Hints from Eloise

Welfare-reform pioneer Eloise Anderson speaks bluntly--as always--about race, class, sex, and the realities of "the system."

Michael W. Lynch from the June 1997 issue

(Page 2 of 7)

Reason: Who are your intellectual influences? Do you have any heroes?

Anderson: Mark Twain, because I like his voice. I think Mark Twain was a pure American, and his voice, his literate voice was one which I understood. He always brought up the hypocrisies in America in a way that we could swallow. He was funny. He was troubled by the conflict in society. If I had a hero, it would be him. If I had a heroine, it would probably be Sojourner Truth. Sojourner posed the question to feminists: Are black women considered women? If you're going to talk about feminist issues, then you can't talk about women's issues in general, because all of us don't have the same experience. Sojourner Truth brought more honesty to the women's movement than anybody [else]. So those are my two, other than my mom and dad.

Reason: How do class and gender issues relate to welfare reform?

Anderson: Child support issues probably need to be rethought in light of more than just middle-class women and their children. They need to be thought of in light of mothers and fathers of all economic levels. Another thing that needs to be rethought is this whole notion of a child and his two parents. What is it that we expect out of fathers vs. mothers? We say fatherhood is a check and that men are not expected to nurture their children. Surely we won't let him have custody of his child. We expect him to continue to pay for a woman that he no longer has a relationship with, and we expect her to do nothing in terms of financial status. The woman, we base her value to the family on nurturing, not financial responsibility.

In the way that we structure welfare and the way we structure our argument, we basically say that she was not a willing partner in the conception of this child, that he was somehow responsible for this without her consent, and that she had nothing to do with getting pregnant. Therefore he bears all the financial burden. I think that is an unfair policy, which means that we have to rethink custody. If a father has a lot of resources and mom has very few resources, and we want the child to continue to live in the comfort the father provided, maybe the father ought to have custody.

Reason: It has always struck me that family law....

Anderson: Is prejudiced against men.

Reason: ...is biased against men on many levels. For example, if a woman gets pregnant, and the man wants to keep the child but she wants an abortion....

Anderson: She wins.

Reason: But if he wants an abortion and she wants to keep the child, he is on the hook. Do you think that as we start rethinking the roles of families we may begin to question these ingrained inconsistencies?

Anderson: Just because it's ingrained doesn't mean that we can't pose the question and get some different answers. I don't think we're going to be able to manage family relationships unless we change the laws that we have, because the laws are based on a condition that doesn't exist for us anymore: women staying home and taking care of the children.

Reason: Women working outside the home--it seems to me that there is a little schizophrenia on this issue, especially among your conservative allies, who are torn between wanting women to stay home as a domestic ideal and not wanting to use government money to pay women to stay home. What are the issues regarding the role of mothers?

Anderson: We don't know where we are on this whole notion of mothers working. We want to say, on the one hand, we don't want to do welfare. We don't want to pay for someone to sit home and do nothing. But on the other hand, we believe somebody ought to be home with the kids. The concern, I think, that is hidden here is not just infant care, it's also what happens to adolescents when moms aren't home. Because adolescents come home to an empty home, and adolescents get pregnant between 3 and 6 in the afternoon. So the question is, if we are going to put both parents in the workplace, then what are we going to do with our children?

Reason: Your proposal to drastically alter Aid to Families with Dependent Children would have put you on the lunatic fringe of this debate as recently as five years ago. Yet now your ideas are driving the debate. What does this say about the possibility for meaningful change? To put you on the spot, what does this say about the role of an individual as an agent of change?

Anderson: My grandmother once said, "All you have to do is sit down, because what goes around will come around." So if you have any belief that you actually believe in, you should live up to that. It's not necessarily that I drove the debate. It is like I'm on a ship and I am high enough on the ship so that I can actually see the shore, but everyone else down on the deck can't see the shore. So I say, "There's the shore," and everybody says that she's crazy, she's lost it. But pretty soon we get close enough to the shore that everybody else can see it.

Comments

nfl jerseys|11.16.10 @ 2:50AM|#

hxtyghgvh