After the Family Wage: What Do Women Want in Social Welfare?

Author(s): Nancy Fraser

Source: Social Justice, Vol. 21, No. 1 (55), Women and Welfare Reform (Spring 1994), pp. 80-86
Published by: Social Justice/Global Options
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 After the Family Wage: What Do
Women Want in Social Welfare?

Nancy Fraser

AS MY POINT OF DEPARTURE, I AM VERY COMMITTED TO BUILDING A MOVEMENT

out of the ideas under discussion that debunk the myths surrounding
women and welfare reform and seek creative solutions. Basically, I wish
to explore a vision that would inform such a movement. Thus, I will need to pull
back somewhat from the specifics and discuss some broad principles and visions.
President Clinton has promised us that he wants to end welfare as we know it.
Most of us agree that the current system is such a mess that it is difficult to disagree
with that goal. Yet what do we want in its place? To answer that question, we need
a benchmark for evaluating alternative proposals. I wish for us to take as our
benchmark an extremely ambitious standard; that is, I want us to try to imagine
what a maximalist vision of a just and humane social welfare system would be like.
To be sure, such a vision may not be realizable in the immediate future, as David
Ellwood from the Department of Health and Human Services has suggested. Still,
such an exercise has practical value as a critical yardstick and long-term goal.
The question I wish to raise is: "What would a just and humane welfare system
look like?" I will explore two contrasting answers to that question, either one of
which would represent an enormous improvement over what we have now. At the
same time, neither provides everything we want. Therefore, after presenting these
two alternatives, I will ask you to try to imagine a third possibility that would be
even better.
First, however, let me describe what I think is really wrong with welfare as we
know it. As many have noted, in the United States the word "welfare" typically
means Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and criticisms of welfare
and the welfare state are typically criticisms of that program. Yet AFDC is really
only one part of a much broader system of social welfare, parts of which are not

Nancy Fr?ser is a Professor of Philosophy and Research at the Center for Urban Affairs and Policy
at Northwestern University (2040 Sheridan Road, Chicago, IL 60201). She co-chairs the Working
Group on Feminist Public Policy at the Center. Her research concerns the critical theory of both the
North American and Western European welfare states. She is currently working on a philosophical
justification of social rights. Her publications include Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and
Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 1989), "Clintonism, Welfare,
and the Anti-Social Wage: The Emergence of a Neoliberal Political Imaginary," in Rethinking
Marxism, "A Genealogy of Dependency: Tracing a Keyword of the U.S. Welfare State" (with Linda
Gordon) in Signs, and "Reinventing the Welfare State " in The Boston Review (forthcoming).

80 Social Justice Vol. 21, No. 1

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What Do Women Want in Social Welfare? 81

called "welfare," but nevertheless should be. That broader system emerged from
a social world that no longer exists, the social world of industrial capitalism. In its
idealized form, this was a world in which people were supposed to be organized
into male-headed households that lived principally from the man's labor market
earnings. The male head of the household was supposed to be paid a family wage,
a wage sufficient to support a full-time wife and mother and their children. Of
course, countless lives never actually fit that pattern, but the ideal underlies the
structure of the welfare system we have inherited from industrial capitalism.
This welfare system ? I use the term welfare very broadly to include Social
Security, AFDC, and, very importantly, all the private forms of welfare that come
in the forms of labor market compensations ? had three tiers. Social insurance
programs occupied the first rank and were designed to protect people from the
vagaries of the labor market. They were intended to replace the breadwinner's
wage in the case of sickness, unemployment, disability, or old age. Many countries
also featured a second tier of programs that provided direct support for full-time
female homemaking and mothering. I have in mind programs like mother's
pensions, child allowances, family allowances, endowment of motherhood, and so
on. A third tier of welfare served the residuum. Largely a holdover from the
traditions of Poor Relief, these programs provided very paltry and stigmatized
means-tested aid to people who didn't fit the family wage picture because they
were neither breadwinners nor mothers, in the approved sense, and who therefore
had no basis for claiming any honorable support.
Welfare states in all Western democracies fit this broad pattern. Yet the U.S.
is exceptional in at least two important respects. First, here more than elsewhere,
social insurance is provided through a private welfare state in which benefits are
part of labor market compensation rather than citizen entitlements. Thus, not only
wage and salary income, but also a wide range of benefits, including pensions and
health care, have been paid by particular firms rather than by the government.
Another important exceptional feature of the United States is that the second and
third tiers of the structure have been merged. The principal program of Poor Relief
at the federal level (AFDC) is also the principal support for women's child raising.
That is unusual. This merger, moreover, is the source of the expression "welfare
mother" and of many other unfortunate stereotypes that distort our political
debates about welfare and the welfare state.
Proposals for reform certainly must take into account these two exceptional
features of the United States. Yet I wish to emphasize that the current troubles of
the welfare state are not peculiar to the U. S. and no amount of tinkering with AFDC
can possibly solve them. Rather, the troubles, at bottom, are rooted in the collapse
of the world of the family wage and of its central assumptions about labor markets
and families. In the labor markets of today's post-industrial capitalism, few full
time jobs pay wages sufficient to support a family. Women's employment is
increasingly common, and many jobs are temporary or part time and do not carry

