The CalWORKS requirements are unfair
California’s welfare program known as CalWORKs stigmatizes and stereotypes poor unwed women, especially minority women, keeping them at a disadvantage within our society.
The legislation, federally known as the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) was a welfare reform created in 1996 based on the conservative belief that welfare causes unemployment and divorce.
Since the reform, there have been dramatic shifts in the views about dependent women and their children who receive welfare.
During his State of the Union Address, President Barack Obama addressed the importance of empowering women and strengthening the family in order to eradicate extreme poverty. However, the current policy oppresses women rather than providing them with new opportunities to strengthen their families.
CalWORKs stipulates that recipients must participate in the Welfare to Work Program (WtW) in order to continue to receive public assistance.
This reform fails to consider that single parents, typically women, have no other means to care for their children.
Being forced to work means these women must put their children in daycare, creating further financial strain.
CalWORKs dismisses the notion of the unpaid work required to raise a family and views women as needing paid work outside the home, regardless of the circumstances for employment opportunities.
This idea that domesticity and child rearing at home are not appropriate forms of work means. Women are forced to rely on others to provide care for their children, limiting their economic freedom.
For example, Linda* became a single parent after her husband of 20 years passed away from cancer. This left Linda to raise four children on her own.
Unlike the common stereotype of a welfare recipient, Linda was not a young mother with children out of wedlock. She was a mother and widow, single because of circumstance, not by choice.
Linda began receiving welfare to supplement her family’s living cost.
Working as a seamstress, Linda received only a few hundred dollars a month, and even with the assistance of welfare it was barely enough money to put food on the table and provide for her children.
Today, all four children are successful adults with college degrees, owners of businesses and working to provide for their own families without the support of public assistance.
This success is directly attributed to Linda’s ability to support her children’s education and move the family out of poverty. She now works in the community and pays into the system.
Women like Linda deserve the ability to make their own decision on whether to seek employment while on CalWORKs or to stay in the home and care for their children.
Although some may argue that women receiving this type of assistance should not have this decision-making power, the actuality is that CalWORKs was written to be exclusionary and to keep women marginalized.
It seems that there would be a positive benefit in a woman’s desire to prioritize child rearing. A woman may still decide that she would rather be employed so that she can increase the financial income in the home and discontinue the need to receive assistance.
Neither of these decisions is better than the other, or right versus wrong. These two decisions are a freedom of choice, choices that should be left to the women who are eligible for assistance.
In his State of the Union, Obama addressed how Americans should not be rivals for power but instead partners for progress.
Obama also mentioned that every American should be able to get ahead if they work hard and meet their responsibilities.
For women, the responsibilities of motherhood should be a priority if they have children. Thus, creating a healthy home environment is a crucial responsibility for mothers so that their children may learn and grow to be responsible citizens, nurtured by a healthy familial attachment and bond.
So instead of continuing the struggle for women to choose between their children or fulfilling CalWORKs requirements, let us be partners for progress that fight to preserve a woman empowerment.
*Linda is a pseudonym of a woman’s true story.
Christine Le, Julie Le, Ashley Pipes, Joyce Witcher and Lisa Vu are graduate students in the Department of Social Work.