Fortunes of Feminism (18 page)

Psychologized dependency became the target of some of the earliest second-wave feminism. Betty Friedan's 1963 classic
The Feminine Mystique
provided a phenomenological account of the housewife's psychological dependency and drew from it a political critique of her social subordination.
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More recently, however, a burgeoning cultural-feminist, postfeminist, and anti-feminist self-help and pop-psychology literature has obfuscated the link between the psychological and the political. In Colette Dowling's 1981 book
The Cinderella Complex
, women's dependency was hypostatized as a depth-psychological gender structure: “women's hidden fear of independence” or the “wish to be saved.”
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The late 1980s saw a spate of books about “codependency,” a supposedly prototypically female syndrome of supporting or “enabling” the dependency of someone else. In a metaphor that reflects the drug hysteria of the period, dependency here, too, is an addiction. Apparently, even if a woman manages to escape her gender's predilection to dependency, she is still liable to incur the blame for facilitating the dependency of her husband or children. This completes the vicious circle: the increased stigmatizing of dependency in the culture at large has also deepened contempt for those who care for dependents, reinforcing the traditionally low status of the female helping professions, such as nursing and social work.
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The 1980s saw a cultural panic about dependency. In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association codified “Dependent Personality Disorder” (DPD) as an official psychopathology. According to the 1987 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III-R),

the essential feature of this disorder is a pervasive pattern of dependent and submissive behavior beginning by early childhood . . . People with this disorder are unable to make everyday decisions without an excessive amount of advice and reassurance from others, and will even allow others to make most of their important decisions . . . The disorder is apparently common and is diagnosed more frequently in females.
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The codification of DPD as an official psychopathology represents a new stage in the history of the moral/psychological register. Here the social relations of dependency disappear entirely into the personality of the dependent. Overt moralism also disappears in the apparently neutral, scientific, medicalized formulation. Thus, although the defining traits of the dependent personality match point for point the traits traditionally ascribed to housewives, paupers, natives, and slaves, all links to subordination have vanished. The only remaining trace of those themes is the flat, categorical, and uninterpreted observation that DPD is “diagnosed more frequently in females.”
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If psychological discourse has further feminized and individualized dependency, other postindustrial developments have further racialized it. The increased stigmatization of welfare dependency followed a general increase in public provision in the United States, the removal of some discriminatory practices that had previously excluded minority women from participation in AFDC, especially in the South, and the transfer of many white women to first-track programs as social-insurance coverage expanded. By the 1970s the figure of the Black solo mother had come to epitomize welfare dependency. As a result, the new discourse about welfare draws on older symbolic currents that linked dependency with racist ideologies.

The ground was laid by a long, somewhat contradictory stream of discourse about “the Black family,” in which African-American gender and kinship relations were measured against white middle-class norms and deemed pathological. One supposedly pathological element was “the excessive independence” of Black women, an ideologically distorted allusion to long traditions of wage work, educational achievement, and community activism. The 1960s and 1970s discourse about poverty recapitulated traditions of misogyny toward African-American women; in Daniel Moynihan's diagnosis, for example, “matriarchal” families had “emasculated” Black men and created a “culture of poverty” based on a “tangle of [family] pathology.”
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This discourse placed Black AFDC claimants in a double-bind: they were pathologically independent with respect to men and pathologically dependent with respect to government.

By the 1980s, however, the racial imagery of dependency had shifted. The Black welfare mother who haunted the white imagination ceased to be the powerful matriarch. Now the preeminent stereotype is the unmarried teenage mother caught in the “welfare trap” and rendered drone-like and passive. This new icon of welfare dependency is younger and weaker than the matriarch. She is often evoked in the phrase
children having children
, which can express feminist sympathy or anti-feminist contempt, Black appeals for parental control or white-racist eugenic anxieties.

Many of these postindustrial discourses coalesced in early 1990s. Then-Vice President Dan Quayle brought together the pathologized, feminized, and racialized currents in his comment on the May 1992 Los Angeles riot: “Our inner cities are filled with children having children . . . with people who are dependent on drugs and on the narcotic of welfare.”
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Thus postindustrial culture has called up a new personification of dependency: the Black, unmarried, teenaged, welfare-dependent mother. This image has usurped the symbolic space previously occupied by the housewife, the pauper, the native, and the slave, while absorbing and condensing their connotations. Black, female, a pauper, not a worker, a housewife and mother, yet practically a child herself—the new stereotype partakes of virtually every quality that has been coded historically as antithetical to independence. Condensing multiple, often contradictory meanings of dependency, it is a powerful ideological trope that simultaneously organizes diffuse cultural anxieties and dissimulates their social bases.

7. POSTINDUSTRIAL POLICY AND THE POLITICS

OF DEPENDENCY

Despite the worsening economic outlook for many Americans in the last few decades, there has been no cultural revaluation of welfare. Families working harder for less often resent those who appear to them not to be working at all. Apparently lost, at least for now, are the struggles of the 1960s that aimed to recast AFDC as an entitlement in order to promote recipients' independence. Instead, the honorific term
independent
remains firmly centered on wage labor, no matter how impoverished the worker.
Welfare dependency
, in contrast, has been inflated into a behavioral syndrome and made to seem more contemptible.

