Real Babies, Illegitimate Debates

By Barbara Ehrenreich

If she followed the welfare-reform debate, Anita Hill must be having post- traumatic flashbacks. Here we have a collection of important white males, including Bill Clinton, Pat Moynihan and Bill Bennett, scowling down on one small, scared, female figure -- embodied, in this case, in the Welfare Recipient. The women in the 5 million families on welfare are no more, and no less, representative of American womanhood than Anita Hill was. But the assault on welfare, like the Senate committee's interrogation of Professor Hill, is an implicit attack on the dignity and personhood of every woman, black or white, poor or posh.

Take first the universal, nearly unquestioned assumption that welfare mothers "don't work," and that the goal of reform is to get them out of their own kitchens and into those of, say, Burger King. Well, ladies, what have we been doing in our kitchens all these years if not some species of work? No one receives AFDC payments without having at least one child to feed, wash, dress and pick up after, and the assumption of the welfare reformers seems to be that these activities are on a par with bonbon consumption. In the conceptual framework that holds that welfare mothers "don't work," affluent married homemakers can't rank much higher than courtesans.

Churlish males have suspected for decades that homemaking is little more than a sinecure for the low-skilled and occupationally impaired. Of course no husband dares look his wife in the eye -- often bloodshot from sleep deprivation -- and tell her that she "doesn't work." Yet somehow the insult is assumed to be forgivable when directed at the down-and-out.

The most pernicious feature of the recent welfare debate, though, from a feminine point of view, has to be the thriving new rhetoric of "illegitimacy." Until a few months ago, the term illegitimate, when applied to a human child, had more or less fallen from use and been replaced by the less pejorative out-of-wedlock. The courts have been steadily erasing the ancient disadvantages of being born to unmarried parents. Feminists have insisted that every child is equally real and deserving, regardless of the circumstances of his or her conception.

Then Dan Quayle, followed by professional welfare basher Charles Murray, decided that the old stigma against the out-of-wedlock was in urgent need of revival. They argue that "illegitimate" babies are clogging the welfare rolls, and that welfare, perversely, is an incentive for the production of more of them. According to one online database, the number of newspaper articles linking welfare and "illegitimacy" hovered at about 100 a year or fewer between '90 and '93 and then jumped to 157 for the first six months of '94 alone.

In fact, "illegitimacy" has about as much to do with welfare as baldness does with Social Security expenditures. Numerous studies have established that welfare does not serve as an incentive to bear additional babies. Furthermore, out-of-wedlock births are increasing throughout the industrial world -- not because of generous welfare policies but because of changing mores and, in , many instances, declining male wages. Recall that Dan Quayle's original target wasn't some impecunious pregnant teenager but the high-achieving Murphy Brown.

Now women may differ on whether extramarital sex is a sin. But when the products of such unions are restigmatized as "illegitimate," all women, chaste or otherwise, are potentially on shaky ground. The implication is that a mother can give birth, but only a father can confer full membership in the human community, i.e., "legitimacy." A child that no man has claimed -- either through marriage or later legal "legitimation" procedures -- becomes somehow less worthy and less human. In English common law, an out- of-wedlock child was filius nullius, meaning child of no one. The kid was a bastard; the mother, being single and female, counted for nothing at all.

The immediate victims of the new welfare rhetoric will be the children of poor single women. They're the ones who will have to face the restigmatization of "illegitimacy" -- in the playground, where it will really hurt. They're the ones who will come home to empty apartments while their mothers process words and flip burgers. And, as dozens of disappointing welfare-to-work programs have shown, the low-wage jobs available to welfare recipients are hardly a cure for poverty. The net result of forcing welfare mothers to work will be a further decline in wages for everyone -- as desperate women flood the work force -- plus a surge of commuting among the preschool set.

But the ultimate targets of the antiwelfare rhetoric are women, and not only the poor. Going after upscale women can still be a political faux pas, as Dan Quayle discovered. But the welfare mother makes an ideal scapegoat for the imagined sins of womankind in general. She's officially manless, in defiance of the patriarchal norm, just like any brazen executive-class single mother by choice. At the same time, she's irritatingly "dependent," like the old- fashioned, cookie-baking mom. But unlike her more upscale sisters, the welfare mom is too poor and despised to mount a defense. And unlike Anita Hill, she has hardly ever, in the entire debate, been invited to speak.