, as in the case of young Black men in
the vast U.S. ghettoes, that obligations to others are the hardest to
take on and meet Rather than seeing informal obligation and social
services delivered through the government as in some sense
counter-posed, as Coontz seems to, I would view them as mutually
reinforcing.
Expanding Freedom
It is true that government social-welfare programs can promote
individual autonomy, allowing people can make new choices about how to
live. As noted in a recent report, “In the past, if a woman experienced
divorce, became a widow, or had a child prior to marriage, she was
likely to move into the household of relatives.”(15) <#N15> Since 1960,
many such women have headed their own families.
AFDC payments allow single mothers to leave their parents’ homes, and
they increasingly do so. When the aged began getting social-security
payments and pensions, fewer chose to live with their adult
children.(16) <#N16>
Similarly, increased control of resources made women freer to leave bad
marriages and divorce rates rose, despite such women suffering an almost
sure decline in their standard of living. These changes suggest that
social obligations between adults have often been underwritten by
economic need as much as by sentiment. Where economic dependence plays a
smaller role, people may opt for kinds of autonomy and for sexual
freedom that only small minorities could sustain in the past.
Although Coontz recognizes the restrictiveness of traditional families,
she also sometimes seem uneasy about changes that promote certain types
of individualism. By emphasizing ties of obligation and dependence
between people, she minimizes claims for autonomy. She writes:
“Historically, socialists used to talk about obligations as well as
rights, people’s communal duties as well as their personal rewards. Such
is the meaning of slogans about taking from each according to ability,
giving to each according to need. Stalinist distortions of these slogans
have rightly made us wary of abstract proclamations about the need to
sacrifice for the ‘common good.’ But have we also not been influenced
too much by the bourgeois rhetoric of individual rights?”
This raises its own problems. Who, after all, will determine what social
obligations need honoring? Who will determine what kinds of dependence
should be encouraged? l think we would do better to build upon hard-won
notions of individual rights and consider how to expand them in a new
form of society.
Limits of Community Social Support
Coontz does see value in social welfare, but she believes there are
better ways for people to help each other, ways that would reinforce
social relations between people. This argument made me think of Boston’s
‘defended’ white working-class communities and how they provide social
support for their members.
In the 1980s, I spent several periods in Boston doing interviews with
working-class women and men who had been active in the 1974 anti-busing
movement. Of course, this was a racist movement, and neighborhoods such
as South Boston and Charlestown were notorious for their hostility
toward Blacks and others they defined as outsiders.
These neighborhoods, however, had the strengths as well as the
weaknesses of their cohesion. Many antibusing activists told me proudly
that their communities took care of their own. In some cases, I
dismissed these comments as part of the attempt to portray the
communities as idyllic before the arrival of busing. Other people
interviewed, however, gave compelling accounts of community generosity
when families suffered misfortune They said this was part of the ethic
of their neighborhoods; living without much savings or extra resources,
everyone recognized their vulnerability to unemployment, illness or
accident.(17) <#N17> They described how, when families were burnt out,
neighbors arrived with checks and clothes.
More prosaically, it was clear that there were vast networks for
providing social support among the women. Working-class women made up
the backbone of the antibusing movement. They were freed to go to
meetings and demonstrations by mothers, sisters and neighbors who took
care of their children.
One antibuser said she was known as “Southie’s babysitter,” a
designation I could believe when I saw how readily these women shared
their daily tasks, a readiness I hardly ever see among time-conscious,
middle-class women struggling to advance in their jobs while looking
after their families.
Coontz, of course, would not consider these antibusing communities to be
socially progressive or models of what she would like to see. Yet their
experience tells us something about the possibilities and limits of
informal, community responsibility for the needy and for dependents.
Above all, to me it indicates that it is only in socially homogeneous
neighborhoods that people are likely to find extensive aid and social
support. These neighborhoods, suffer from the problems of their
homogeneity; they are usually highly traditional and racially
exclusionary.18 Not only do they have negative and suspicious attitudes
toward outsiders, but they impose a cost on the “insiders” who may
receive aid but then find it hard to defy community pressures.
