IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/femeco/v10y2004i2p143-171.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Welfare As We [Don'T] Know It: A Review And Feminist Critique Of Welfare Reform Research In The United States

Author

Listed:
  • Karen Christopher

Abstract

Reform of the United States welfare system in 1996 drastically changed welfare receipt for low-income lone mothers. This paper explores the effects of these changes on lone mothers by summarizing empirical work on caseload reduction, labor force participation, income, poverty, material hardship, and family formation. While it appears that the economic status of many lone mothers improved during the economic expansion in the late 1990s, many lone mothers continued to experience poverty and material hardship. Building on the work of feminist scholars from both the US and other countries, this paper goes on to critique mainstream research on welfare reform. It identifies a particularly feminist approach to welfare reform research, stresses its advantages over mainstream research, and speculates about why there is comparatively less feminist research to date. The paper concludes by calling for more structural analyses of poverty and of lone motherhood itself.

Suggested Citation

  • Karen Christopher, 2004. "Welfare As We [Don'T] Know It: A Review And Feminist Critique Of Welfare Reform Research In The United States," Feminist Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 10(2), pages 143-171.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:femeco:v:10:y:2004:i:2:p:143-171
    DOI: 10.1080/135457004200217757
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/135457004200217757
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/135457004200217757?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Denton R. Vaughan & Barbara A. Haley & Aref N. Dajani, 2021. "Ten years later: Self‐sufficiency of welfare mothers before the Great Recession," Poverty & Public Policy, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 13(2), pages 184-223, June.
    2. Nancy Folbre & Marta Murray-Close & Jooyeoun Suh, 2018. "Equivalence scales for extended income in the U.S," Review of Economics of the Household, Springer, vol. 16(2), pages 189-227, June.
    3. Karen Christopher, 2007. "Reassessing welfare reform data: a response to cherry," Feminist Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 13(2), pages 197-202.
    4. Cordula Zabel, 2008. "Patterns of partnership formation among lone mothers in Russia," MPIDR Working Papers WP-2008-020, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany.
    5. Shu-Jung Lin & Sung-Ho Yang, 2017. "Qualitative longitudinal research on Lithuanian student migration," Journal of Advances in Humanities and Social Sciences, Dr. Yi-Hsing Hsieh, vol. 3(4), pages 206-213.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:femeco:v:10:y:2004:i:2:p:143-171. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/RFEC20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.