School or Therapy: Two Approaches to Empowering Welfare-Reliant Women

Abstract

Ethnographic data from two welfare offices in Contra Costa County, California reveal a welfare program that broke with the work-first norm and empowered welfare-reliant women. Yet each office had a different approach to empowerment. The Lewiston office encouraged participants to pursue education to expand their future possibilities. The Strafford office, on the other hand, emphasized therapeutic services and discourses to help participants overcome personal difficulties before they pursued work and education. The author argues that the two approaches were largely a response by instructors to differences in the attitudes and preferences of participants at each site.

KEYWORDS:

• welfare reform
• welfare to work
• education
• mental health
• ethnography

Notes

1. Numbers that represent people, rather than percentages, have been rounded to the nearest whole number.

2. This included cases where the family asked to be discontinued and the caseworker assumed that it was due to employment, as well as cases where child support, or a second parent’s income, was added to the family.

3. Unfortunately, CCC’s statistics on educational attainment at each office were unreliable, thus we cannot assess differences in this form of cultural capital, which may have been tied to earnings differences.

4. Studies show that approximately half of welfare-reliant women are at risk for clinical depression (Kalil, Schweingruber, & Seefeldt, 2001; Quint, Bos, & Polit, 1997), and that mental health issues are associated with unemployment (Kalil et al., 2001).

5. Unfortunately, starting classes is not the same as completing them; this is an area for further research.

6. In 2000 the median income of women employed full time with a high school diploma was just over $22,000, while for those with some college it was just over $27,000. For women of color, the incomes were lower, but the increase with education was at least as pronounced (U.S. Census Bureau, 2000).

7. At both offices this program was discussed by instructors. At Strafford counselors also talked about it.

8. The number of enrolled participants in a class often changed as people dropped out or were kicked out.

9. These counseling sessions would not be included in the statistics for therapeutic services as a work activity.

10. Rates of domestic violence are similar between Hispanic and non-Hispanic women (Catalano, 2006).