Women and Children in Poverty

By Diana Pearce

Vol. 8, No. 1, 1986 pp. 1-2, 16-20

Two out of three adults in poverty today are women. Three-fourths of America’s more than 34 million poor consist of women and their children. Over half of children in poverty live in women-maintained families.

We truly have a new poverty problem, a new kind of poor. It is not just that the demographics have changed. The very nature of poverty has changed. And that calls for a change in the nature of the solutions. We should not just reinstitute the New Deal and the War on Poverty, for they were not intended to deal with women’s poverty.

The femininization of poverty means that in the last two decades women-headed families have increased from thirty-six to fifty percent of all poor families. There are now more than three and a half million families maintained by women alone whose income is below the poverty level.

Although women are poor for some of the same reasons that men are poor-because they’re in high unemployment areas, because of racial discrimination, and because of physical handicaps, there are two characteristics of women’s poverty that distinguish it from the poverty experienced by men: children and labor market discrimination.

First, women often have the economic as well as the emotional burden of child rearing. Most people are aware that the rise in the divorce rate and the increase in the number of children born out of wedlock has increased the number of single-parent families, primarily woman-headed

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families. When a family with children breaks up, or when children are born to an unmarried couple, the man frequently becomes, or remains, single and the women becomes a single parent.

The circumstances of a woman alone in America, struggling to maintain a household, is highly correlated with poverty. The current system of child support in this country is a disgrace. Forty-three percent of children who have absent parents–usually absent fathers–get child support. Only half of these children receive the full amount awarded. The average child support awarded is $2,100 a year per family, not per child–that’s less than ten percent of the median income.

More disgraceful is our lack of public support for children who are without sufficient income from either parent. I’ve compared the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) support rates to the support standard for foster children-a good standard to use because that is what the state determines it costs to take care of a child. Nationwide in ]974, foster parents received three times as much as the natural, single parent mother (receiving AFDC) to take care of a child. In 1982, the ratio was four-to-one. That is, if you go from two children to three children, the average increase in AFDC payments in 1982 was forty-nine dollars a month Compare that with the the average state payment for a foster child: almost two-hundred dollars a month. In some states the ratio is seven or eight to one.

Some mothers living in poverty have come to feel that the best way they can provide for their children is to give them up to foster care. Because the foster mother can get at least four times as much money as the natural mother to provide food, clothing and shelter, and sometimes more, the children would be better off, at least materially.

The other distinctive characteristic of women’s poverty is the disadvantage that women experience in the labor market. This is the familiar “fifty-nine-cents-on-a-dollar,” and the fact that women college graduates still earn less than men who are high school dropouts. Those figures however, only compare men and women who work full-time, year-round.

Only forty-eight percent of women workers work full-time, year-round. The majority of women workers only manage to get part-time or part-year work, or both. Women find themselves unable to get full-time jobs. Only thirty-eight percent of women who maintain households alone are able to get full-time year-round work. Their wages are even less than the fifty-nine cents on a dollar–considerably less if they are minority women.

Women disproportionately fill jobs that are set up to be part-time. These jobs are in the most rapidly expanding industries. Employers deliberately create these jobs as part-time so that they don’t have to provide fringe benefits or sick leave. Sometimes people don’t even get breaks or lunch hours. They don’t get paid vacation. They don’t get paid holidays. They don’t get many of things that the full-time worker gets. Women are bearing the brunt of the expansion of part-time jobs and are being kept poor because of it.

Many women work at the minimum wage–eighteen percent compared to eight percent of men. Even if you work full-time, year-round, at a minimum wage job you do not earn enough to support yourself and one child above the poverty level for a two-person family.

The minimum wage, until 1981, had remained pretty close to the poverty line for a family of three. But today if you are a minimum wage worker, you have to work fifty hours a week to support yourself and two children at the poverty level. Deductions for social security add another three or four hours. Pretty soon you’re working seven days a week. The minimum wage is no longer a living wage. And women are disproportionately minimum wage workers.

So we have the two sources of women’s poverty: poverty from children, poverty from disadvantage in the labor market. We have a welfare sytem, however that was designed not for the problems of poor women, but for the problems of poor men. I call that system a Dual Welfare

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System, for our welfare programs can be grouped into two very different groups, a primary sector and a secondary sector.

Most of the resources spent by the welfare system are devoted to programs in the primary sector that are geared to one’s being, or having been, a full-time, year-round, worker: programs such as unemployment compensation, social security, worker’s compensation. These are relatively generous.

When unemployment compensation was established, the rhetoric used then spoke of “regular workers” versus “casual workers.” Unemployment insurance was set up to protect workers who had worked full-time for a number of years, and then were laid off through no fault of their own. But, as we have seen, women workers don’t fit this “regular worker” model. Many women work part-time. They don’t make the minimum earnings or the minimum hours to qualify for unemployment compensation.

Women often leave employment for reasons that don’t have to do with their competence on the job. Sometimes they leave because they cannot fulfill their domestic obligations and work their job. What happens, for example, if an employer shifts an employee who is also a single, working mother from a day to a night shift? What if she cannot arrange for nighttime child care and is, as a result, forced to leave her job? The law says that’s her fault, not the employer’s. The result is that she can’t get unemployment compensation.

In many states, if you leave work voluntarily because you have been sexually harassed by your employer you can’t get unemployment compensation.

Disproportionately, because women do not fit the Male Worker (regular worker) Model of unemployment compensation, or of other welfare programs that provide support or give access to job training programs, they have to turn to the secondary welfare system.

The secondary welfare system contains the “means-tested” programs that are stigmatizing, penurious in benefits and that push women back into employment as quickly as they can, no matter how inappropriate or how insecure the jobs are. These secondary welfare sector programs are built upon what I call the Male Pauper Model.

The Male Pauper Model grew from the English Poor Laws, and from the nineteenth century work houses. In this model, poor people are viewed as able-bodied persons who are just lazy and need to be forced to go to work. Benefits are set so low that anybody who possibly can work will be pressed into the labor market as quickly as possible. If neccessary they are forced through compulsory programs we now call “workfare.”

Thus, the US welfare system now consists of a primary set of programs that women find themselves ineligble for and a secondary set of programs that women find demeaning, impoverishing and that push them into competition for low-skilled, low-paid employment.

By the way, ninety percent of women presently on welfare have worked. Before the Reagan budget cuts, many poor women worked while they were also on welfare. That’s very difficult to do now because you are allowed to earn so little before you are forced off welfare.

What about job training programs in the secondary welfare system? We have two major ones: WIN (Work Incentive Program) and to some extent JTPA dote Training Partnership Act).

Each of these programs are so small as to be considered tokenism. They essentially ration jobs. But women do enter into them. Women constitute fifty percent of the people who take JTPA training programs. Yet, even here, they are shunted into the programs that pay the least. For example, JTPA on-the job work experiences which offer non-paying job training is sixty-two percent female. Paid on-the-job training is fifty-eight percent male. When it comes to wages, women too get shortshrift; their average wage of $4.20 an hour (remember, this is the secondary sector) is eighty-five percent of the wages received by men graduating from the same program, and on a full-time basis puts their income at about the poverty level for a three-person family.

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Women are forced into a cycle of alternating between very poor jobs and going on welfare. As soon as a job ends, women find they’re not eligble for unemployment compensation. They didn’t earn enough money or they didn’t work long enough–so they go back on welfare. Once on welfare they’re forced through the programs and are sent back out into a poor job again. Never getting anywhere. Never getting to the point where they have enough job training skills, enough work experience to get out of poverty in any permanent way.

We have a gender-differentiated way of thinking about welfare programs. We think about “income support” for women and children. We talk about “jobs” and “job training” and “equal opportunity” for men. The reality is that everybody is expected to–and must, work. By talking about work and welfare in this gender differentiated way, and yet forcing women into unequally-paid work, women’s poverty is perpetuated and institutionalized.

There’s been some talk about re-instituting programs from the 1960s’ War on Poverty. Think carefully back to all those programs. They analyzed and concentrated on relieving poverty among the “able-bodied.” Basically, they were intended to help men, black as well as white. And they did. Particularly young men.

As it was originally written, the Job Corps legislation excluded young women. It was amended so that they could participate, but it was not intended for them and did not have much effect on them. The same thing is true for many of the programs that are under discussion now. They do not address the nature or needs of women in poverty.

Among our most successful programs during the 1970’s in reducing poverty were those for the elderly. We asked, “What is the nature of poverty among the aged?” One of the problems was fixed incomes, so we indexed Social Security. A second problem was medical expenses. As people get older, their health problems increase, but there was no way they could increase their income to deal with rising medical expenses. So we created the Medicare program. It has never been adequate, and the Reagan Administration has cut it back, but we created a program that dealt with the problem.

A third problem was housing. We said, “A lot of people who aren’t able to buy a house are finding themselves without housing when they are older.” So we created subsidized housing for the elderly. With these and other programs we substantially reduced poverty among the aged.

Now, we have to do the same thing with regard to pov-

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erty among women. We have to ask, “What is the nature of women’s poverty?” Then we have to devise and develop programs that meet the nature of that poverty. I’m going to suggest six principles that I think should guide us as we develop an agenda for women’s poverty.

The first one is: dual systems are inherently unequal. Services for poor people alone tend to be poor services. We need universal programs. We need universal income support programs. We need universal health care programs.

There is, for example, a great deal of talk about people who are uninsured for health care. Do you know what is being proposed? That for middle class people we develop health insurance programs, and for poor people we develop charity hospitals. Hospitals and doctors will be given a pot of money to dole out health care-on their terms-to the poor. That is the wrong way to do it. Dual systems are inherently unequal.

They will always end up being poor services for poor people. We need a non-stigmatizing, universal, system. And there are many ways to pay for it out of the tax system.

Second principle: while programs need to be universal in terms of application, they need to be targeted at specific needs of the poor. Instead of providing a few subsidized child care spaces for a few people, we need universal child care system, much like our public education system. Women-maintained families, especially, need child care.

We emphatically don’t need employer-controlled child care. We’ve had enough experience with company doctors and company stores to know what happens when you have services in control of the same people whose primary motives is profit.

We need programs that address the specific labor market disadvantages faced by women workers as women. We need job training programs that prepare women for non-traditional jobs. We need to prepare women for sexual harassment and sex discrimination so that they know how to handle these situations. Almost no job training provides that unless they’re ones run by women’s organizations.

The third principle is that we need to get rid of the destructive dual system rhetoric when we talk about social welfare programs. We make false judgments and distinctions between dependent and independent. I don’t know any “rugged individualist” who is not socially dependent.

Another false distinction for most women workers is that of being “at work” and “being at home”. Most women know that such dual rhetoric is destructive of self-esteem and that it doesn’t make any sense for their lives. There’s work for pay and there’s work at home.

The fourth principle insists that we need to develop programs that value the work that women do. If a young man gives two or three years to serve in the US armed forces, he is rewarded in many ways. He receives education benefits, health care benefits for the rest of his life, and burial benefits. He is given social esteem.

If a woman gives one year or a few years to having children, she is castigated and ultimately punished for having interrupted her career. We need to value her gifts of her time-perhaps with Social Security earnings sharings, parental leave, or something like veteran’s preference points which would credit women for the time they spent out of the labor force raising children. Women should not be impoverished for making the choice to have children.

Our fifth principle is that we should value children as the precious resources and as the future of this society that they are. Just as no children today should be denied equal access to education or health care because of their race, we need to declare that no children should be denied equal accesss to education, health care, shelter, because of the marital status of their parents.

