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become the instrument of God: welfare’s mission, from the beginning, was to punish women for having had sex outside of marriage, for having had children outside of marriage, for having had children at all— for being women. With righteousness on its side, the welfare program and those who made and executed its policies punished women through starvation for having “unsuitable homes, ” that is, illegitim ate children.

Mothers and their dependent children are purged en masse from

the welfare rolls whenever a state government decides its purity is

being sullied because it gives money to immoral women. A typical

purge, for instance, took place in Florida in 1959. Seven thousand

families with over 30, 000 children were deprived of benefits because of the suitable home law. According to a report for the then Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, these families met

all the eligibility requirements for welfare but were denied benefits

“where one or more of the children was illegitimate. . . or where

the welfare worker reported that the mother’s past or present conduct of her sex life was not acceptable when examined in the light of the spirit of the law . ”9 Other states, including Northern states,

have done the same. By virtue of being illegitim ate, the children

are being reared in unsuitable homes; therefore, they can starve.

This is a fine exercise in state morality. The benefit to the state is

concrete: the women must do the cheapest labor; in economic

terms, welfare is a refined instrument of state power and of capitalism. In what looks like chaos, it accomplishes a serious goal—creating and maintaining a pool of degraded labor, cheaper than dirt. In terms of its other function, it is not so refined an instrument yet. It

is supposed to keep these women from having children; it is supposed to discourage them, punish them, force them to have fewer children. It is supposed to use the twin weapons of money and

hunger—reinforced by fear of suffering and death—to stop these

women from reproducing. Sterilization has a legislative history in

the United States: in 1915 thirteen states had mandatory sterilization laws (for “degenerates”); and by 1932 twenty-seven states had laws mandating sterilization for various kinds of social misfits. As

Linda Gordon said in Woman's B ody, Woman's R ight: “The sterilization campaign tended to identify economic dependence with hereditary feeble-mindedness or worse. ” 10 It has been proposed over and over again: if these women are going to keep having these bastards, after the second or third or fourth, we have the right to stop them, sterilize them—for their own good and because we are paying the bills. Sterilization has been practiced on poor women piecemeal. So far there is no judicial carte blanche that extends the power of the state explicitly to the tying of tubes because a woman

is on welfare. But when doctors sterilize Medicaid women, they

know they are acting in concert with the best interests of the government that administers welfare; and the government does not hesitate to pay the doctor for his good deed. So far, the strategies

of the state in stopping women on welfare from having children

have been crude. The government has tried to police their sexual

relations, enforce chastity, keep men out of their homes, punish

them for having illegitimate children, starve them and their children: state policy is one of absolute, cruel, murderous paternalism.

Welfare policy has usually been interpreted in terms of its impact on black men. From the state (police) side, the effort is to keep a shiftless man from living off the welfare benefits of a woman; to

keep men from defrauding welfare by using benefits intended for

women and children; to get black families back into the patriarchal

mode, that is, headed by males, for reasons of traditional morality

or economics; to force black men to marry black women and be

legally responsible for the children. From the antiracist side, w elfare policy has been seen as a blanket effort to destroy black men or the black fam ily, which, when headed by a woman, is seen as inherently degraded. The absent black male is the political focus and priority. But neither side penetrates to the real meaning of welfare