Contemporary policy discourse about welfare dependency is thoroughly inflected by these assumptions. It divides into two major streams. The first continues the rhetoric of pauperism and the culture of poverty. It is used in both conservative and liberal, victim-blaming or non-victim-blaming ways, depending on the causal structure of the argument. The contention is that poor, dependent people have something more than lack of money wrong with them. The flaws can be located in biology, psychology, upbringing, neighborhood influence; they can be cast as cause or as effect of poverty, or even as both simultaneously. Conservatives, such as George Gilder and Lawrence Mead, argue that welfare causes moral/psychological dependency.
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Liberals, such as William Julius Wilson and Christopher Jencks, blame social and economic influences, but agree that claimants' culture and behavior are problematic.
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A second stream of thought begins from neoclassical economic premises. It assumes a “rational man” facing choices in which welfare and work are both options. For these policy analysts, the moral/psychological meanings of dependency are present but uninterrogated, assumed to be undesirable. Liberals of this school, such as many of the social scientists associated with the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, grant that welfare inevitably has some bad, dependency-creating effects, but claim that these are outweighed by other, good effects like improved conditions for children, increased societal stability, and relief of suffering. Conservatives of this school, such as Charles Murray, disagree.
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The two camps argue above all about the question of incentives. Do AFDC stipends encourage women to have more out-of-wedlock children? Do they discourage them from accepting jobs? Can reducing or withholding stipends serve as a stick to encourage recipients to stay in school, keep their children in school, get married?

Certainly, there are real and significant differences here, but there are also important similarities. Liberals and conservatives of both schools rarely situate the notion of dependency in its historical or economic context; nor do they interrogate its presuppositions. Neither group questions the assumption that independence is an unmitigated good or its identification with wage labor. Many poverty and welfare analysts equivocate between an official position that
dependency
is a value-neutral term for receipt of (or need for) welfare and a usage that makes it a synonym for
pauperism
.

These assumptions permeate the public sphere. In the current round of alarms about welfare dependency, it is increasingly claimed that “welfare mothers ought to work,” a usage that tacitly defines work as wage-earning and childrearing as non-work. Here we run up against contradictions in the discourse of dependency: when the subject under consideration is teenage pregnancy, these mothers are cast as children; when the subject is welfare, they become adults who should be self-supporting. It is only in the last decade that welfare experts have reached a consensus on the view that AFDC recipients should be employed. The older view, which underlay the original passage of ADC, was that children need a mother at home—although in practice there was always a class double standard, since full-time maternal domesticity was a privilege that had to be purchased, not an entitlement poor women could claim. However, as waged work among mothers of young children has become more widespread and normative, the last defenders of a welfare program that permitted recipients to concentrate full-time on childraising were silenced.

None of the negative imagery about welfare dependency has gone uncontested, of course. From the 1950s through the 1970s, many of these presuppositions were challenged, most directly in the mid-1960s by an organization of women welfare claimants, the National Welfare Rights Organization. NWRO women cast their relation with the welfare system as active rather than passive, a matter of claiming rights rather than receiving charity. They also insisted that their domestic labor was socially necessary and praiseworthy. Their perspective helped reconstruct the arguments for welfare, spurring poverty lawyers and radical intellectuals to develop a legal and political-theoretical basis for welfare as an entitlement and right. Edward Sparer, a legal strategist for the welfare rights movement, challenged the usual understanding of dependency:

The charge of antiwelfare politicians is that welfare makes the recipient “dependent.” What this means is that the recipient depends on the welfare check for his [sic] material subsistence rather than upon some other source . . . whether that is good or bad depends on whether a better source of income is available . . . The real problem . . . is something entirely different. The recipient and the applicant traditionally have been dependent on the whim of the caseworker.
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The cure for welfare dependency, then, was welfare rights. Had the NWRO not been greatly weakened by the late 1970s, the revived discourse of pauperism in the 1980s could not have become hegemonic.

Even in the absence of a powerful National Welfare Rights Organization, many AFDC recipients maintained their own oppositional interpretation of welfare dependency. They complained not only of stingy allowances but also of infantilization due to supervision, loss of privacy, and a maze of bureaucratic rules that constrained their decisions about housing, jobs, and even (until the 1960s) sexual relations. In the claimants' view, welfare dependency is a social condition, not a psychological state, a condition they analyze in terms of power relations. It is what a left-wing English dictionary of social welfare calls
enforced dependency
, “the creation of a dependent class” as a result of “enforced reliance . . . for necessary psychological or material resources.”
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This idea of enforced dependency was central to another, related challenge to the dominant discourse. During the period in which NWRO activism was at its height, New Left revisionist historians developed an interpretation of the welfare state as an apparatus of social control. They argued that what apologists portrayed as helping practices were actually modes of domination that created enforced dependency. The New Left critique bore some resemblance to the NWRO critique, but the overlap was only partial. The historians of social control told their story mainly from the perspective of the “helpers” and cast recipients as almost entirely passive. They thereby occluded the agency of actual or potential welfare claimants in articulating needs, demanding rights, and making claims.
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Still another contemporary challenge to mainstream uses of
dependency
arose from a New Left school of international political economy. The context was the realization, after the first heady days of postwar decolonization, that politically independent former colonies remained economically dependent. In
dependency theory
, radical theorists of “underdevelopment” used the concept of dependency to analyze the global neocolonial economic order from an anti-racist and anti-imperialist perspective. In so doing, they resurrected the old preindustrial meaning of dependency as a subjected territory, seeking thereby to divest the term of its newer moral/psychological accretions and to retrieve the occluded dimensions of subjection and subordination. This usage remains strong in Latin America as well as in US social-scientific literature, where we find articles such as “Institutionalizing Dependency: The Impact of Two Decades of Planned Agricultural Modernization.”
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