The new face of welfare
About 40 percent of single moms in Pennsylvania are in poverty; more than 30 percent of women going it alone are unemployed, according to Census data.
The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, signed by former President Bill Clinton in 1996, limits welfare recipients to five years of assistance, and mothers are required to look for work.
Society was moving on from seeing mothers as simply the homemakers who could be devastated financially if their partners left them, said Lisa Brush, a sociologist at the University of Pittsburgh. Now, women needed to be worthy of the assistance.
However, many of those mothers go on to hold low-paying jobs; 40 percent of single mothers across the U.S. are working minimum-wage jobs.
They also have to manage evolving expectations: Many workplaces expect employees to be available around the clock at the same time mothers are expected to be increasingly hands-on with their children.
“Single mothers are screwed because there aren’t enough hours in the day to do all these things,” said Brush, author of “Poverty, Battered Women, and Work in U.S. Public Policy.”
Shannon Spano, a 20-year-old from Scranton, has a son who is almost 2 years old. She graduated high school seven months pregnant, and became a certified nursing assistant while her son was a baby. She now works full time at the Jewish Home of Eastern Pennsylvania, a nursing home, while raising her son on her own.
“I haven’t slept in four days, but I’m still going. I don’t know how physically I’m doing it. I just think that no matter what happens, I’ll try to get through the day,” Spano said.
Single moms not only have to do it all — they often have to do it all under a microscope. They are “shoved under the rug, but also hyper-scrutinized and hyper-surveilled,” Brush said.
Arlee Rowley, a Pittsburgh resident, felt that surveillance extend right to the inside of her house. While raising three young children on her own in the 1970s, she suddenly lost her assistance because the welfare office had heard there were extra people — seven men, to be exact — living in her home.
They suggested that she was using her welfare money for them. Rowley knew this was false and decided to get their attention.
She dressed her young boys, took them to the welfare office and sat them on the counter.
As she left, she said, “Y’all ain’t giving me nothing to take care of them, so y’all take care of them.”
When she returned home, there was a message waiting for her to come and get her kids, as well as her benefits.
Rowley, now 59, returned and told them, “I thought you might see it my way.”
Scattered help
For moms who need assistance, there’s more than the struggle of judgment by those doling out the resources. There’s also the limitations of support services.
About Post Author