Sixth, programs should recognize and value–

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equally-different family forms, and not try to solve poverty by imposing one model on all of us. Two parent families-other things being equal-may be preferable. I don’t think all the evidence is in, but clearly “other things” aren’t always equal. For many families the choice is between a two-parent family which is psychologically and physically abusive of the mother and children, and a single-parent family that is not. Often, even with the great economic costs, a one parent family is preferable.

The problem of joblessness among young black men is a problem that ought to be solved in its own right. If that problem were to be solved, and if the man’s wages were to be shared (through marriage or child support), it might contribute to reducing women’s poverty, but it is not the solution, or even a major solution to women’s poverty.

Now some specifics. We need a universal income support system to recognize women’s work as valuable work.

Anybody who wants to work and can work, but can’t find work. should have access to income support as an unemployed person. In the United States, about forty percent of the women who are unemployed are either new entrants or reentrants to the labor market. That means they cannot get unemployment insurance, nor access to the various job service and retraining programs that are available to people who are the “insured unemployed.” Likewise, unemployment insurance systems in Europe provide for young people who graduate from high school, have never worked, but can’t find a job.

In the US, we have a false distinction: a woman with children who receives public assistance is considered to be a “welfare mother.’ She is not considered “unemployed”, even though ninety percent have worked, and some even work while on welfare. She may be looking for a job to support herself and her family, but she does not have a right to unemployment insurance–an income support program whose benefits are often several times as high as those of welfare programs. This makes a big difference. If you don’t have enough resources, you can’t do much about solving your problems.

We should have one income support system. One that is not stigmatizing. We should include everybody who is not working and everyone who has a job but whose earnings are inadequate. For example, in some states-but nowhere in the South-we have “short-time compensation.” Someone whose full-time job is cut back to half-time can get unemployment insurance coverage for that halftime they are not working.

However, if you are a part-time worker, already working only four hours a day. you’re not eligible for the program. ‘[‘hat doesn’t make any sense. The person who can’t get a full-time job is usually in as much, if not more, need than the person who has been cut fron1 full-time to part-time hours.

We need anti-discrimination-against-women provisions in our job training programs. Currently, if you run a job training program. You’re rewarded for how many people you place in jobs. A white man comes in and needs only two weeks of training to get a job. A woman comes and needs child care, remedial math (she dropped out of high school), and more time and experience to get a job. That takes more resources. The job training program which opens itself fully to women’s needs is going to be castigated for not getting as many people jobs as another program which is more concerned with mere body counts-that’s called “creaming”. And it’s been a characteristic of job programs since they started.

Why not reward programs for placing people according to how difficult they are to place?

We need to raise and index the minimum wage. The minimum wage was intended to be a minimum living wage. We should restore that commitment. We have not raised the minimum wage since 1981.

We need to create more jobs both in the private and public sectors. We have a system where we subsidize capital, where there are real incentives for an employer to add a machine to increase his capital investments. (It’s not for nothing our system is called capitalist.) We need incentives for employers who want to expand production-not to add a machine or to add overtime hours for present workers-to give them an incentive to hire new workers.

If everybody who is working today worked only forty hours, had just one job and no overtime, and if we took those overtime hours and hired new workers-and did so by public policy that would subsidize it in the employer’s interest-we would create enough new jobs for every person who is now unemployed. The jobs are there, but not available to those who need them.

And, we should create new jobs. We started to do this under CETA and then cut back. There are a lot of services we need. We need educational excellence. We need teacher’s aides. We need library aides. We need social workers. We need child care. We need a lot of services for a better society.

We should have universal fringe benefits. We need to make sure that all jobs provide not only the minimum income, which is what raising and indexing the minimum wage would do, but minimum security against income loss due to health crisis, unemployment, disabilty, and so on.

We need a system of universal health insurance.

We need to make sure that unemployment insurance covers everybody who is a worker. We need to make sure that disabilty covers everybody who is a worker, including women during pregnancy.

We need decent housing. The absence of shelter is becom-

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ing an increasing crisis for women and their children-the hidden homeless. You don’t see women and their children on the streets nearly as much as you see homeless men. But if you look at the lists for public housing, people who have been found eligible and are waiting, you will see that we have a crisis of shelter for women and children. This crisis is exacerbated by increasing discrimination in the private market against families with children. Twenty-five percent of rental units across the country exclude chidren altogther. Another fifty percent restrict them-only two children, no children over eight, no children under six, and so forth. In some cities, eighty percent of the new rental housing excludes children.

This trend is growing. Gentrification and the building of condiminiums are further reducing the supply of moderate income housing. In public housing, we’ve cut back on rent subsidies. We’ve cut back on construction. Congresswoman Pat Schroeder (D-Colorado) estimates that there are now three million single parent families that are doubling up.

How do we get from where we are to where we want to go?

First, we have to use our imagination and out of our experience devise and revise programs that will work. This means the development of programs at the local level as models for national programs and the changing of national programs–such as income support programs. We need to rethink from the ground up.

But, I don’t think we’re going to get simply because of good ideas, or obvious next steps. We have to organize and make demands. We must push for the election of people who realize we have a crisis and who are willing to work on these issues. And frankly, I think that means we need more women to raise the issues and concerns of the new poor.

Diana Pearce is Director (and founder) of the Women and Poverty Project, and visiting professor of Sociology at American University in Washington, DC. She has written and spoken widely on poverty issues, and coined the phrase the “feminization of poverty” in 1978. She has also researched housing discrimination and school desegregation, including serving as an expert witness in the Yonkers (NY) Ouachita Parish (Monroe, LA) cases.

American Poverty, World Poverty

By Ray Marshall

Vol. 8, No. 1, 1986, pp. 3-7

For poor people in this country, and in the world, the outlook is not good. And because the lives of the poor are joined together with ours, their problems and poverty are ours-directly and indirectly, in our communities, through international trade, and through immigration.

Rising unemployment is a worldwide phenomenon. Joblessness in the Third World is fifty percent, and climbing. The International Labor Organization estimates that to keep that figure from going up by the end of this century for people already born we’ll need to create 700 million new jobs.

There are not 700 million jobs in the whole industrialized world today. Things are going to get worse.

The Greatest Economic Policy Mistake

The American economy is losing its competitiveness across the board, not just in the smokestack industries but, as a presidential commission reported in 1985, in seven out of ten high-tech industries. Our ability to maintain jobs in this country is being eroded.

The main reason for the loss of competitiveness and for our loss of two million jobs is the over-valued dollar-which comes about directly because of Reaganomics. The 1981 tax cut was the single greatest economic policy mistake in US history. Historians will leave no doubt about that.

To give you some idea of the magnitude of the damage that has come from the tax cut decision, Ford Motor Company estimated in 1983–before things got as bad as they are now–that of the $2,000 differential between American and Japanese automobiles, $1,400 was because of exchange rates. The Caterpillar Company estimated that on a $200,000 piece of equipment, they ought to have a $30,000 advantage over Komatsu. They’ve got a $30,000 disadvantage.

So what do they do? They leave the country. They’re moving the jobs to other countries. Not because of inefficiency in the United States, not because we can’t be more competitive in real terms. They’re moving those jobs from the United States because with differentials in exchange rates of that magnitude they simply cannot compete. They cannot produce in the United States. Ninety-five percent of all the increased capital goods final demand over the past business cycle came from imports. Ninety-five percent.

Our capital goods industries–our machine tools and basic production capability–are in shambles. And although we also have structural problems, the fundamental problem is the over-valued dollar that came about because of high real interest rates, that came about because of the enormous budget deficit, that came about because of the 1981 tax cut.

Corporations Beyond the Rule of Law

There are other problems. What to do about multinational and transnational corporations? (Transnational companies are owned by people from different countries. Multinationals are American companies operating in different countries.)

Transnationals and multinationals are driven by profits. Whatever is second to profits is a long way behind. They will move the jobs wherever they can make the greatest profit. Ordinarily that means to where they can get the lowest wages. So they are able to whipsaw countries. And whipsaw workers.

I’ve seen no effective means to bring multinational and transnational corporations under the rule of law, to make them responsible for their actions. I think it can be done, but I see no organization now to do that.

Many of the jobs in the South are on their way to the Third World. We will not be able to keep them. Many of them came here because of low wages. And this is their last stop in this country. In the Third World, Mexico is a high-wage country and their wages are about one-fifth of ours.

American Poverty

The US poverty figures remain high. The little improvement among some categories last year was very little. We have to be very discouraged about the overall decline in the national poverty rate from 15.2% to 14.4%

Income is being redistributed in the United States. The top ten percent of income recipients have never received a larger proportion of the income at any time since we’ve been keeping numbers than they did in 1984. (see Tables l and 2) The bottom forty percent of income recipients in the country have never received a lower proportion of income than they did in 1984. The lowest ten percent of income recipients in the country have lost about $400 since 1980 while the richest ten percent have added $5,000 to their median income.

Programs to help the poor have been drastically reduced. You know those numbers. Most discouraging, most alarm-

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ing is what is happening to children. Poor children are much worse off now than when the War on Poverty started. There are more of them. Their numbers are increasing while the resources to deal with their problems are diminishing.

Over one-half of poor children live in families headed by women. These children’s futures are inextricably bound up with the conditions of women in poverty. They will never escape from that. If they don’t get proper nutrition as infants and children, they and we are damaged by that forever. These programs have been drastically reduced despite evidence that they save the government three dollars for every dollar spent.

Among our most important anti-poverty programs are our anti-discrimination laws. But, now we’ve got an administration intent upon weakening civil rights enforcement. In their attitudes about discrimination against women and blacks, they would send us back to the 1940s.

Many of the organizations that might help poor and near-poor people are either weakened or are looking the other way.

Unions are weakened and under full-scale attack. The National Association of Manufacturers has formed a Council for a Union-Free Environment. They wouldn’t have dared do that twenty years ago. I don’t think they will pull it off. But in the process they have greatly weakened unions and unions’ ability to represent the interests of workers.

Community-based organizations and civil rights groups have been weakened.

The government–which in a just and humane society should always be concerned about the least fortunate–is looking the other way. They have convinced themselves that there’s no problem or, that it’s the poor’s own fault that they’re poor.

The Democratic Party seems unconcerned about the poor. It has not even demonstrated the concern that would be in its own self-interest: by registering the poor to vote. We could only get six out of over thirty Democratic governors involved in encouraging community service organizations to register voters.

We’ve also got the “neo-liberals” who are disaffected. They believe that the programs that tried to help the poor failed. They believe that if we just let the market work and have the proper macroeconomic policies we don’t need jobs programs and we don’t need most of these programmatic interventions. That strikes me as looking the other way. Denying a problem that clearly exists.

An Intellectual Code of Nonsense

We are seeing a weakening of the intellectual support for human resource development programs. Having such intellectual support during the New Deal was one of the reasons we were able to make progress.

People used to believe that a just and humane society took care of the least of these our brothers and sisters. And, that in so doing, we were helping the country. We did not believe we could prevent depressions and have lasting prosperity unless all major goups shared in that prosperity.

We still say that people are our most important asset. And it’s unquestionably true. But many people who know that, don’t understand it.

So we have cut programs for education that have demonstrated their effectiveness. And we have cut programs like WIC, the women’s, infants and children nutrition program which returns three dollars to the government for each one it spends.

In the past, we believed that these programs were not costs but investments. Public education was an investment in this country. So was the GI Bill. We didn’t only look at the cost of doing things.

Creating a just society once meant something pretty concrete. It meant a bias in favor of the disadvantaged. Nothing was more unjust than the equal treatment of unequals. We felt an obligation to the poor and the disadvantaged.