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 82 Fr?ser

Standard benefits. Not surprisingly, because of the private, firm-based character of

the American welfare state, this rise of low-wage, temporary, and unstable
employment has generated particularly deep fears in the U.S. about personal and
family security.
Families also look very different today. People are marrying less and later, and
are divorcing more and sooner. Growing numbers of women, both divorced and
never married, are struggling to support themselves and their families without a
male breadwinner's wage. Of course, gender norms and family forms are highly
contested and disputed today. Thanks in large part to the feminist and gay-and
lesbian liberation movements, growing numbers of people are rejecting the male
breadwinner-female homemaker model.
A whole new world of economic production and social reproduction is emerging.
This is a world of less stable employment and more diverse families. Nobody can be
sure of the ultimate shape that this world will have, but at least this much is clear: this
emerging new world will require welfare programs to protect people, all people, from
uncertainty. It is also clear that the old forms of the welfare state, built upon
assumptions about patriarchal farnilies and relatively stable jobs, are not suited to
providing that protection. We need something radically new ? a post-industrial
welfare state ? that is suited to new conditions of employment and reproduction.
The key point is that the problem of security in this post-industrial world is a
problem for everyone. We need to recast the whole issue of welfare reform in the
broadest possible terms in order to draw in people who may now have hostile
attitudes toward welfare, but who also have legitimate concerns about their own
security. If we phrase the problem in the right way, we may be able to break down
some of the divisiveness.
What, then, would a post-industrial welfare state look like ? one that we
would wholeheartedly support? To assess the alternatives, we must have some
standards, values, ideals, and principles. I wish to propose five principles that
should inform welfare policy. These principles should be used to test any new
proposal put forward by President Clinton's welfare reform task force, or by
anyone else. I am taking a page from the president's "Health Care Speech" by
trying to lay out some fundamental principles.
The first principle is that social welfare provision should prevent poverty.
Because of the decline of the family wage, the special disadvantages of women in
the labor market, and the growing number of solo-mother families, this goal is very
pressing now, especially, although not only for women.
The second principle is that social welfare policy should prevent exploitation.
Needy women with no other way to feed themselves and their children are liable
to exploitation, for example, by abusive husbands, by sweatshop foremen who
engage in sexual harassment, or by pimps. Social welfare programs can help
prevent such exploitation by making alternate sources of income available. The
nonemployed wife who knows that she can support herself and her children

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What Do Women Want in Social Welfare? 83

outside of her marriage has more leverage within it. The same holds for the low
paid nursing home attendant in relation to her boss.
A third principle is that social welfare should reduce inequality, including
inequality by gender, class, and race. I think this actually has to be divided into two
ideas. One is that the programs should reduce income inequality. This is important
because women's earnings are currently around 70% of men's. Much of women's
labor is not compensated at all and many women suffer from "hidden poverty" due
to unequal distribution within families. Consequently, social policy ought to
reduce income inequality. In our post-industrial society, however, welfare pro?
grams should also reduce the inequality in leisure time between men and women.
After all, many women, but only a few men, do both paid work and unpaid
primary-care work, and women suffer disproportionately from time poverty. So
we want to avoid social arrangements that require two shifts of work from women
but only one shift from men.
A fourth goal is to prevent the marginalization of welfare recipients. We should
avoid approaches, such as mother's pensions, that enclave women into a separate
domestic sphere and cut them off from the larger society. Rather, we wish to
integrate those people receiving welfare assistance.
A fifth and final goal is to combat androcentrism, the idea that the ideal male's
current life pattern represents the human norm and that women ought to assimilate
to it. For women to enjoy levels of well-being comparable to those of men, women
should not have to live traditionally male lives or fit into institutions designed for
men. Rather, we want a policy that restructures androcentric institutions and
norms so that human beings who can give birth and who often care for relatives
and friends are not treated as deviants or departures from the norm.
Those, then, are my five principles for evaluating welfare proposals: anti
poverty, anti-exploitation, anti-inequality (both for income and leisure time), anti
marginalization, and anti-androcentrism. We should prefer any arrangements we
can imagine that would promote all five of those goals simultaneously and avoid
the necessity of trade-offs among them.
Let us now consider two very different pictures of an ideal post-industrial
welfare system. The first approach I call Universal Breadwinner. It is the implicit
vision of most U.S. feminists and liberals. Its chief aim is to ensure labor market
equality for women so that they can support themselves and their families through
their own wage earnings. The idea is that the breadwinner role should be
universalized so that women, too, can become breadwinners, or as Congress
woman Woolsey has phrased it, "can earn a family wage."
This is an extremely ambitious goal. Achieving it would require a range of
services, including day care and eldercare, that could free women from current
unpaid domestic responsibilities and enable them to compete in the labor market
on the same terms as men. It would also require a raft of workplace reforms to
combat discrimination, harassment, and various other equal opportunity ob

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 84 Fr?ser

stacles, as well as a policy of comparable worth to redress the current undervalu?

