Poverty lawyers pushed to end moral surveillance of welfare recipients using family law liberalization

Evidence

Relaying the most radical voices in the welfare rights movement, progressive public-interest lawyers questioned why recipients of public assistance and public housing were still subject to such intrusive forms of moral surveillance. If the Supreme Court now recognized a constitutional right to sexual privacy, why would this right not be extended to women on welfare? If middle-class women were now free to dissolve marriages at will and had increasing power to earn an independent wage in the labor market, why should poor women remain imprisoned within the private bonds of economic dependence? If marriage no longer counted in determining the legal status of middle-class children, why would the children of welfare mothers still be classified as illegitimate and punished for the sins of the parents? In short, poverty lawyers were looking to the liberalization of family law to argue against the continuing enforcement of private familial obligations in the realm of welfare. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 224