All this now is being challenged by an intellectual code that contains several parts. The first is Reaganomics, an economic theory of sheer nonsense. I don’t think anybody of sound mind and any training believed that supply-side economics–the doctrine that was used to justify the 1981 tax cut-ever had a chance. You remember what this promised–that by cutting taxes by 750 billion dollars and increasing defense spending to 1.6 trillion, we would so stimulate the economy that we would balance the federal budget by the end of 1983.

The result was the creation of a budget deficit so huge that people now view balancing the budget as the most important thing we can do–even if it means cutting out education and nutrition for children.

As former Reagan budget director David Stockman said in his famous interview, you couldn’t sell trickle-down out loud, so you called it supply-side. That’s all Reaganomics was and is: the myth that if you make the rich richer, we’ll all be better off.

Well, we made the rich richer. And we made the poor poorer–they have been trickled down on. Investment went down. Savings went down. And the result is a budget deficit larger than that produced by all the preceding administrations combined.

Beyond Reaganomics, other doctrines have undercut intellectual and popular support for economic justice. One idea–put forth by Charles Murray in his book Losing Ground–is that government assistance programs are

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counterproductive. Murray’s view, which continues to be surprisingly well-received, holds that social spending makes the receipients dependent and the problems worse. Murray says that as a result of the War on Poverty and the rest of the government’s social spending programs, poverty went up.

A variant of that argument is, “The programs didn’t work.” That’s the easiest one to deal with. Because the evidence is overwhelming that the programs did work. And produced rich dividends for the country.

But let’s look at the ideas of Reaganomics and then at the notions of Murray. First, is the budget deficit our most important problem? Not really. The budget deficit is not likely to cause a recession. It is troubling. Its real effects are on interest rates, the exchange rate, and in creating an obstacle to economic growth. But bringing the deficit down will not necessarily reduce real interest rates.

There are various reasons for that. First, in the deregulated financial environment, competition for deposits keeps the interest rates up. There used to only be competition on one side of the market. Moreover, with very low corporate profits, corporations are no longer as sensitive to interest rates. So there is likely to continue to be high demand for money. Also, there’s simply a lot of speculation, which causes rates to be high and volatile.

By trying first to balance the budget by 1987, we could end up with a deeper recession than that of 1981-82. It’s the wrong time to do it. And the worst possible way to do it would be to make further cuts in domestic spending. We need to reduce the budget deficit as much as possible by raising revenues, cutting military spending, restoring many of the cuts in human resource development programs, raising taxes and reforming the tax system.

Now, let’s look at Charles Murray’s arguments. The evidence is overwhelmingly against the idea that government domestic spending is counterproductive. Bet me just tick off a few reasons.

First, there is the assumption, underlying Murray’s view, that the poor don’t want to work. Nonsense. If you have had any experience with these programs you know that if you make a few lousy jobs available, you get inundated with applicants. Secondly, Murray doesn’t exclude the elderly from his federal expenditure numbers, but he excludes them in terms of how their lives have improved. The elderly have benefitted tremendously from government programs. They have received 86% of social welfare spending. Poverty among the elderly has declined from over 25%, at the beginning of the War on Poverty, twice the overall level, to fourteen percent in 1983.

The neo-conservative argument ignores the fact that a relatively small part of social welfare spending goes to the non-elderly. We are told by Murray that black male teenage crime is a result of government spending. What government program is for black teenage males? None. There’s no social spending on black teenage males. Indeed I know of no human resources development program where conditions got worse because we spent more money.

Even from looking at Murray’s own statistics, the only conclusion you can come to is that social program spending reduces poverty. When we quit spending and reduce

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programs, poverty went up. Problems get worse because of changing conditions or poor program design, not because we spent money. There is overwhelming evidence that programs like the Job Corps that have had time to grow and learn from their mistakes have greatly improved the employability of the young people they were designed to help and are good investments of public resources.

Things have gotten worse for many people because we have discontinued the programs, not because we adopted them. We have serious problems of a secular rise in unemployment; growing inequality, which will greatly weaken an already fractured national unity; and the development of a self-perpetuating social and economic underclass-made up disproportionately of minorities, but including many whites as well.

One manifestation of this self-perpetuation is the teenage pregnancy problem. Unwanted pregnancies among children is a serious national problem with devastating long-run consequences. Its causes are not well understood, but they can be understood with study and attention. I would guess that a good bit of the problem relates to unemployment and social isolation of very poor young people. In the black community, joblessness, racism, the movement of middle- and working-class people out of predominantly black areas (thus removing role models and sources of social stability), and growing unemployment among young black males, all have contributed greatly to a self-perpetuating system of helplessness and despair.

I believe we should make the elimination of this growing underclass a high national priority.

Many object to the costs of programs to change this situation, but we will pay dearly if we do not deal with it.

Most of the work force growth between now and the first two decades of the twenty-first century will be among women and minorities By about 2015, there probably be a combined minority population of 91 million in the US; this will constitute about 34% of the population and well over forty percent of the work force (because white males are older and more likely to retire).

How well prepared these young people are for twenty-first century jobs depends on what is happening to them right now. And the evidence is not encouraging. Most eighteen year old minority males are not sufficiently literate to function in even the emerging low-wage jobs.

Probably less than ten percent of our growing prison population can function at the twelfth grade level. The fact that it costs between $25,000-$30,000 to keep somebody in prison for a year is only part of the cost of inadequate human resource development.

If there is any one fault with what we did in the past, it was that we paid too much attention to income transfers and not enough attention to making people self-sufficient. For the poverty problem is going to be solved by poor and near-poor people themselves. The rest of us (and organizations like the SRC) can help, but programs must be designed to give people greater ability and incentives to help themselves.

So what can we do? It’s very clear that we need a new international economic order. That we’ve got to renegotiate GATT (the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs). We’ve got to have much better coordination between the economic policies of the major industrial countries.

We’ve got to say to Japan and Germany and other countries, “You’ve got to help. We’ve got to move together. And what you ought to do now is to start stimulating your economy. What we all ought to do now is relax our monetary policies to bring real interest rates down. And we’ll start doing some things to balance our budget.”

Within the US, we need a full employment strategy. We need to create enough jobs at decent wages to provide one for everybody who is willing and able to work. We can and ought to do it. We can’t do it through monetary-fiscal policies alone, but we can create jobs There’s a lot of useful work to be done.

We know that a full-employment policy would be good business. With a jobs program, $15 billion could save the federal government $30 billion. We’ve demonstrated that in the past. The main reason we don’t do it now is the neoconservative mythology that it didn’t work. We ought not let them get IJY with that. The contrary evidence is overpowering.

We need to greatly strengthen our human resource development. Our education, our health care. We must educate people, get them trained.

Worker ownership of industry has already started in

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other countries, and is beginning in the United States. We ought to develop policies to facilitate worker participation in and ownership of industry.

We must strengthen collective bargaining.

We need to strengthen community-based organinzations that assist people in gaining greater control of their own destinies.

We must get ready, for our time will come I think the country will be looking for new answers by 1988 when many of Ronald Reagan’s chickens come home to roost and the consequences of his policies are more obvious.

What should we do? We must keep the faith. We must do what we think is right. We ought not be stampeded into doing things simply because they are popular. We especially should avoid the trap that balancing the budget should take priority over everything else-an idea t hat seems to be very popular with many Democrats. We ought to learn. We ought to act We ought to challenge. We ought to develop strategies and tactics to improve the conditions of the poor. We ought to organize. We ought to register voters. We ought to form coalitions.

We ought to present our analysis and the realities of life under Reaganomics to as wide a popular audience as we can, using the most modern and accessible forms of media. We should make clear what life for the working poor is really like. We should present the examples of young people who have been trained in the civil rights movement or in community-based organizations who are now assuming positions of leadership in the country. We should present the lives of young women who have been able to escape from welfare and poverty because of government programs which support training and childcare. We should present the very real stories of adults who have learned to read and write because of an adult literacy program.

We should not let people make abstractions of human suffering. Above all we should not be afraid to experiment, to try new approaches to dealing with our human problems. We should not be afraid to make mistakes and we should learn from our mistakes.

Rather what we should fear most, as citizens of the richest nation on earth, is the judgment of the world community and of history that we were unwilling to tee good and faithful stewards of our resources, that we deliberately decided not to use our resources to try to improve the human condition.

One of the reason that I am proud to have been associated with the Southern Regional Council is that this organization can stand that test. Whatever else historians may say about the SRC, I am confident that they will say we at least tried to use our resources to make the South a better place for all of our people.

Ray Marshall holds the Audre and Bernard Rapoport Chair in Economics and Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, and is vice-president of the Southern Regional Council.

Casualty Count. The War Against the Poor

By Robert Greenstein

Vol. 8, No. 1, 1986, pp. 7-10

If you look at the statistics of American poverty today, one set–the figures for children’s poverty–hits you over the head. Fifteen years ago the child poverty rate was between thirteen and fourteen percent. Last year it was over twenty-one percent. The poverty rate for children is a full one-third higher than in the late 1970s when the unemployment rate was at the same level as it is today.

And, while there has been a very slight recent reduction in the overall poverty rate during the past year, and in the overall child poverty rate, all the reduction in child poverty has occurred among white children. None of it has occurred among black or Hispanic children.

The poverty rate for black children under the age of six now has reached just over fifty-one percent. One out of every two black children under the age of six in the United States lives in poverty.

Nor do we expect any substantial further reduction in poverty soon. Real wages (wages adjusted for inflation), which are an important predictor of the poverty rate, remain unchanged from a year ago. Inflation isn’t going up very fast, but wages are going up even less than inflation. The

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real purchasing power of wages did not improve in 1985.

Why is this happening?

Before the scant decline in the poverty rate was announced, Secretary of Commerce, Malcolm Baldrige, hailed the improved unemployment figures and predicted that the poverty rate for 1984 would go down to thirteen percent.

It didn’t happen.

Meanwhile, several economists at the Institute for Research on Poverty in Madison, Wisconsin, were forecasting the 1984 poverty statistics almost exactly on the mark. What were the differences between how the Reagan Administration and the Wisconsin researchers analysed the circumstances of poverty?

The Administration assumed the major issue was the economy: unemployment goes up, poverty goes up, unemployment comes down, poverty comes down.

The economists at the Institute for Research on Poverty recognized that changes in the economy are important, but found that the domestic budget cuts since 1981 also have played a role and have had a long-lasting effect in increasing the number of families with children who are poor.

They also found the benefits of the current economic “recovery” are less evenly distributed than those of any previous economic recovery of recent decades. The gap between rich and poor is growing. In fact, the gap between upper and lower income families in the United States is wider today than at any time since the US Census began collecting data on income distribution in 1947.

The poorest forty percent of all US families now have a smaller share of the national income than at any time since 1947.

The richest forty percent of all US families now have a larger share of the national income in any time since 1947.

What’s more, if you examine median family income since 1980 you’ll find that the a family in the poorest forty percent of the population had nearly $500 less in annual income by 1984 than in 1980 (after adjusting for inflation). By constrast, the median family of the top forty percent was $1,800 richer in 1984 than in 1980. And the median family income in the top ten percent of the population had increased by $5,000 in those years. That’s before-tax income–even before the effects of the Reagan help-the-rich tax cuts.

These figures have implications for rich and poor, and for black and white. Nearly two-thirds of black families fall into the bottom forty percent of the overall population. Only one of every five black families falls into the top forty per cent. Or to put that another way, while white median family income is a tad higher now than in 1980, black median family income is over $500 lower after adjusting for inflation.

