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sedatives— are

agents of social control; an elite male group does the controlling;

women are the class controlled. The willingness of the doctors—

male medical professionals—to use these drugs on women systematically and the perceptions of women that lead them to do so are evidence of the expendability of women, the essential worthlessness of women when measured against a human standard as opposed to a standard of female function. One does not dump drugs on society’s best and brightest; nor is a drug habit encouraged in

those who have work to do, a future with some promise, and a

right to dignity and self-esteem. Through the use of drugs, the

doctors are doing their part in the social control of women. T hey

have shown themselves willing—even eager sometimes—to go further. Decades ago clitoridectomies were all the rage as doctors did their surgical bit to control sexual delinquency in women. Now,

after being out of fashion for a few short years, the doctors are

trying to bring psychosurgery back into style. In a violent society,

they say, it is more than useful; it is necessary. The ideal patient

for lobotomy is considered to be a black female. Her violence, apparently, is simply in being a black female. She is ideal for the operation because afterward she can still perform the functions for

which she is best suited: she can be female in all the conventional

ways, and she can still clean other people’s houses.

Surgeons, however, need step in only where welfare programs

have already failed to provide a pool of cheap black female labor.

In R egulating the Poor: The Functions o f Public W elfare, * Frances Fox

Piven and Richard A. Cloward show that black women have been

given less money than white women in welfare payments and as a

result have had to do menial work to achieve the barest subsistence;

or have been kept off the welfare rolls altogether by administrators

who have manipulated regulations to exclude blacks, in keeping

with the racist policies of local or state governments. This pattern

of discrimination was particularly evident in the South, but it was

also found in other regions of the country:

There are many mechanisms by which Southern welfare departments deny or reduce payments to blacks, thus keeping them in the marginal labor market. The “employable mother”

rule [that a mother must work if the welfare agency determines

*A n important book that analyzes the economic value of racism under

capitalism but sadly fails to address the exploitation of women as such; as a

result, the social and sexual controls on the welfare population are understood superficially; the ubiquitous and almost self-renewing nature of thecontrols is not taken seriously enough— it is not recognized that as long as

the sexual oppression is intact, the controls will keep appearing, even if

reform seems to have eliminated them.

that there is appropriate work for her]. . . has been applied

discrim inatorily against black women: when field hands are

needed, Southern welfare officials assume that a black woman

is employable, but not a white woman. 8

These machinations of the welfare system are commonplace and

pervasive. A great effort has been made—contrary to public perceptions— to keep black women off the welfare rolls, to make them even more marginal and often even poorer than those on welfare.

The specifics can change— for instance, which women must work,

when, and w h y— but the kind of control the welfare system seeks

to exercise over poor women does not change. The first “em ployable mother” rule was invoked in Louisiana in 1943; Georgia adopted the same kind of regulation in 1952; in 1968 a federal court

in Atlanta struck down Georgia’s “employable mother” rule, which

was w idely considered to have negated the force of that rule in the

states where it existed; and yet in 1967 Congress had required