It All Comes Down to Money

Honestly I had never given a lot of thought to welfare in the United States. I knew a lot of people supported it believing that every little helps for people struggling to put food on the table, but also a lot of people thought it was abused by the poor, and that welfare money was money that could be put to better use. Never had I considered welfare an issue of equality. In the article, "The Lady and the Tramp: Feminist Welfare Politics, Poor Single Mothers, and the Challenge of Welfare Justice", Gwendolyn Mink, the author, reveals how this is so. Mink is dedicated to fighting for welfare especially for poor women. She believes that welfare should be the income that is owed to people who work at home caring for the children and running the household, that welfare is a condition of women's equality. If these poor individuals do not receive the aid that they need to pay for daily expenses then they are forced to work outside of the home as well as complete all the tasks that caring for children requires. Current welfare law distinguishes poor single mothers as a separate system of the law. They are the only people in the USA who are forced to work outside of the home, whose decisions to bear children are punished by the government, of whom the government may demand all the details of their personal lives and relationships, and are the only ones who are compelled by the law to make room for biological fathers so that her family may be sustained. If welfare laws were changed to favor these poor single women then it would aid the fight for single mothers' equality, and it would rid them of economic disfranchisement.
After reading this article, I now think about welfare in a different way. I didn't realize the impact it had on poor single women. Without welfare they have to make a choice between caring for that family at home or making money outside the home to provide for her family. You need both for a happy family with all it's needs met, but these women do not have the time nor the energy to fulfill both roles completely, both end up losing out. It really isn't fair. And then bringing the other article into this, "The Mommy Tax" by Crittenden, you begin to realize that the money that these women do make is significantly reduced by the fact that they've had children, and the more children they have, the more they suffer.