What the figures also show is that not only has the number of poor grown (in 1978 there were about 25 million people below the poverty line, today there are nearly 34 million), but that those who are poor have gotten poorer. The typical poor family is farther below the poverty line.

The Working Poor

Another factor of recent years affecting the rise in poverty is a very serious decline in wages. Larger and larger numbers of people who work remain poor. The number of people who work full-time year-round and are still poor has increased by two-thirds just since 1978, and now exceeds two million persons.

The increasing numbers of working poor are related to the growing weakness of labor unions, foreign competition and the shift from manufacturing to service jobs. Just as important is the unprecedented stagnation of the minimum wage. The minimum has not been adjusted now in nearly five years. The minimum wage has fallen twenty-five percent in relation to inflation since January 1981.

What does a declining minimum wage mean if you work forty hours a week, fifty-two weeks a year for $3.35 an hour? In 1978 if you were a member of a family of four in which one wage-earner worked full-time and year-round at the minimum wage, your family would have been $1,150 below the poverty line. The same situation in a family of three would have put that family above the poverty line.

Today, a family of four with a single wage-earner working forty hours a week, fifty-two weeks a year, finds itself $4,000 below the poverty line. Today, a family of three–for instance, a minimum wage earning mother of two children–working full-time, year-round, is $1,600 below the poverty line. A family of two (a full-time working mother and one child) is about forty or fifty dollars below the poverty line. These families are falling further below the poverty line each year because the minimum wage is not being adjusted for inflation.

And, it’s not just the minimum wage. Many workers are paid fifty cents or a dollar above the minimum. Families are working, they are trying, but they are remaining in poverty.

The Unkindest Cuts

Now, these are some of the basic situations that confront us. And what has the federal response been? To cut the very programs which give the most help to the working poor while, at the same time, using the money cut from domestic programs to finance the continuing military build-up.

While the programs affected are many in number and their effect is often life-saving–Medicaid, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), food stamps, SSI, low-income housing, low-income energy assistance, legal servi-

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ces and so forth (about thirty programs in all)–their budgets are actually quite small. If you add together all of the programs targeted for low income persons, you’re talking about one-tenth of the federal budget. Yet that one-tenth of the federal budget bore thirty percent of the budget cuts enacted from 1981 through 1983, when the bulk of the domestic reductions were made. In other words, the low income programs shouldered three times their share. No other part of the federal budget has been cut as deeply. And, many of these programs stand to be cut deeply again in fiscal year 1987, if the Administration has its way.

Let’s take a couple of areas and highlight what has happened.

In the AFDC program, the Reagan Administration says the cuts have been “successful.” Yet, this past July, the General Accounting Office came out with a major report on the impact of the cuts in AFDC. The GAO found 440,000 families-nearly all of them working, female-headed families-had been cut from AFDC. Many of those families were poor even before being cut. Many more were made poor.

In many states the families cut from AFDC also lost Medicaid coverage. An estimated 700,000 children lost Medicaid coverage.

When the GAO looked further, it found that the average family that was cut from AFDC had lost between $1,500 and $2,500 dollars a year in benefits. The GAO determined that between twenty and fifty percent of the families that were cut now have no health care coverage for themselves or their children.

About half the families reported having run out of food at least once and having no money to buy more. Over one-quarter of these families had some utility shut-off at least once after being dropped from AFDC.

This GAO study did not even examine the effects of all the cuts in the AFDC program, such as the denial of AFDC

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benefits during the first five months of pregnancy to a woman pregnant with her first child. This, despite knowledge that prenatal care during early periods of pregnancy is quite important to healthy growth.

And then, there are other program areas. The cuts that have been made in low-income housing are truly staggering. Not only did we raise the rents for everybody in public and subsidized housing twenty-five percent or more, but in many cases we cut their food stamps and their AFDC benefits as well. We cut back on federal support for construction and rehabilation of low-income housing units. We are now losing about a half a million low-income units a year nationwide, due to rent increases, condominium conversion, abandonment, decay and so forth.

As recently as the mid-1970s, federal money was paying for the construction or rehabilitation of over 300,000 units a year. That’s been cut by two-thirds. The 1987 budget as proposed by the Reagan Administration provides no funds for any further construction or rehabilitation of low-income housing.

Nor has most of the impact of past housing cuts yet been felt. The shortage of low-income housing today is nothing like it will be ten years from now, when the forward-funded housing of the Ford and Carter administrations trickles out. The low-income housing situation is expected to will be substantially worse ten years from now.

Despite statements of Reagan Administration officials that their proposed 1987 budget will protect low income Americans, the proposals included in the President’s latest budget request will, if enacted, represent the deepest cuts in programs for the poor since the large reductions enacted 1981. An analysis of the 1987 Reagan budget reveals that spending for programs for the poor would be cut $8.2 billion next year from current levels. Virtually every low income entitlement program would be cut. Two million elderly persons living below the poverty line would be required to pay more out of their own incomes for Medicare.

The President’s 1987 budget calls for “recisions” (cancellations) of $7 billion already appropriated by Congress in fiscal year 1986 for some fifteen low income programs and for the elimination–next year–of fourteen low income programs. Among those set for extinction and of particular importance to poor people in the South are legal services, community services block grants, rural rental housing loans, rural home ownership loans, rural water and sewer grants.

And, while the 1987 budget proposal would exact a substantial toll on poor families and low income elderly persons, appropriations for the military would increase by $34 billion–a rise of eight percent after inflation. As in past years of the Reagan Administration, cuts in domestic programs in the 1987 budget would not only bear nearly all of the brunt of reducing the deficit, they would also finance the ongoing military build-up.

Robert Greenstein is director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. For more information about the Center and its work, write to 236 Massachusetts Ave., NE, .Suite 305, Washington, DC 20002. 202-544-O591. Mr Greenstein’s remarks printed here are revised from his talk at the 1985 annual meeting of the Southern Regional Council.

In Country, a novel by Bobbie Ann Mason. Harper &Row 247 pp. $15.95

Reviewed by John Egerton

Vol. 8, No.1, 1986, pp. 20-22

The tumultuous decade of the 1960s still hovers over us like a great gray cloud, a mighty shadow of lingering hope and despair and wonder. We look back now with amazement bordering on disbelief at the exhilarating and traumatic ascensions and plunges that our society somehow survived in those years-black liberation and the movements it spawned for women and other minorities, the war in Southeast Asia, multiple assassinations, moon landings, urban and environmental crises, the drug culture, and much more. It may be emotional exhaustion as much as anything else that has slowed the runaway roller-coaster since then; in any case, the rumble of revolutionary thunder seems now to echo less frequently and more distantly.

Trying to make sense of those times, to tote up the gains

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and losses and chart new directions, is a complex and unending task. We look to participants and eyewitnesses, to politicians and commentators, to scholars and creative artists for a better understanding of what went on and what the consequences will be. The picture is not yet clear, though, and may not be for a long time to come. Most historians regard the period as still too recent for definitive interpretation and analysis (some would call it both literally and figuratively too close for comfort). Novelists, on the other hand, may feel no such constraints; armed with literary license, they can probe selectively, explore at will, blend reality with imagination, and finally give us sweeping or tightly focused visions of our former selves.

Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country, a novel, looks back to Vietnam from the vantage point of a small town in western Kentucky in 1984. Her characters are working-class white people living in the present. On the surface, hers is a simple tale briefly told. But in the spare and unadorned language we stumble upon some unexpected and disturbing images: of Vietnam’s continuing legacy, of mass culture seeping into the pores of the society, of an out-of-the-way country place that could be Anywhere USA, of ordinary people like us who seem harmless and even at times humorous but also aimless and immobilized.

An eighteen-year-old girl named Samantha Hughes–Sam to everyone–is the central figure. She lives with her thirty-five-year old uncle, Emmett Smith, a Vietnam veteran whose only regular activities are having breakfast at McDonald’s with some of his old army buddies and watching M*A*S*H reruns on TV. When his father asks him why he doesn’t get a job and “stop fooling around,” Emmett answers: “Ain’t nothing worth doing. Most jobs are stupid.”

Sam’s father was killed in Vietnam, and her mother has remarried and moved away. Her grandparents live nearby, but she seldom sees them. She has finished high school and is thinking about going to college-either that or going back to her counter job at Burger Boy. Her current boyfriend, Lonnie Malone, is a bag boy at Kroger, and her closest friend is a girl named Dawn who has just discovered she is pregnant.

Emmett has health problems that Sam believes are caused by residual poisoning from Agent Orange, the chemical defoliant we used so extensively in Vietnam. She wants to know what really happened in the war, to know how her father died and what Emmett and his companions experienced there, but no one seems able to tell her anything: “She knew very well that on TV, people always had the words to express their feelings, while in real life hardly anyone ever did. On TV, they had script writers.” In Hopewell, Kentucky, a.k.a. Anywhere USA, no one seems to grasp what is happening, let alone have the words to explain it.

Sam and Emmett and their friends seem utterly shackled by contemporary culture. Their reference points are in television and music videos, supermarkets and shopping malls, processed foods and packaged entertainment. History to them reaches only as far back as the sixties, “a much better time to be young than now.” Far from being dangerous or menacing, they are simply ineffectual, even impotent. If they have jobs, the work is routinized and low-paying and dead-end; if they have family ties, the connections are tenuous and habitual.

Emmett and the other veterans, physically or mentally scarred by their war experiences, seem destined never to recover; now in their mid-thirties, they have been old men

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since they came home fifteen years ago. But Sam and her friends also seem old before their time, though they are still teenagers, and when the two generations come together, they find common ground in stereo music and cable TV, in Bruce Springsteen and Johnny Carson, in HBO, MTV, Cinemax. Whatever can’t be captured in a half-hour sitcom or a seven-minute music video is not likely to be seen and heard, let alone remembered.

The Southeast Asian experience, whether terrifying of thrilling, is the only thing different in the lives of the older men. Those who were “in country”–in Vietnam–know it is all that sets them apart; some of them resent that, others take pride in it. Sam’s concern for Emmett’s health and her curiosity about her father’s death are the only compelling interests she seems able to sustain.

Set as it is in 1984 (the same year it apparently was written, since it was published in 1985), In Country is full of the most contemporary and immediate references–Reagan, Mondale, Ferraro, and so forth. Even so, the book portrays characters who are isolated and adrift, lost in inner space with no apparent hope of rescue–or even a clear sense that they are lost. The bleakness of their plight is all the more poignant because they seem so real, so believable, so familiar.

One of the marks of Bobbie Ann Mason’s skill as a writer is her ability to disguise intent. Is she telling us, like Jean Paul Sartre, that our destiny as human beings is to wander aimlessly in a meaningless universe? Is she describing reality as she sees it in one little corner of the globe? Has she simply invented a few fictional characters who can’t “express their feelings” because they don’t have TV script writers to give them a voice? Is she poking fun at lower-middle-class white people in the small-town South, or being critical of them, or showing sympathy for them, or celebrating them?

Who’s to say? You pay your $15.95 and you take your choice. Along the way, you may encounter some people you’ll think you’ve met before–friends, neighbors, relatives–or even catch a glimpse of yourself. Bobbie Ann Mason’s strength is in fashioning familiar characters out of plain, direct, straightforward language. I am moved by her power to do that. I only wish her people were sometimes able to rise above themselves and do something really wild -cancel the cable subscription, sell the stereo, boycott the shopping malls, or even, heaven help us, break the habit of dining daily under the golden arches.

John Egerton lives in Nashville. He is author of many essays and books, including Generations (Univ. Press of Kentucky) which won the Southern Regional Council’s Lillian Smith Award in 1984.

