Doctoral Dissertation Research: Learning to Love Labor: Low-Income Mothers, Work-Family Balance, and Public Assistance

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Recent decades have witnessed dramatic changes in women's lives in the U.S., including higher employment rates among mothers. Additionally, the 1996 welfare reform, The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PROWRA), ended low-income mothers' entitlement to cash grants to care for dependent children and initiated time-limited support that mandates work as a condition of state support. This dissertation research analyzes evolving models of wage work and motherhood through the experience of low-income women facing welfare reform. While much of prior research portrays low-income women as passive recipients of state policy, this study theorizes them as agents creatively responding to cultural and moral definitions of work and family as well as to the financial resources given or withheld by the state. The research questions are as follows. To what degree do low-income mothers' work and family decisions reflect the cultural assumptions about paid work and family responsibility embedded in welfare reform? By the valorization of women's participation in wage work, does welfare reform reshape women's taken for granted definitions of being a good mother or a good worker? Or do low-income women reject and resist these cultural definitions? Finally, how do low-income women themselves actively engage and reshape present-day cultural understandings of work, welfare and family? The population of this multi-method case study consists of 1300 women in Spokane, WA, who have enrolled in a program intended to lead to self-sufficiency. Methods include in-depth interviews and a self-administered survey of a stratified random sample of this population. The qualitative approach in this study is designed to capture the meanings and self-definitions of poor women themselves in meeting the demands of work and family. The survey data allow comparison of themes and patterns found in the qualitative sample across a larger sample. This project will contribute to sociological understanding of work-family conflict among low-income women, a group largely ignored by work-family researchers. The research also demonstrates how social policy can develop out of broader social trends and cultural models while at the same time crystallize and reinforce these trends and models. This study brings together the publicly shared moral dimension of the welfare state with contemporary work and family practices. The study's broader impact will be its potential to inform the decisions of policy makers and others concerned about consequences for women and children in the wake of welfare reform.