Those rare South Boston residents who actually supported the
desegregation order, or at least did not oppose it, suffered extreme
community harassment, to the point that some had to have police
protection. People were afraid to get out of line. As one woman I
interviewed said, “In South Boston, you know your place.” To receive the
privileges of living in a mutually supportive community, people had to
pay the price.
Such tightly bonded neighborhoods are becoming rarer in U.S. cities.
Even South Boston and Charlestown are slowly changing under the
pressures of real-estate development.
Big cities undermine the type of neighborhood solidarity that allowed
for social support. Such neighborhoods are, increasingly, an
anachronism, and as socialists we cannot mourn their passing because
they reinforced race and gender oppression.
The fierce but narrow solidarity of neighborhoods like South Boston and
Charlestown could never aid a transformative political movement; the
neighborhoods would have to first be transformed themselves.
Some working-class communities generally based in industry or mining,
combine traditions of collective support with those of worker militancy,
while avoiding the extreme parochialism of Boston’s neighborhoods.
Historically such communities, whether in Western mining towns or the
auto districts of Detroit; have stood as the backbone of working-class
movements. Their histories often offer examples of remarkable solidarity
in the face of hardship.
These come the closest to the political ideal that Coontz describes, but
even here, there can be problems of dependency between people and racial
segregation and isolation.(19) <#N19>
Finally, in spite of the emphasis on mutual support in Boston’s
working-class neighborhoods and elsewhere, most such communities also
lacked the resources to really help those who needed aid. Strong
residential segregation means that generally the poor live among the
poor and the rich live as far from them as possible. Many have remarked
on the generosity and collective spirit of the poor as compared with the
rich, but there are great limits to what they can do.
Building Political Strength
To really provide aid for the elderly, as just one example, is very
expensive, and it is beyond the resources of friends and neighbors
except in rare circumstances. Communities can help their members, but
seldom do they take on the actual economic support of individuals. The
serious care of dependents must be underwritten by the state, as the
only entity capable of providing the range of social services required
by those who are not economically self-supporting.
Not only do economic realities suggest that demands on the state are the
only way to attain decent social services, but there are great political
advantages to pressing these demands.
First, social-welfare proms involve rights, not privileges.(20) <#N20> People should not have to feel gratitude to others for receiving basic
medical care and they should not have to bow to community pressures to
receive various forms of aid. More broadly, working-class political
strength is enhanced when people do not risk their most basic security,
including medical care and pensions, by risking their jobs.
This is one reason capitalists have so strongly opposed expanded social-
welfare benefits. Capitalists have every reason to cut back even such
programs as food stamps when workers go on strike; how more political
reason, they have to keep workers from broader social-welfare benefits
that would persist regardless of job status.
Second, by making universalistic demands, people can be mobilized across
lines of race, neighborhood and region. Political demands on the state
can raise consciousness in a way that localistic demands, programs and
networks cannot.
For working-class groups to win even limited gains requires broad
political engagement. This does not mean that demands on the state can
replace demands on employers, but they can supplement each other, as
they have historically where working-class parties have been strong.
And lastly, once programs are in place, history shows that beneficiaries
do not lightly give up what they have gained. Even the most oppressed
people, such as those receiving AFDC, have mounted remarkably courageous
and impressive battles to expand their rights during times of broader
political militancy.
Coontz is right that these demands can be formulated in such a way as to
encourage individual caregiving responsibilities, as in the case of
asking for child-care that is near parents’ workplaces. We also need to
think through the gender implications of different types of social
welfare programs, something that, incidentally, women in working-class
parties have done.(21) <#N21>
Simple comparison with societies such as Sweden shows that the United
States has not even come close to a minimum package of social-welfare
programs. The longstanding socialist goal of expanding such programs has
dual value in building people’s consciousness for greater political
changes and as a way of improving people’s lives even within capitalist
societies. Notes 1. Julia Wrigley, Class Politics and Public Schools (New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 1982). 2. For a representative view, see Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, “Gender
and the Origins of the Welfare State,” Radical History Review
43(1989): 112-119. 3. Mimi Abramovitz, Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare
Policy from Colonial Times to the Present (Boston: South End Press,
1988). 4. See Barbara J. Nelson, “The Gender, Race, and Class Origins of Early
Welfare Policy and the Welfare State: A Comparison of Workmen’s
Compensation and Mothers’ Aid,” in Patricia Gurin and Louise Tilly.,
eds., Women in Twentieth Century Politics (New York: Russell Sage,
1987). 5. Catherine J. Ross, “Early Skirmishes with Poverty: The Historical
Roots of Head Start,” Project Head Start, Edward Zigler and Jenette
Vallentine, eds. (New York: Free Press, 1979) 21-42, 27. 6. Bernard Greenblatt, Responsibility for Child Care (San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass, 1977) 37. 7. Julia Wrigley, “Children’s Caregivers and Ideologies of Parental
Inadequacy,” Circles of Care, Emily Abel and Magaret Nelson, eds.