Southern Liberal Journalists and the Issue of Race, 1920-1944 by John T. Kneebone. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1985.

Reviewed by Patricia Sullivan

Vol. 8, No. 1, 1986, pp. 22-24

The term “liberal” often obscures more than it explains. The adjective “southern” is certain to add to the confusion.

There is an implicit assumption that “southern liberal” means white southern liberal. The image of a southern liberal between the two world wars, the period John Kneebone addresses, evokes an ambivalent figure. The system o~ legalized white supremacy was firmly intact, and many “liberals” endorsed Mark Ethridge’s 1942 statement that “there is no power in the world-not even all the mechanized armies of the earth, Allied and Axis-which could now force the Southern white people to the abandonment of the principle of social segregation.”

Thus, John Kneebone feels compelled to qualify his definition from the start. “Southern liberalism,” he explains, “must emphasize the adjective. Downplaying the southernness of these people tends to identify them with national racial liberalism that takes its traction from a history emphasizing the ideals of Jefferson’s declaration, the abolition movement, the Radical Republicans during Reconstruction, the abolition movement, and Negro protest in the twentieth century.” The liberalism Kneebone writes about has limitations which time brings to the fore. His is a provocative study of a particular style of “southern” liberalism which came of age in the 1920s and 1930s and was moribund by the end of World War II-a victim of its own inner contradictions, underscored the emerging black protest movement.

Southern Liberal Journalists and the Issue of Race, 1920-1944 is organized around the lives and careers of five men: Gerald W. Johnson (1890-1980) of the Baltimore Evening Sun, George Fort Milton (1894-1955) of the Chattanooga News, Virginius Dabney (1901-) of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Ralph McGill (1899-1969) of the Atlanta Constitution, and Hodding Carter (1907-1972) of the Greenville (MS) Delta Democrat-Times. Hardly two generations removed from the period of the Civil War and Reconstruction, the past was very much present in the minds of these journalists. They maintained that the slavery system bore the seeds of its own demise, and, therefore, the Civil War was an unnecessary war. The journalists focused their attention on Reconstruction as the event which traumatized the process of change in the South, and caused the political and social unrest that disrupted the region through the turn of the century. The Progressive era brought back a semblance of order through the enactment of segregation and disenfranchisement law in the South. A delicate balance had been restored, and the subjects of Kneebone’s study dedicated themselves to maintaining social harmony while nurturing the progress promised by increasing urbanization and industrializtion.

These men came of age professionally during the post World War I period. Southern journalists of the 1920s won national acclaim as the voices of reason and tolerance in a region that seemed woefully lacking in both. They applied a critical eye to the southern social scene and challenged the excesses of fundamentalism, the Klan, lynching and prohibition. By the end of the decade, Kneebone explains, an identifiable southern journalism existed. The journalists had assumed their “class” responsibility as social reformers with a twofold mission: to educate the southern white masses, and to explain the South to northerners in order to discourage “outside” interference in southern affairs. They further refined their position during the Agrarian debate of

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the early 1930s when they held forth as proponents of progress through “regulated industrialization.”

Race relations remained largely on the periphery of the journalists’ concerns during the 1920s. In 1930 the number of lynchings, which had been on the decline during the previous decade, increased dramatically. The Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC) responded with an investigation which reinforced the belief that these evils were uniquely lower class in origin. The key to establishing and maintaining good race relations, then, was to modify and cultivate the behavior of the white southern masses. The Scottsboro case also failed to raise any serious questions about the base injustice of legalized white supremacy. While striving to curb its excesses, the journalists worked to insure that the segregation system worked. They were confident that urbanization would contribute to better race relations, and adopted Robert Parks’ model of vertical segregation as their goal in realizing a more equitable society. Black folk remained an invisible people whose patience, endurance and submission were taken for granted as white reformers promoted gradual change within the limits of Jim Crow.

Events during the 1930s tested the position that the journalists had secured for themselves. They enthusiastically endorsed Franklin D. Roosevelt during his first term as the embodiment of Rational Leadership, a true statesman who stood above partisan squabbles. His aggressive legisla. tive program met the crisis of the depression and implemented programs to provide for the larger social good. By 1937, however, their view of the President had begun to sour. Roosevelt’s second term victory was based on a coalition of labor, black and urban voters, suggesting a class appeal which countered the journalists’ ideal of social harmony. The President’s court-packing plan and his attempt to purge conservatives from the Democratic Party in the South completed the disillusionment. Outside interference in regional affairs could never be justified, even if it intended to mobilize political support for New Deal programs the journalists favored. By 1938 their opposition to FDR and the New Deal paralleled that of the South’s most conservative representatives in Congress.

The Depression and the New Deal had released forces for change in the South which challenged the moderating influence of Kneebone’s subjects. Just as they retreated from Roosevelt, another group of Southerners rallied to demonstrate their support of the President in founding the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW). As Arthur Raper, a founding member of SCHW, explained to me a few years ago, the events of the 1930s had shaken the foundation of southern society. “A lot of folks were up on their feet and talking and expecting things that they had never expected before …. Here was … a very basic ferment, and people needed to respond to it in some way.” The SCHW went beyond the CIC (which addressed itself to the “better” elements of the community as agents of gradual change), and made a mass, interracial appeal. Organized by southern New Dealers and labor activists, the SCHW hoped to build a broad-based constituency for progressive political action in the South. The organization concentrated on eliminating voter restrictions which kept the great majority of southerners from the ballot box, and later joined the CIO and NAACP in promoting voter registration and education drives throughout the South. The SCHW acted on the assumption that an expanded electorate, which included working class and black voters, was essential to liberalizing the South. This approach contradicted the basic premises shared by the southern journalists. They believed in cooperative endeavors led by the elite class, and they strongly opposed any type of racial or class activism. These men lacked a basic faith in the “democratic” process, and did not promote enfranchisement of the masses as part of their reform program. They eschewed politics in favor of Howard Odum’s ideal of social planning by “nonpartisan” leaders as the means for advancing the general welfare.

By the end of the 1930s, the journalists were on the defensive. Events overseas, however, seemed to provide a reprieve from pressing social concerns. “Dr. Win the War” had replaced “Dr. New Deal” and the journalists enthusiastically endorsed the war against fascism. World War 11 caused them to abandon the anti-war doctrines which had served as the intellectual foundation of the southern liberal program for gradual reform. Their support for the war undercut an earlier notion that the Civil War had demonstrated the futility of war for principle. Hitler had changed

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all of that. There were moral issue worth fighting for. Gerald W. Johnson acknowledged that “the principle of freedom is a unit to the extent that when any man’s freedom is attacked every man’s freedom is threatened.” George Fort Milton proclaimed, “the world cannot endure half slave and half free.” The war became their cause-and their undoing. For when black Americans internalized wartime rhetoric, and publicly endorsed the indivisibility of freedom and democracy, the journalists were forced to confront the color line. When they did, they qualified those very principles which justified the war against Hitler. By the end of the war, the journalists had become apologists for the segregation system and relinquished whatever leadership role they might have played in the emerging civil rights movement.

Kneebone demonstrates quite convincingly that the black protest of the World War II period caught his subjects totally off guard. Clearly, there had been very little communication of consequence between most whites and blacks in the South prior to the war. As Kneebone points out, his journalists along with the rest of the CIC leadership had very limited relations with a very limited number of black leaders, and always with the assumption that “white southern liberals would determine the agenda and set the pace for racial reform.” Charles S. Johnson and others were consulted for their endorsement and cooperation, not for their critical judgment or unqualified participation. The journalists had effectively insulated themselves from the ferment within the black community. This ferment took on sustained momentum and direction during the 1930s when Charles H. Houston and a team of black lawyers around the South began coordinating the legal attack on the segregation system which would culminate with the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. Building on the protest surrounding the Scottsboro case, Houston used the courtroom as a classroom to further educate, politicize and organize local blacks. These preliminary efforts helped to revive and expand NAACP membership in the South, which boomed during the war years. The fact that Charles Houston is not mention in Kneebone’s study further suggests the extent to which Kneebone’s subjects ignored the dynamics for change emerging within the black community.

John Kneebone has written a compelling study of the evolution of a predominant strand of southern liberal thought between the wars, and its ultimate demise. However, it is important to note that as Kneebone’s subjects were turning inward, southern liberalism was blossoming through the lives and careers of a number of their contemporaries. Hugo Black, Claude Pepper, Clifford and Virginia Durr, Clark Foreman, Aubrey Williams, Lucy Randolph Mason, C.B. Baldwin, Frank Graham, Palmer Weber, Arthur Raper, Josephine Wilkins and others were also rooted in the southern past. But they looked beyond the Civil War Reconstruction period to the Jeffersonian ideals of the late eighteenth century. These individuals concentrated on givng the democratic process full play in the South, and in the nation. Their concerns complemented the efforts of Charles Houston, Ella Baker, E.D. Nixon, Charles Gomillion, and a host of black leaders throughout the South who were motivated by the promise of the Constitution. Virginia Durr’s Outside the Magic Circle, and Robert J. Norell’s Reaping the Whirlwind are important companion pieces to Kneebone’s Southern Liberal Journalists. Together they help demonstrate the broad range of “liberalism” that should be suggested by the adjective “southern.” They also direct our attention to the New Deal-World War 11 period as an exciting and important era in the history of the South–and of the Civil Rights Movement-and one which historians have just begun to explore.

Patricia Sullivan is Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Civil Rights and lecturer in history at the University of Virginia.

Gradualism, South Africa, and Civil Rights

By Steven F. Lawson

Vol. 8, No. 1, 1986, pp. 1-3

In February 1986, a white student from the University of Cape Town in South Africa paid a visit to my campus at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Twenty-six years after black students in the southern United States initiated their wave of sit-ins against segregation American style, this young South African offered his thoughts on eradicating his country’s version of apartheid. Rather than supporting divestment of funds from companies doing business in South Africa, he counselled against any economic sanction that would interfere with the Botha regime’s commitment to bring about change “in a peaceful and orderly fashion.” To do otherwise, he argued, would only succeed in plunging his nation into financial chaos, injuring both black and white South Africans alike and pushing the government further to the political right.

On the surface this native South African sounded reasonable. He was advocating the dismantling of the “dehumanizing system” of apartheid, and he cited the progress that had been made toward this end. Within the past two years, the Botha administation had repealed the Mixed Marriages and Immorality Act and announced modification of the Group Areas Act to permit blacks to own property in their designated townships. These measures, he asserted, have strengthened the hands of those like himself who are dedicated to working for change from within to “bring about peace and justice for all in a country with tremendous wealth and potential for all her inhabitants.” Accordingly, the correct position for Americans to take

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was to back the “constructive engagement” policy of President Ronald Reagan.

Reading these remarks as they appeared in my school newspaper, I was immediately struck by their similarity to those put forth by moderate segregationists during the Civil Rights Era. Though significant differences exist between the situations in the U.S. and South Africa, in both countries the response of ruling whites was much the same. In neither case did they want to alter fundamentally the system of racial control or share political power in any equitable arrangement. Like the Pretoria regime today, “enlightened” southern whites a generation ago advocated gradualism as the best approach to resolving racial conflicts. Willing to accept desegregation in principle, they attempted to delay its implementation for as long as possible. In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s pronouncement in Brown, moderates opposed school closings and other extreme measures of white massive resistance but devised pupil placement laws and freedom of choice plans to keep integration to a minimum. Furthermore, though the courts and Congress had struck down practices denying the right to vote on the basis of race, southern whites continued to employ literacy tests to keep three-quarters of adult blacks disfranchised.

