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Social Control Through Welfare Legislation

The Impact of a State “Suitable Home Law”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Roland J. Chilton
Roland J. Chilton*
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts
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Unlike other federally assisted public welfare programs, the Aid to Dependent Children program has periodically been subjected to sharp political and journalistic attack. The themes of these attacks center around assertions that the program has encouraged illegitimacy and contributed to an increasing number of female-centered families. Bound up in such criticism is the suggestion that the parents of many, if not most, of the children receiving public assistance are unworthy of it by reason of their conduct or their notions of proper conduct. Also included in this anti-ADC ideology are the sloganlike propositions that many poor women have illegitimate children simply to become eligible for ADC payments and that they have additional children to obtain increased payments. A closely related assertion is sometimes made that the availability of ADC payments, or the way in which they are administered, causes many men to abandon their families or to live separately but nearby, and that the program in this way promotes and perpetuates matrifocal family patterns.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , November 1970 , pp. 205 - 224
Copyright
Copyright © 1970 The Law and Society Association.

Footnotes

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Data used in this paper were collected as part of a study directed by Lewis M. Killian and supported in part by Grant 155 from the Welfare Administration, U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

References

BELL, W. (1965) Aid to Dependent Children. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.Google Scholar
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