AFDC’s man-in-the-house rules fabricated legal paternal responsibility women never consented to

Evidence

During this period of rapid liberalization, the much-maligned AFDC program remained firmly embedded in the poor law tradition. Far from phasing out the family responsibility provisions of AFDC, state legislatures continued to strengthen them after World War II, reinforcing the idea that impoverished women should look to individual men and not the state as sources of support. So-called “substitute father” or “man-in-the-house” rules had been imposed on welfare mothers since the beginning of the program, serving to create a de jure relationship of paternal and marital responsibility where none had been consented to by the parties concerned. From the 1950s onward, many states, including California, extended their family responsibility laws to include “absent fathers”—the former husbands of women who had been separated or divorced or the biological fathers of children who had been born out of wedlock. Now more than ever, women were reminded that their economic welfare depended primarily on their legal connection to a man. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 222

Categorization

• XREF: The state’s coercive enforcement of private family dependence prefigures later welfare-reform ‘personal responsibility’ rhetoric — a key thread for mapping how apparently libertarian discourse maintained coercive state power. — connects to: Postwar states tightened AFDC rules imposing paternal responsibility without the parties’ consent — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 222