Throughout that period, southern moderates pleaded for understanding and sufficient time to solve their own problems. They criticized meddlesome northerners for not comprehending the unique pattern of race relations that had developed in the South over three hundred years and warned that attempts to overturn longstanding folkways would plunge the region into violence and cause more harm to blacks than to whites. Just as white South Africans admonish that blacks will suffer most from economic consequences of divestment, so too did moderates warn that blacks would be harmed if the federal government cut off funds to segregated schools. They presented their brand of gradualism as the antidote to the racist potions of the likes of George Wallace, Orval Faubus, the White Citizens Councils, and the Ku Klux Klan. Nevertheless, their prescriptions for change called for more deliberation and less speed, civilities more than civil rights.

The record of Governor LeRoy Collins of Florida illustrates the dilemma of the southern moderate. Elected to two terms beginning in 1955, on each occasion Collins defeated arch-segregationists in the Democratic primary. As governor he advocated modernization of Florida’s economic and governmental structures through attracting industry to the Sunshine State, expanding educational opportunities, and reapportioning the legislature. In the aftermath of Brown and Little Rock, Governor Collins pursued a middle course designed to keep public schools open, maintain the dual system of segregation, and avoid violent confrontations that would tarnish the image of the state with northern investors. Consequently, he refused to endorse legislative resolutions nullifying the Brown opinion, but at the same time he also supported laws permitting local school boards to assign students and teachers to segregated schools based on criteria other than race, such as intelligence, character, and potential for disruption. The governor insisted that the state did not have to defy the US Supreme Court to assure “that there will be no integration in our public schools so long as it is not wise in the light of the social, economic and health facts of life as they exist in various localities.”

In his final year in office, Collins began to reconsider his position in a fashion that should be instructive for his South African counterparts.

In 1960, blacks throughout the state mounted sit-in demonstrations to desegregate lunch counters in five and dime stores and other facilities. The governor publicly urged white Floridians to reevaluate the morality and fairness of a policy that prohibited blacks from eating in an establishment where they were allowed to shop. In addition, he created a biracial committee to facilitate the desegregation of these businesses. After leaving office, Collins moved even further toward embracing the goals of the civil rights movement as well as recognizing the necessity of federal intervention to achieve them. In 1965, he played a key role as President Johnson’s emissary in arranging an agreement that averted bloodshed on the voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. In the span of a single decade, LeRoy Collins had marched on his own personal odyssey toward the attainment of first-class citizenship for blacks.

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Activism rather than gradualism had triumphed.

Had the United States moved at the pace desired by southern gradualists, blacks would have continued to live under the yoke of second-class citizenship well into the twenty-first century. As Martin Luther King wryly observed during the Selma voting rights campaign in 1965, it would have taken 103 years at the rate they were going for local registrars to enroll all the qualified blacks who applied. Realizing that freedom is indivisible, black Americans and their white allies refused to wait that long. They not only resisted the new forms of segregation instituted to slow down racial equality, but also challenged the federal government to abandon its constructive engagement policy of allowing the South to manage its own affairs, as long as it did so in a respectable fashion. In the end, coercion by means of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, not voluntarism, broke the back of Jim Crow. Frederick Douglass summed up the lesson long ago: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

The cosmetic reforms of the Botha regime are as intellectually shallow and morally bankrupt today as were those offered by southern gradualists during our age of civil rights. They did not succeed then, and they are doomed to fail in South Africa.

Steven F. Lawson is Professor of History at the University of South Florida, Tampa, and author of In Pursuit of Power: Southern Blacks and Electoral Politics, 1965-1982 (Columbia University Press).

Women in the Rural South: Scraping a Living from Two-bit Jobs

By Barbara Ellen Smith

Vol. 8, No. 1, 1986, pp. 5-8

Southern working class women are survivors. No message emerges as vividly from the stories in this booklet, Picking Up the Pieces. All of these women scraped their livings out of rocky soil and two-bit jobs; all got by on little but their own muscles and wits. Many bore children at a young age, and struggled for the better part of their lives to put food in their mouths and shoes on their feet. All endured the personal insults, self-doubt and, in several cases, physical violence that are the lot of women in this country; many faced the additional barrier

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of racial abuse and discrimination. Their stories are not romantic or pretty; poverty is neither. But they are stories of great courage, humor and strength in the face of formidable odds.

These women are but one generation in a long succession of southern women with similar stories to tell. The history of women’s survival in the South is bound up with the history of agriculture, which remained the foundation of the region’s economy until well into the present century. The first women to eke their livings out of the southern earth were of course Native American. Encroachment and enslavement by European settlers shattered their traditional way of life, but members of the Cherokee, Lumbee and other tribes have survived, especially in North Carolina and Oklahoma. Native Americans were the first of many rural people in the region to be dispossessed of their most precious economic resource–land. They were also among the first to be enslaved in the labor system for which the South became known.

The eighteenth century saw the flourishing of plantation agriculture in the South, based on the labor of African women and men. Although slavery was formally abolished in 1863, the reorganization of agriculture into the sharecropping system ensured the continued poverty of most black families. Concentration of land ownership in the hands of a white upper-class minority denied economic opportunity to successive generations of rural Southerners. Women–both black and white–labored long and hard in cotton fields and on tobacco farms, but remained for the most part landless and in debt.

Industrialization came to the South on a large scale during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Mines, mills and factories proliferated amidst regional fanfare over the construction of a “New South.” Allocation of the new industrial jobs according to race and gender established a pattern of occupational segregation that is visible to this day. Hard pressed to secure an adequate labor force in the rugged Appalachian mountains of the upper South, coal operators sought workers of all races and nationalities–but hired no women. In the more densely settled piedmont to the South, textile mill owners preferred the low-wage labor of rural white women and originally children. They refused to hire black workers, save for a few menial jobs, though certain other southern employers, such as tobacco processors, relied heavily on black labor. All segregated their workers by race and gender into distinct physical locations and job categories. Coupled with enforced social separation under Jim Crow, occupational segregation maintained a divisive hierarchy of opportunity among Southerners who were increasingly members of the same working class.

Southern women’s present economic status reflects the persistent, detrimental impacts of their segregation into low-wage, often labor-intensive jobs. In the coal-dependent economies of east Kentucky, southern West Virginia and areas further south, women are largely excluded from the most important source of high-wage employment industry, the mining industry. As a result, they have few economic opportunities and extremely low labor force participation rates: in 1984 in West Virginia, 39.2 percent of adult women were in the labor force, the lowest rate of any state in the nation. Over the last ten years, women have fought successfully to gain access to mining jobs; today, however, many coal miners–including most women–are unemployed.

In the piedmont counties of North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, women remain concentrated in the low-wage manufacuring industries where they were first employed one hundred years ago. Nearly two-thirds of southern textile and apparel workers are women, and the great majority are rural. Today, women of all races find employment in the mills, but they receive some of the lowest wages in the country for their efforts. In 1983, average earnings in the apparel industry were $5.37/hour, about half the average in manufacturing industries like chemicals and primary metals, where men predominate.

As is true throughout the United States, the rapid growth of the southern service sector has been based on the labor of women. For black women, dependence on service jobs is nothing new; they were long consigned to domestic service, the lowest wage job in the nation. As recently as 1960, nearly half of all employed black women in the South were domestic servants. Many now engage in a commercialized variation of the same activity; they are cooks in restaurants, maids in hotels, laundresses in hospitals. Over one-third of all employed black women in the South work in the service sector.

Southern white women, by contrast, are more heavily concentrated in pink collar ghettos of retail sales and office work. In the urban South, slightly more than half of employed white women are cashiers, secretaries,

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and related workers. In the rural areas of the region, the larger role of manufacturing somewhat offsets dependence on these sectors, though nearly 40 percent of employed rural white women are secretaries and sales clerks. The higher status of this pink collar work does not necessarily bring a higher wage or greater job satisfaction. Southern women of all races often earn scarcely more than the minimum wage: in 1984, half of those with any income at all received less than $6,700 a year; among those who worked full-time the entire year, half earned less than $14,312. Median earnings of black and Hispanic women were over $2,000 a year lower than those of white women.

As the lowest paid workers in the lowest wage region of the country, southern working class women bear a heavy burden of poverty. Their role as caretakers of children magnifies their economic needs and spreads the implications of their poverty to the next generation. Poverty is most severe among those who experience the intersecting discrimination of class, race and gender: working class black women who are single mothers with young children. Over sixty percent are poor. Other southern women of all races live constantly on the margin between destitution and survival–one month unemployed and down to the last dollar, another month with a small paycheck and an uncertain job, yet always without genuine opportunity.

Women survive despite their lack of economic resources by using skills passed down for generations. This is true not only of those who live in remote areas on the margins of the wage economy, but also of women in “developed” locations who work hard for wages yet always remain poor. Both produce and circulate with their neighbors the goods and services necessary for their families’ survival: they patch and sew, swap child care, watch for sales and clip coupons; in rural areas, they also garden, raise chickens and perform other agricultural tasks. In general, women have learned to substitute their own hard work for the commodities that they cannot afford to buy.

Women who have made much out of little may have to do with even less in the future. Current economic trends do not bode well for southern women, especially those in rural locations. Fueled by international competition and the loss of markets, US corporations are engaged in a global search for reduced production costs; their strategies include technological innovation, relocation to lower wage areas, and sometimes a combination of both. For workers, the domestic impacts of this economic transformation include unemployment, irregular work and lowered wages. Labor-intensive manufacturing has been especially hard hit; this is precisely the industrial sector that once favored the rural South and the labor of southern women.

These trends are apparent in mining and manufacturing industries throughout the South. In West Virginia, for example, the unemployment rate has topped all other states’ for over two years. Technological innovations in underground mining, coupled with declining markets for certain grades of coal, have drastically diminished employment in the coalfields. Women who once worked in the mines now stand in unemployment lines with former waitresses and secretaries from the boarded-up businesses of rural county seats. Further south, women who worked in the textile and apparel industries also find that jobs are scarce. Bankruptcies, plant closings and layoffs have swept through the piedmont during the past ten years. Between 1973 and 1983, the work force in textiles and apparel dropped nationwide by over 500,000. Although advocates for protectionist trade policies assert that “unfair competition from producers in Southeast Asia” is the source of declining employment, the situation is far more complex.

Large corporations in the textile industry have transformed the production of cloth from fiber. Since the mid-1970s, they have brought robots, electronic knitting machines and other technological innovations into the mills; the result has been rapidly rising productivity and wide-spread displacement of workers. Although it is true that textile imports have boomed in recent years, they are by no means the sole cause of unemployment. The US textile industry is undergoing a massive shakeout: less productive mills are closing; less well-capitalized companies are going bankrupt. Meanwhile, the larger producers are concentrating production in modern, relatively automated plants. Manufacturers of apparel have taken a different approach to the pressures on international competition. Although some have invested in new, highly productive technologies, many have roamed the globe in search of cheap labor, and have found it among poor women in Hong Kong, Mexico, Taiwan and elsewhere.

Some producers have even found they no longer need to leave the United States to take advantage of Asian and Hispanic women’s cheap labor; there is evidence that rising immigration and high unemployment rates have enabled a return of the sweatshop to cities like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

Women laid off from textile mills and garment factories rarely find a job in the new manufacturing industries that have recently located in the South. Since

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World War II, businessmen in heavy industries have been drawn by the region’s low wages, nonunion work force and accomodating political tradition, which equates “economic development” and the “right to work.” Particularly for capital-intensive operations, in which long-term security of expensive plants and equipment is a serious concern, the political conservatism and stability of the South give it an edge over alternative locations in the Third World. Manufacturers of chemicals, machinery, rubber and other products have all constructed plants in the South. Location of the Saturn automobile plant in rural Tennessee is only a recent and relatively well-publicized example of this larger trend, which has generated considerable regional rivalry, especially during periods of recession in the North. These so-called “emerging” or “non-traditional” industries bring opportunities for some of the highest wages paid to southern workers. But for women, they bring very little: employers in these industries rarely turn to women for their production work force, which is over seventy percent male.

