Piven Frances Fox - Regulating the poor: the functions of public welfare

Frances Fox Piven Frances Fox is Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Graduate School and University Center, City University of New York. Richard A. Cloward, a social worker and sociologist, is on the faculty of the Columbia University School of Social Work. Their co-authored books include The Politics of Turmoil (1974), Poor Peoples Movements (1987), The New Class War (1982), Why Americans Dont Vote (1988), and, with Fred Block and Barbara Ehrenreich, The Mean Season (1987). They have won various international and national awards, including both the C. Wright Mills and Lee/Founders Awards of the Society for the Study of Social Problems.

SECOND VINTAGE EDITION, OCTOBER 1993

Copyright 1971, 1993 by Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Pantheon Books in 1971 and Vintage Books in 1972 in somewhat different form.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication
Data Piven, Frances Fox.
Regulating the poor: the functions of public welfare / Frances
Fox Piven, Richard A. Cloward.Updated ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN: 978-0-307-81464-7
1. Public welfareUnited States. I. Cloward, Richard A.
II. Title.
HV95.P57 1993
361.973dc20 9317460

v3.1

DEDICATED

TO

the welfare protest movement that arose in the 1960s;

and to its leader,

George A. Wiley

In preparing the original edition, we were greatly aided by the comments of Winifred Bell, Herbert Gans, Alvin Schorr, and David Fanshell. Harriet Hoptner of the Columbia University Library gave us invaluable bibliographical assistance, and Sara Blackburn and Martha Gilmor helped edit the manuscript.

Fred Block, Timothy Casey, Henry Freedman, Herbert Gans, Michael Goldfield, and Charles Noble generously took time to review and comment on the updated edition. Margaret Groarke performed helpful library assistance.

We are again indebted to our friend and literary agent, Frances Goldin.

The original version of Regulating the Poor was published in 1971, just as the rise in the welfare rolls associated with the turmoil of the 1960s was peaking. We thought that the expansion of relief was an accomplishment, flaws in the American relief system notwithstanding. The readier availability of cash and in-kind assistance eased some of the worst poverty, especially among women and children.

But we did not think liberal relief-giving would last. We expected that the expansion of relief would set in motion forces pressing for reform, including restrictions on aid and measures to force women on welfare to work. During the more than two decades since the first edition was published, our predictions were confirmed. Grant levels were driven down, the rolls were slashed, and workfare programs of one sort or another have proliferated.

Because we believe that the analysis set out in this book is substantially correct, we left the original ten chapters intact in this revised edition, and added two chapters. theories of welfare state development to explain why the United States continues to be a poor relief state.

Finally, in an appendix to , we review a series of published empirical studies, conducted by others, which test the propositions contained in Regulating the Poor.

Frances Fox Piven
Richard A. Cloward
March 1993

This book is about relief-giving and its uses in regulating the political and economic behavior of the poor. Our object is not so much to describe the public welfare system (as relief-giving is known in the United States), for that has been done often enough. Rather, we seek to explain why relief arrangements exist, and whyfrom time to timethe relief rolls precipitously expand or contract.

The key to an understanding of relief-giving is in the functions it serves for the larger economic and political order, for relief is a secondary and supportive institution. Historical evidence suggests that relief arrangements are initiated or expanded during the occasional outbreaks of civil disorder produced by mass unemployment, and are then abolished or contracted when political stability is restored. We shall argue that expansive relief policies are designed to mute civil disorder, and restrictive ones to reinforce work norms. In other words, relief policies are cyclicalliberal or restrictive depending on the problems of regulation in the larger society with which government must contend. Since this view clearly belies the popular supposition that government social policies, including relief policies, are becoming progressively more responsible, humane, and generous, a few words about this popular supposition and its applicability to relief are in order.

There is surely no gainsaying that the role of government has expanded in those domestic matters called social welfare. One has only to look at the steadily increasing expenditures by local, state, and national governments for programs in housing, health care, education, and the like. These expenditures have been prompted by the repercussions that result when such matters as housing or health care are left entirely to the untrammeled forces of the marketplace. Decisions that are reasonable to the profitmaker are obviously not necessarily reasonable to the various groups that are affected, and they may demand that government intervene to protect them. Moreover, once governmental action is inaugurated, the groups who benefit become a supporting constituency and press for further gains. But most such social welfare activity has not greatly aided the poor, precisely because the poor ordinarily have little influence on government. Indeed, social welfare programs designed for other groups frequently ride roughshod over the poor, as when New Deal agricultural subsidies resulted in the displacement of great numbers of tenant farmers and sharecroppers, or when urban renewal schemes deprived blacks of their urban neighborhoods.