Reframing the ‘Welfare Queen’

USC Gould symposium discusses the political construct of the welfare queen and how to better provide governmental assistance.

-By Jared Servantez

Law professors and scholars from across the country gathered at USC Gould School of Law for “Reframing the Welfare Queen: Work, Privacy and Reproductive Freedom,” a two-day symposium dedicated to discussing the idea of the “welfare queen” and exploring how the often racially-charged and gendered term shapes political debate over governmental assistance programs.

The phrase “welfare queen” has been used to refer to people accused of cheating the welfare system to collect excessive payments, but studies have shown that the term is often used to stigmatize poor, black single mothers and contributes to the criminalization of poverty.

Professor Dorothy Roberts from the University of Pennsylvania School of Law joined USC Gould Professor Camille Gear Rich to open the two-day symposium.

“Demographic data shows that welfare families, even prior to welfare reform, typically are single female-headed households with fewer than two children,” said Camille Gear Rich, organizer of the conference and professor of Law and Sociology at USC Gould. “Furthermore these families typically are on public assistance for less than two years. The question is, given these realities, why did politicians create the welfare queen construct? Why did they decide to pathologize poor women in short term need of assistance rather than rally citizens to their aid?”

In six panel discussions and lectures spread across two days, conference presenters discussed how the “welfare queen” construct reveals an institutional anxiety about the position of women in society and creates cultural anxieties that prevent people from seeking state assistance. The term demonizes poor women of color in need of state assistance, they argued, and criminalizes their families.

“Sadly because of the welfare queen construct, today’s welfare system is based on the State’s fear of dependency and prioritization of short term political wins, rather than responsibly attending to our long term interest in respecting and restoring families that find themselves on the economic margins of society,” Rich said.

“Here, black women's childbearing is explicitly connected to criminality,” said Priscilla Ocen, associate professor of Law at Loyola Law School and presenter on one of the symposium's panels. “The welfare queen archetype tracks mass incarceration, which generalizes their children as criminal or incarcerable. They're cast not as people with problems, but as the problem.”

“We live in a world today in which poor women are called welfare queens and imprisoned for 'theft of services' when they try to sneak their children into wealthier school districts to ensure they attend better schools,” Rich added. “Is this the best way to show we respect and value committed motherhood?”

The conference aimed to reclaim and reframe the welfare queen by challenging the ways in which claims of need and needy communities are marginalized, feminized and represented as pathological by the state, in order to develop new, more effective forms of governmental assistance.

“This conference asks, what does the State owe poor women and their families?” Rich said. “Are there different, better ways to think about the social contract between all Americans? We think there are.”

USC Gould co-sponsored the two-day symposium with the USC Dornsife Center for Feminist Research and Department of Sociology.