The growth industries in which southern working class women find employment are primarily in the ubiquitous sectors of services and retail trade. The more fortunate land a relatively secure job with the government, which in the postwar era has been an important source of service sector expansion and increased job opportunities for women. Nearly one-fourth of all employed women in the South now work for the government; among black women, public employment is even more significant, accounting for nearly one-third of all jobs. In much of the service sector, however, jobs for women may be plentiful but genuine opportunities are few. Pay in the lower ranks of service employment rarely matches even the $5 an hour that women received in manufacturing. In rural areas where tourism has generated a boom in shops, motels and restaurants, earning a living wage is yet more difficult. Jobs for women in tourist-dependent businesses are frequently seasonal, the hours are often part-time, and the wages are almost invariably low.

Most southern women will no doubt survive the present economic crisis, as they have done for generations back. That does not diminish the injustice of their situation, however. There is a shameful gap between the economic contributions of southern working class women and the economic resources that they actually control. The southern economy has long been dependent on the labor of women. Black women were essential to southern agriculture, white women were central to southern industrialization; and now, women of all races are primary workers in the key growth sector of the economy–services. Moreover, as the unpaid laborers in families and households, women have long maintained the southern work force, and made possible survival in a regional economy premised on subsistence-level wages. Women’s poverty is no indication of their contribution to the southern economy; indeed, it is a terrible indictment of the southern economy. Working class women must share in the benefits of southern growth and prosperity. Justice decrees it, equity requires it and, increasingly, southern women demand it.

Barbara Ellen Smith is director of research and education of the Southeast Women’s Employment Coalition, Lexington, Kentucky. Her essay is the introduction to Picking Up the Pieces, a new booklet by the Highlander Research and Education Center, in which thirty women from ten communities throughout the South talk about their lives–their growth as community leaders, their struggles for integrity and economic survival. Picking Up the Pieces is $5 per copy plus $1 postage from Highlander Center, Route 3, Box 370, New Market, TN 37820.

Women in the Rural South: Toward Economic Equity

By Leslie Lilly

Vol. 8, No. 2, 1986, pp. 5, 8-11

There is a sense of place and time about the South that distorts even as it amplifies its outward character to the nation. We are a region of great diversity even as we pursue the rejection of that diversity. We market our stereotypes at the same time we deplore them.

We are haunted by an historical wishfulness to act and think in terms of privilege.

Our geography is that of rural and small town communities. Our economic progress has been confounded by this ruralness. We have been used as a hinterland–our timber, our coal, our minerals, our water, our agriculture, and even our people exploited as export commodities.

Our political experience is distinguished by a rigid conservatism. Its most ardent expression has been the need to defend and explain about the South. Generations

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of racial role-playing have left a terrible legacy of poverty and powerlessness among the disfranchised. The inertia is seductive. There is a hopelessness about thinking that things can ever be any different. Our self-blame is deeply ingrained. We are primarily a poor and working class people, a people for whom change has meant hard, bitter, and often violent confrontation.

Proclamations demanding rights for women found few initial supporters in the South. What movement there was had a delicate nature due to the hothouse of its growth–an old confederacy of geographic circumstance, steeped in a unique regional history, dominated by a rural and agrarian political economy. If the “southern question” had troubled national politics for more than a century, it was no less a barrier to women working to improve the status of women. From the earliest era of activism in behalf of women’s rights, to the more recent struggle to win southern states’ ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, the enrollment of a southern constituency has been problematic.

Ironically it seems that political support for women’s equity in the South could not be pursued on the basis of equity. To have done so would have raised an issue that is still controversial: to whom is equity entitled? The implications of this issue are nothing short of revolutionary. That racism should overtake the vision for universal equity was preordained in the South. Alliances across race and privilege were divided by political tactics that required the oppressed to settle first on which oppress-

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sion was of greater priority in the determination of specific reforms.

There is one lesson to be learned from this history. Racism, classism, and sexism mean that women always lose. This reality is nowhere more stark than in the South. Women’s historical inheritance is economic subjugation. Their children must necessarily share in this experience since their role of women as bearers and caretakers of children has not significantly changed.

But it isn’t as though women haven’t fought injustice. Women have a history of struggle as leaders, fighting to end slavery and lynching, as workers in the labor movement, as citizens fighting for franchise, as advocates against child labor, as organizers to achieve civil rights, as supporters of social welfare reforms, as entrepreneurs in development, as voices in behalf of global peace and justice. Racism and sexism are not mutually exclusive, and privilege cannot substitute for the right of self-determination. We came to know this about slavery. We are only now beginning to know this about women.

We are an organization devoted to this struggle. We believe economic equity is at the heart of the effort to achieve civil equality in the United States. Civil equality has limited meaning in the absence of economic resources sufficient to ensure basic quality of life. The issue of economic equity is paramount for women especially. Female-headed households are the fastest-growing segment of the poverty populations in this country. Children are carried on their mothers’ breasts throughout households that can’t adequately provide educational opportunity, food, shelter, clothing, or health care. Gender, race, and class are the most powerful ingredients in the formula which determines who shall be poor. The final ingredient is geography. In the South and Appalachia, there are few who enjoy escape from the destiny that their birth to this equation implies.

We believe that this report, Women of the Rural South, will underscore the extent to which change must be advocated. We believe that women have the burden of leadership in calling for that change, and that their responsibility to do so is clear. The problem of economic injustice is not solely a women’s issue, however, nor will resolution be achieved by women alone. But there is a change of attitude that must be cultivated, and some intellectual reckoning that must occur.

Social movements cannot be sustained if they fail to support the participation of women. Women cannot develop leadership nor mobilize to follow leaders without recognition of the special responsibilities they also have in regard to children. Poverty and vulnerability are inherent in roles of dependency–forced or voluntary. Improvement to the quality of life for all Americans and challenges to the causes and sources of poverty cannot succeed in the absence of an analysis about the economic and political status of those citizens for whom change is being sought. Women of the Rural South is an attempt to provide the anatomy of the problems women are facing in the rural South so that we can more clearly understand the nature of the struggle before us, and the depth of reform that will be required. Strategies to achieve social and economic justice must explicitly recognize the political economy of women if they are to succeed.

And, if we do succeed? Ours is a vision for economic development in the South that is inclusive of women and

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minorities. It is a vision for an economy that is self-sustaining, and that has the capacity to distribute the income necessary to enhance the quality of life throughout our communities, but most especially among women and minorities. It is development that inspires rejuvenation of the old and innovation of the new, and a respect, regard, and appeciation for the human resource upon which economic development depends. It is development that is integrally rooted in a wider sphere, with self-reliance at the heart of its purpose, and with education, community, and independence as parts of its vision. In that spirit, we call on: Policymakers to repudiate the century-old policy of promoting economic growth on the cynical guarantee of low wages and poverty among southern workers. Specifically, we urge them to:

* Allocate fifty percent of state economic development funds to projects benefitting primarily women, and additional funds to projects benefitting people of color in direct proportion to their representation in the state population.

* Earmark a specific portion of economic development funds for rural areas, directly proportionate to the distribution of the state population.

* Establish affirmative action requirements for the civil service and for private contractors rendering services under contract with the state. Initiate strong enforcement of laws guaranteeing nondiscrimination in private and state workforces.

* Arrange immediately for a job evaluation/comparable worth analysis of the state and local civil service systems; and appropriate the funding necessary to close the gaps between workers of different race and gender who perform jobs requiring comparable skills and responsibilities.

* Establish a more favorable political climate in support of working people, and repeal the right-to-work law in your state.

* Bring public assistance payments, specifically AFDC, up to the national average.

* Subsidize locally-owned, quality child care in rural communities.

* Provide vocational education extension courses in rural areas that currently lack opportunities for training, and actively recruit women for nontraditional vocational courses.

* Identify and actively recruit women into positions of policy and decision making at every level.

Grantmakers, especially those in the South, we ask you to evaluate your present funding priorities according to criteria of social responsibility, and to revise your policies accordingly. Specifically, we urge you to:

* Allocate at least fifty percent of your total annual budget to projects that organize and empower the economically disadvantaged.

* Allocate at least half of that amount to projects that address the needs of women, particularly women of color.

* Recruit women from the ranks of community leadership as staff executive officers, board members, and trustees in philanthropic endeavors.

* Collaborate with women community leaders in a process that will eliminate attitudes and beliefs that are barriers to working together in addressing issues of poverty.

* Develop peership with grantseekers on issues of strategy, and build a process for mutual evaluation that reveals the strengths and weaknesses in our collaborative attempts to foster change.

Leaders of Southern Churches and Synagogues, we call on you to speak out for economic justice, and to minister to the economic needs of low-income people, especially women. Specifically, we urge you to:

* Educate your congregations as to the economic injustice experienced by women and people of color in the South.

* Provide food pantries, soup kitchens, shelter, transportation and other services needed by the poor.

* Provide active support for local efforts to organize and empower women.

* Encourage the leadership of women in all areas of religious activity.

* Build on the vision of liberation theology and apply it to the responsibility of your church among the poor and disfranchised in your own communities.

Southern Education Institutions, we call on your faculty, staff and trustees to incorporate the experiences and contributions of women into all areas of the curriculum, and to address the needs of women as students and as employees. Specifically, we urge you to:

* Hire faculty with expertise in women’s studies, particularly in the areas of southern working class women and women of color.

* Evaluate existing curricula, especially in the social sciences and humanities, as to their coverage of the experiences and contributions of women and people of color.

* Develop and implement new curricula to remedy identified deficiencies.

* Recruit women and minorities as students.

* Seek scholarship funds and establish financial

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aid policies that enable the attendance of low-income.

* Establish and enforce strict affirmative action procedures for hiring, salaries and promotion, including the granting of tenure, among all faculty.

* Arrange for an evaluation of the comparability of all staff jobs, and revise pay scales according to the principle of comparable worth.

* Establish and enforce affirmative action procedures, hiring, and promotion of staff.

* Establish programs that make the educational, research and other resources of your institution available to the local community, expecially to low-income members, in order to serve needs that they themselves identify.

Finally, we call on Southern Women to come together across the barriers that historically have divided us. Unite! Organize! This report will justify your anger, and support your resolution to act. A single voice can become a mighty shout in the presence of a shared vision among women about what must be different in our lives. No one else can “give” us equity or set us free! We have nothing to lose in this struggle but our poverty and the diminishment we experience because of our oppression. We are powerful and we are needed. Let your children be your inspiration, your sisterhood be your sustenance, and a movement for race and sex equity, your vision. We have generational responsibility to uphold and the strength and capability to meet its challenges. Stand up, reach out, and let the future unroll as if you mattered. In this movement, every person counts!

Leslie Lilly is executive director of the Southeast Women’s Employment Coalition. This essay is taken from an extensively researched report: Women of the Rural South. For order information see page 6.

Maggie Lee Sayre–A Glimpse of Shantyboat Life

By Tom Rogers

Vol. 8, No. 1, 1986, pp. 12-14

Maggie Lee Sayre, born deaf, never heard water slap boat thwarts. Yet during her half century on the Tennessee River she compiled an unrivaled record of life there.

