WELFARE

Welfare

Welfare

Introduction

Public or social welfare is the mechanism for providing assistance to vulnerable populations. In the modern world, beginning in the 20th century, it is connected to individuals living in poverty, especially females and their children. As A. Orloff notes, gender roles and the sexual division of labor are profoundly linked to social welfare.

Beginning in about 1902, there were a variety of legal reforms enacted worldwide to establish minimum public health, housing, and work safety standards, which, in the United States, represented the first urban reform movement. At the same time, Nordic and European countries were working on and implementing similar types of reform. For Europeans, public welfare was related to questions about rights of full employment because individuals and governments believed that citizens had the right to be fully employed. John Maynard Keynes had suggested that all individuals who were capable of working should have the right of full employ-ment—public welfare assistance was one process for moving people toward full employment.

Discussion

Modern welfare has its roots in the Great Depression, which was a worldwide event, and began to be constructed in the 1930s through full-fledged government programs aimed at reducing the impact of poverty. Until the 1920s, various private institutions and foundations were responsible for providing assistance to the needy. As noted by B.S. Jansson, “those who must bear the brunt of social problems—individu-als contending with poverty, discrimination, and dis-ease—have depended in considerable measure not only on their personal and familial tenacity and on community supports but also on the policies of public and nonpublic agencies and of federal, state, and local governments.” These groups, for example, children, mothers, widows, and the elderly—of various racial/ethnic backgrounds—are the targets of social welfare policies worldwide.

Welfare policy in the United States is controversial. Given the country's ethos of individualism and self-reliance, the public often blames the poor for their misfortunes and views those who receive public aid with distrust. Historically, both cash aid and publicly supported poorhouses reflected the philosophy that aid was meant mainly for widows with children and the indigent. The government's approach to aid rests on a delineation of those who are worthy and unworthy.

The first welfare programs emerged following widespread unemployment during the economic downturn of the 1930s. Triggered by the stock market crash of 1929, the Great Depression was an era of rampant poverty; working-class families and the elderly were the hardest hit. President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal programs sought to provide relief to unemployed workers and their families. One of these was the Social Security Act of 1935, which marked the beginning of sustained U.S. welfare programs. This act created three programs: Old Age Assistance, Aid to the Blind, and Aid to Dependent Children, providing means-tested entitlements to low-income elderly, the blind, and poor children with absent fathers, respectively.

Other welfare programs were subsequently added since the 1935 Social Security Act. Between 1939 and 1943, the U.S. Department of Agriculture administered the first food stamps program. The U.S. food stamps program expanded throughout the 1960s and ...