ation of skills and jobs that are coded as feminine or non white. None of that would
work, however, without permanent, full-time, high-paying jobs for women. The
idea, in any case, is to ensure parity for women in the primary labor force by giving
them full access both to the private welfare state's firm-based benefits and to the
public system of social insurance.
Let us now contrast Universal Breadwinner with another model, which I call
Caregiver Parity. This is the vision of most Western and European Social
Democrats and feminists, though Mimi Abramovitz and Paula Roberts also appear
to share elements of it. It is premised on the assumption that women's lives will
not and need not look exactly like men's and that many women will alternate
between spells of full-time employment, spells of full-time caretaking, and spells
that combine part-time employment and part-time caretaking. The goal of welfare
is to "make difference costless," to eliminate the penalties facing people who now
have lives like that, to eliminate the opportunity costs of caregiving.
This is a very ambitious goal. It would require a program of caregiver
allowances to compensate childbearing, child rearing, and eldercare. These
allowances would have to be sufficiently generous to support a family at a full
time rate, and hence roughly equivalent to a minimal breadwinner wage. Caregiver
Parity would also require programs that would enable people to make a transition
among these different life stages, including paid pregnancy leave, paid family
leave, retraining and job search, flex-time, and so on. To provide security in the
wake of all this flexibility, it would be necessary to delink social insurance from
employment. This means integrating employment and caregiving into a single
system of social insurance, a system in which part-time jobs and carework are
covered on the same basis as full-time employment so that retirement, unemploy?
ment, and disability insurance would be available on the same basis to people
whether their lives look like men's lives are supposed to look now or whether they
look like many women's lives look.
Both Universal Breadwinner and Caregiver Parity are very far removed from
current realities. Either would represent an enormous advance over what we have
now. How well do they fare when measured by our five principles? Both are good
at preventing poverty and exploitation, but after that their strengths and weak?
nesses diverge. Universal Breadwinner is much better at income equality, because
Caregiver Parity institutes a "mommy track" in employment, to the obvious
disadvantage of women. On the other hand, Caregiver Parity does much better at
guaranteeing leisure time, because Universal Breadwinner unrealistically as?
sumes that all caregiving work can be shifted to social services and ends up
imposing a double shift on women. Universal Breadwinner is better at preventing
women's marginalization, however, since Caregiver Parity reinforces female
domesticity. Yet Caregiver Parity is better at combating androcentrism, since it,
unlike Universal Breadwinner, accords value to caregiving.

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What Do Women Want in Social Welfare ? 85

The choice between these two approaches is consequently very tough. Neither
gives us everything we want.
My conclusion is that to build a movement informed by our own vision, rather
than always reacting defensively to the actions of the "bad guys," we need a third
approach, which I call an Integration Model. It designs policies for people whose
lives include bread winning and caregiving and it does so in ways that change the
lives of both men and women. The key to this approach, if I could borrow some
conservative rhetoric, is to discourage "free riding." The real free riders in the
current system are not single poor mothers who shirk employment. The real free
riders are men of all classes who shirk carework and domestic labor, and the
corporations who free ride on both the paid labor and the unpaid labor of working
people.

Questioner from Audience:

My name is Cynthia Folkerielle and I am with the Mental Health Policy

Resource Center here in Washington, D.C. I am glad to hear a few of the panelists
speak to the issue of families with disabilities and to some of the ways in which
that also keeps people in poverty. I hope that the issue of special-needs families
will be addressed more than it has been thus far.
Second, a few speakers raised the issue of family violence and its relationship
to poverty. I am interested in knowing to what extent we know how family violence
propels or keeps people in poverty? To what extent is the issue of trauma being
addressed among poor women and children who come out of, or continue to be in,
a traumatic environment?

Ruth Brandwein:

In Suffolk County, where we are responsible for emergency housing, 20% of

those who come to us do so as a result of battering. Thus, there is a very clear link
and it is really a cruel choice that a woman must make either to stay in her home
and be beaten up or to leave her home (instead of the man leaving) and go into a
shelter for 30 days and then onto welfare. Another part of that has to do with
transportation. For a woman, having a car is more than physically being able to get
to a destination. Many women stay with their abusers because they have no
transportation. They cannot get to work, they can't get to the supermarket, they
can't get anyplace.
Regarding your comment, we also need to change SSI regulations. There are
many women who should not be on AFDC, which is supposedly a temporary
system. While people are preparing to go to work, they should be on SSI. Yet the
way it is now, if you can go through the hoops required to get qualified, you are

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 86 Fr?ser

obviously not qualified (because if you are really disabled, you wouldn't be able
to). We had an advocacy program in which we worked with people. We got doctors
to see them and we transported them to the federal hearing judge. In 95% of the
cases that were appealed, the result was to overturn the original judgment and they
were then put on SSI for the disabled. I also think that it must become more flexible,
so that women with some combination of disabilities could be made eligible,
especially those women who never worked full time because of disabilities, while
reducing the disincentives to work. The CAP program in New York State allows
you to keep a portion of your earnings until you are above the poverty level and
you are also allowed to save money.

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