Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States

"Welfare Warriors was one of the first books to center women in the story of the late 1960s and early 1970s welfare rights movement. One of the mobilizations of the 1960s was a campaign to improve the rights of welfare recipients, for example by eradicating intrusive questioning by caseworkers and invasive treatment of recipients’ personal lives, and by efforts to improve benefits and services. People had told the history of that movement without revealing that women were central to it. Welfare Warriors puts women at the center of the story. It shows how women, largely black poor mothers, mobilized a mass movement for welfare rights that culminated in a campaign for a major piece of legislation that would have led to a baseline guaranteed annual income in place of welfare. That legislation failed, unfortunately. Nadasen shows that the achievements of the welfare rights movement were successes of women and of black feminist activism. She moves welfare rights activists into the history of feminism. That’s a very important piece of the story of feminism. Nadasen applies ideas about intersectionality to the history of the women’s movement. Intersectionality is a concept which explains how gender and race and class identities are deeply intertwined with each other and inseparable from people’s historical experiences. Nadasen is able to look at these female welfare rights activists and show how their status—as poor women, as black women, as single mothers—endows them with a specific consciousness, rooted in their intertwined class, racial, and gender vulnerability. Their consciousness as black women shapes their roles in welfare rights organizations that are initially led by men, many of whom are black, and their roles in other feminist organizations where white women are the most visible leaders. She’s able show how they navigate among those different pulls to advance their cause."