Her record is a rare stream of more than four-hundred photographs shot while she lived on the river in a houseboat, or “shantyboat,” as many called the floating wood homes. Her photos were displayed-and she was on hand to discuss them-during the Tennessee River Folklife Center’s dedication celebration April 19. The Center is at Nathan Bedford Forrest State Historical Area at Eva, Tennessee.

Organizers of the twentieth annual Festival of American Folklife, to be held this summer in Washington, D.C., have invited Sayre as one of about ninety Tennesseans who will make up the Festival’s spotlight on the Volunteer State this year. The festival is presented by the Smithsonian Institution and National Park Service.

And later this year, from September 8 to October 15, Mud Island at Memphis will present the first showing of the traveling exhibit of Sayre’s photos, “Maggie Lee Sayre: Pictorial Narrative of a River Life.” The Tennessee Folk Society, with a grant from the Southern Arts Federation, is preparing the exhibit, which is to tour for two years.

Excited by the recognition coming her way, Sayre still sees her riverine life as precious, closeknit years with her parents, Archie and Mary Sayre. Using simple box cameras, she froze those years in snapshots she keeps now to “remember always.”

In one series of four photos, made in 1938, she recorded the process of tarring hoop nets.

“Archie Sayre and helper Charlie dyed black tar,” she explained of the sequence. “Papa stirred around the nets in the big barrel for two or three minutes, then pulled

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them out of the barrel to hang the nets in trees. When the nets were made they were white.”

Another photo, of a visitor boarding the Sayres’ moored houseboat, brought from her an explanation of how her family had tied a forked stick to a tree on shore to hold the houseboat safely off the bank. A picture from 1938 shows the “live can” Archie Sayre used to keep his catch fresh to increase its market value.

Another shot, of friends fishing from the houseboat deck, shows on the wall behind them the rolls of line from which the Sayres uncoiled lengths to mend snag nets.

Sayre said her father preferred fishing the Tennessee River because it yielded bigger fish than other waterways. She said he caught “any kind of catfish, buffalo, carp, spoonbill.”

“Did you ever have a name for your houseboat?” she was asked.

“Never know to call a name,” she answered.

“Home?”

She nodded “Yes” and mouthed the word: “Home.”

Spry and good-humored at sixty-six-her birthday was April 4-Sayre communicates by written note. Seldom does she move about without a pen and notepad.

She and her sister, Myrtle, were born a year apart. Myrtle, also deaf, died at sixteen. Maggie Sayre’s father, who survived her mother, died in 1977. Maggie Sayre has lived in a nursing home since then.

Between the ages of seven and nineteen she attended a school for the deaf at Danville, Kentucky, and spent summers on the river. When she finished school, in the late 1930s, she returned to live on the river year-round.

Here’s her account:

“Archie and Mary met her at the depot and they all returned home and were very happy.

“They moved to the Tennessee River. They sailed the houseboat and motor boat to Tom Creek. They stayed there for three years. They continued to sell fish to a market.

“They then moved to Click Creek near Sugar Tree, Tennessee. After that they moved to several places down the Tennessee River and stayed a few weeks in one place.

“They decided they like Click Creek best, so they moved back. Maggie’s mother got sick and was taken to Jackson Hospital. She later died. She was buried in Paducah, Kentucky.

“The houseboat was getting old, so they moved to a house on Brodie Road. This was in 1971. Archie liked to hunt and they enjoyed eating ducks, squirrel and rabbits.

“Archie became sick and had to stop fishing in 1974. He died March, 1977.”

Their three-room floating home was sold and moved ashore to be used as a home. Today it is unoccupied and crumbling. Some folklorists hope to preserve it.

The Sayres’ boat was larger than most, and its motor gave them a mobility most houseboaters lacked, according to Tom Rankin, who worked with Sayre in 1982-83 when he was doing research for the Tennessee River Folklife Center.

The Sayres stayed on the river longer than most shantyboaters, said Rankin, who now is Director of Programs with the Southern Arts Federation.

Shantyboat life “was mostly a drifting life,” he said. It was “pretty extensive up until the 1930s,” but the New Deal signaled the beginning of the end for the gypsy-like houseboaters, and “by the 50s and 60s they were told to get off the river.”

Although the shantyboat life is part of the past, the river still draws and shapes those who live near it,

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according to Nancy Michael, folklorist at the Tennessee River Folklife Center at Nathan Bedford Forrest park. Today more than two thousand persons in the seven counties bordering the river hold commercial permits to take fish and mussels, she said.

So Sayre felt at home at the Center’s celebration. Many persons whose photographs or handiwork are displayed in the Center’s exhibits were also part of the day’s events.

“As you walk through here you will see a lot of people who are coming,” explained Michael. “That’s what we’re trying to do, get as many people as possible who have been contributing.”

Like T. J. Whitfield of Holladay, whose twenty-five foot-long musseling boat, Betsy, is the museum’s centerpiece.

The festival officially dedicated the $315,000 center, which opened last year.

River people, Michael said, are marked by “their independence…and their aesthetic sense. When they talk about the river it’s obvious they have a sense of it, a love of it.”

She pointed out a display board with river woman Ada Roberson’s words:

“I ain’t got but one thing to say: Enjoy everything you do. Get all the experience you can at anything you can. I wouldn’t take nothin’ for the years I spent on the river.”

“It’s a healthy way of livin’. You get plenty of fresh air and sunshine. You work hard…in the way of a job. One thing-it’s not nerve rackin’ like factory work. You ain’t got somebody on your shoulder yelling ‘Make production, Make production’-If there comes a day that you don’t feel like going out there, you can stay at home. It’s a good way of life.”

Tom Rogers is a staff writer for the Nashville Tennessean–where this article originally appeared.

The Risks at Oak Ridge

By Joanne Thompson

Vol. 8, No. 2, 1986, pp. 15-16

Ever since World War II, under the protective umbrella of national security, nuclear facilities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, have operated with minimal outside scrutiny. Companies under contract with the federal government have been able to get legislative and agency waivers to continue operations, while at the same time refusing to disclose their methods of handling and disposing of radioactive and toxic materials. Only in the recent past have citizens been made aware of the true extent of the problem. In 1983, local media exposed the fact that the Y-12 weapons facility illegally released over 2.4 million pounds of mercury into the environment during the many years the facility had been in existence. Mercury poisoning causes nerve and brain damage, and birth disorders.

The transformation of Oak Ridge from a backwoods community to the center of weapons research and production of weapons was never questioned at the time. In the 40’s, the country was at war. Security was tight and who could argue with 80,000 federal jobs being brought to east Tennessee. Oak Ridge and surrounding communities became dependent on the federal government to sustain the local economic base. With Oak Ridge jobs now down to 10,000, former workers developing cancer, and landfills contaminating groundwater supplies, the price of national defense is only now being realized.

The recognition of the federal government’s failure to be accountable to its citizens comes at a time when the Department of Energy is proposing to make Oak Ridge the site for the first facility to re-package and store high level radioactive waste. DOE proposed the development of this facility at the same time it announced the shut-down of the Oak Ridge Gaseous Diffusion Plant, effectively laying off over 2,000 workers. The promise of jobs to help the local economy has always been the “big carrot” in reducing local opposition.

TRACK RECORD

Tennesseans have grown increasingly skeptical that DOE can indeed construct and operate such a facility safely in light of its own track record on worker health and environmental damage. While DOE officials claim that there are minimal worker risks at their facilities, there is increasing evidence to the contrary. A paper. by Bob Alvarez of the Environmental Policy Institute documents serious occupational health problems at Oak Ridge facilities:

* Leukemia mortality at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory–workers in maintenance jobs who worked less than ten years show a 91 percent increased risk of leukemia. Those who worked longer showed a risk 212 percent greater.

* Cancer mortality at the Oak Ridge Y-12 weapons plant–research found that the risk of brain tumorsfor workers employed five to ten years was 489 percent greater than expected. Leukemia and aleukemia risks were 900 percent greater than expected.

An October 11, 1984 issue of the New Scientist indicated additional problems:

* Overall, workers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory have a 49 percent excess leukemia mortality compared to the general public;

* Janitors, laborers, maintenance men and construction workers at the Laboratory have a significant excess risk of radiation-associated cancers;

* Between 1943 and 1947, workers at Oak Ridge’s Y-12 uranium processing plant had “significant excesses of deaths from lung cancer when compared to US white male rates”;

* Workers at Oak Ridge’s Y-12 plant had “excess death from cancer of the lung, brain, and central nervous system, Hodgkin’s disease and other lymphatic tissue,” and

* Workers at Oak Ridge’s Gaseous Diffusion Plant exhibit “excess deaths due to lung and brain cancers and respiratory disease.”

In addition, a study of 19,000 women working between 1943 and 1947 at the Y-12 plant was never finished–officals claimed that it was difficult to follow up on research subjects who did not have Social Security numbers and changed their names upon getting married. In late 1985, DOE officials announced that nine years of health data of workers had been destroyed or lost.

During the mercury investigation, it was discovered that workers at the Y-12 plant curing the 1950’s breathed doses of mercury vapor as high as thirty times the prevailing health standards.

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The track record for environmental damage is as scandalous. In addition to the 2.4 million pounds of mercury illegally released into the environment, we have the following:

* Over twelve million cubic feet of low-level radioactive waste was buried at the Oak Ridge Reservation since World War II–enough to fill the 95,000-seat University of Tennessee football stadium;

* TVA has identified more than 140 dangerous chemicals and radioactive materials present in Oak Ridge creek bottoms, including lead, cadmium, methylene chloride, thorium, and perchloryethlene;

* Over the years DOE engaged in poor disposal practices, including dumping wastes into poorly sited and constructed trenches and ponds which have resulted in serious underground water contamination;

* In 1985, DOE admitted to having dumped over fifty million pounds of uranium chips into Dempster Dumpsters, then buried them in shallow trenches;

* In an eight-year period, DOE has had 740 NPDES (National Pollution Discharge Elimination System) violations at its three Oak Ridge facilities; and

* Recent spills of strontium-90 resulted in shutting the water intake system for the City of Kingston. City officials were notified one day after DOE had notified workers at the Gaseous Diffusion Plant not to use the water.

Notwithstanding other unknown dangers, DOE has estimated that the cost for clean-up of their facilities will run to over $800 million. As recently enacted laws, such as the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, and Superfund Law (CERCLA), and recently promulgated standards, such as National Emission Standard for Hazardous Air Pollutants, are applied by the federal and state EPA’s, more information will become known about DOE past disposal and operating practices.

The Tennessee Valley Energy Coalition (TVEC) is one Tennessee citizen organization leading the fight to keep the proposed temporary nuclear waste facility out of Tennessee and to make DOE correct past sins before proceeding with any new projects. TVEC has recently organized Americans for a Clean Environment, a local group which is monitoring past and future DOE activities at Oak Ridge. The organizations recently delivered petitions to the state capitol representing the opposition of over 100,000 Tennesseans to the MRS facility. The Sierra Club Radioactive Waste Campaign is working with TVEC, the Highlander Center, Tennessee Chapter of the Sierra Club, and other Tennessee groups to halt the spread of groundwater contamination from Oak Ridge facilities.

Joanne Thompson, Ph.D., is executive director of the Tennessee Valley Energy Coalition and an adjunct faculty member with the University of Tennessee School of Social Work. TVEC’s address is 1407 East 5thAuenz e, Knoxville, TN 37917. Call 615-637-6055. This article, and the one following [Debra Castaldo. “Oak Ridge Wastes Varied, Extensive”] are reprinted from The Sierra Club Waste Paper, published quarterly by the Sierra Club Radioactive Waste Campaign, 625 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.