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poetry

Applying for AFDC

Applying for AFDC Hudson Review
Applying for welfare support, the poet Lucille Lang Day discovers a shifting identity—the anxious applicant, the gaudy outfit she wears, the mirror between.

Forgotten Feminisms: Johnnie Tillmon’s Battle Against ‘The Man’

Judith Shulevitz New York Review of Books
Mainstream feminists never quite knew what to do with the welfare rights movement. Here was a group of mothers who, rather than wanting equal work and equal pay, demanded that the government support them while they stayed home and raised their kids.

How Racism Has Shaped Welfare Policy in America Since 1935

Alma Carten The Conversation
It is true that the data show the number of families receiving cash assistance fell from 12.3 million in 1996 to current levels of 4.1 million as reported by The New York Times. But it is also true that child poverty rates for black children remain stubbornly high in the U.S.

California's Worst Law - And What's Behind the Repeal Movement

Judith Lewis Mernit Capital and Main
This year, State Senator Holly Mitchell, (D-Los Angeles), introduced Senate Bill 23, a repeal of the Maximum Family Grant rule, on the grounds that it has only driven poor women deeper into poverty, and done nothing to reduce the birth rate of women on welfare. That assertion has been supported by several studies, including one from the University of California, Berkeley and another from Cornell University.

Marian Wright Edelman Marks 40 Years of Advocacy at Children’s Defense Fund

Krissah Thompson The Washingon Post
Forty years after founding the Children’s Defense Fund, which advocates for federal and state resources for children, Edelman is still at work in the fund’s red brick building on E Street NW, displaying at 74 the same passion she had in 1967, when she was a 27-year-old civil rights attorney leading Sen. Robert F. Kennedy through the Mississippi Delta.
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