(Albany: SUNY Press, forthcoming). 8. Los Angeles Times, Sept 1, 1989: Al. 9. F.A. Ross, School Attendance in 1920. Census Monograph 5.
(Washington, D.C.: Bureau of the Census, 1924). 10. Abramovitz. 11. Jean H. Quataert, “Women’s Work and the Early Welfare State in
Germany: Legislators, Bureaucrats and Clients before the First World
War.” Paper delivered at conference on Gender and the Emergence of
the Welfare State, Harvard University, February, 198; Kathryn Kish
Sklar, “Doing the Nation’s Work”: Florence Kelley and Women’s
Political Culture, 1830-1930, forthcoming. 12. William J. Reese, Power and the Promise of School Reform (New York:
Methuen, 1986); and Sklar. 13. Christoph Sachsse, “Social Mothers, Feminism and Welfare State
Formation in Germany, 1890-1929.” Paper delivered at conference on
Women and Welfare State Formation, Center for European Studies,
Harvard University November 14, 1987. 14. Walter Korpi, “Power, Politics, and State Autonomy in the
Development of Social Citizenship: Social Rights during Sickness in
Eighteen OECD Countries Since 1930,” American Sociological Review 54
(June 1989): 309-328. 15. Committee on the Status of Black Americans, A Common Destiny: Blacks
and American Society (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press,
1989) 519. See also Heidi L Hartmann, “Changes In Women’s Economic
and Family Roles In Post-World War II United States,” Women,
Households and the Economy, eds. Lourdes Beneria and Catharine R.
Stimpson (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987) 33-44. 16. Those in low-wage, irregular employment often do not receive
pensions, which means they have few choices about living
arrangements. Among the country’s elderly Latinos, for example,
there is widespread poverty. Only 29% receive pensions, compared
with 45% of the elderly overall. This poverty means that more than a
third of elderly Latinos must live with children or other relatives.
In a national sample of 2,229 elderly Latinos, more than a third
reported that this dependence constituted their biggest problem. See
“Many Elder1yLatinos Face Daily Struggle, Report Says,” Los Angeles
Times, Sept. 14, 1989: A17. 17. Carol Stack, in All Our Kin (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), argues
that much the same type of social support and solidarity can be
found in poor Black communities. 18. See Jonathan Rieder’s Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn
against Liberalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985) for a
description of such a neighborhood In New York City. Rieder comments
that “the old neighborhoods were founded on strong personal ties and
mistrust of formal agents of help such as experts, government, and
law” (33). He adds, though, that these communities had their
drawbacks: “By affirming the natural comforts of living in a
familiar community of the like-minded, it justified closed
neighborhoods, employment markets, and unions” (33). 19. In a study of industrial workers in New Jersey, David Halle found
that older workers mourned the decline of helping relations between
friends and relatives. Halle notes, though “Of course these
traditional exchanges were often unequal and, especially in the
context of the family, sometimes suffused with tension,
exploitation, and struggles for power. Now greater financial
independence makes possible greater social and personal
independence. Young people who have left school and cannot find
work, or who lose a job, can eke out an admittedly sparse existence
on government programs as an alternative to being supported by
parents or kin. Parents who retire… can live on a pension and Social
Security without their children being ‘forced’ to support them.”
America’s Working Man: Work, Home and Politics Among Blue Collar
Property Owners (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 47. 20. Korpi. 21. Pat Thane, “Women in the Labour Party: The Making of Social Policy
in Britain, 1906-1950.” Paper presented at conference on Gender and
the Origins of the Welfare State, Center for European Studies,
Harvard University, 1987.
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