Privacy rights were deliberately withheld from impoverished women on welfare

Evidence

Yet the fortunes of AFDC changed dramatically around 1965, thanks in large part to the rise of a new kind of public-interest lawyer working in close collaboration with the nascent welfare rights movement. In mounting their case against public assistance laws, these lawyers looked to recent changes in family law as a model of the kinds of freedoms that might also be extended to those on welfare. Family law was effectively undergoing an extraordinary process of liberalization during this period. After more than a century of little change at all, laws that limited divorce, stigmatized non-marital unions, and discriminated against illegitimate children were repealed or ceased to be enforced within the space of a decade or so. Alongside the marginalization of older, status-based rules governing sexual relationships, a new jurisprudence came into being that explicitly recognized “sexual freedom” as a constitutionally protected right. In two landmark decisions, Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) and Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972), the Supreme Court fashioned a new “right to privacy” that limited the power of the state to police intimate, sexual relationships in the home. Yet none of these innovations extended to impoverished women on welfare who were regularly subject to salacious investigations into their sexual histories, unannounced home visits, and strict moral policing under state law. As the field of family law entered a new age of relative sexual freedoms, welfare law—aptly dubbed the “family law of the poor” by legal scholar Jacobus tenBroek22—continued to reflect the punitive moral conservatism of the poor law tradition. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 223

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the body of work on how moral panics and ‘immodesty’ policing apply unevenly along class lines; echoes the class skew in the earlier ‘immodesty’ material. — connects to: Court-era welfare made poor women’s dependence public rather than mediated by men — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 226; Welfare rulings granted poor women a social wage like male workers — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 226; Abstract legal recognition of rights fails to overturn women’s concrete economic inferiority — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 57 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Court-era welfare made poor women’s dependence public rather than mediated by men #expands (0.85) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 226
• Welfare rulings granted poor women a social wage like male workers #contradicts (0.80) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 226
• Male protections disguised as benefits actually mask women’s subordination #expands (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1972
• Abstract legal recognition of rights fails to overturn women’s concrete economic inferiority #expands (0.75) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 57
• Unsourced impressions replaced hard statistics and justified denying welfare resources #complicates (0.75) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 971
• Public nakedness was deliberately used to degrade enslaved women #exemplifies (0.70) — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 114