Learning to Labor, Love, and Live: Shaping the Good Neoliberal Citizen in State Work and Marriage Programs

Abstract

Promoting work and marriage were primary aims of the 1996 welfare reform bill, yet implementation of these dual goals has not been analyzed comparatively. In analyzing our respective ethnographic data from government-funded work and marriage classes, we identified similarities in the programs’ focus on teaching the cognitive and emotional skills presumed to comprise what we call the good neoliberal citizen. Drawing on the programs’ curricula and our class observations, we reveal how both pillars of welfare reform sought to promote individual responsibility and economic self-sufficiency among poor parents by teaching skill-based strategies for regulating participants’ thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. We argue that by framing economic mobility as the result of learned capacities for skillful self-regulation and proper planning in the realms of work and family, welfare programs’ attempts to create good neoliberal citizens obscure the structural factors that sustain poverty and the need for welfare.

Do the Health Benefits of Marriage Depend on the Likelihood of Marriage?

“…Marriage promotion programs endure in the United States more than 2 decades since the passage of welfare reform legislation that first endorsed marriage as a path out of poverty (Lee, ; Randles & Woodward, ). These programs presume that the benefits of marriage could apply even to people who are unlikely to marry (Huston & Melz, ; Lee, ).…”

“Why Don’t They Just Use Cloth?” Gender Policy Vacuums and the Inequalities of Diapering

“…Framing women's labor as a fix for poverty and environmental problems delimits political conceptions of need in social provisions. Safety net policies in the United States reflect cultural visions that mothers should be economically self-sufficient parents who do not rely on the state (Hays 2003;Randles and Woodward 2018). Neoliberal ideologies characterize the work of proper motherhood as expertly and actively managing calculable risks to children, and they ignore how stratified access to public and private resources constrains individual mothers' abilities to do so (Reich 2014).…”

Mapping the literature on child marriage: A critical engagement

“…These policies reinforce dominant understandings of marriage as a "cure" for social problems, including poverty and adolescent pregnancy (Heath, 2012, p. 3), that are reflected in state marriage promotion policies more widely in the United States (O'Quinn, 2020). In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, authorizing the use of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families funding on heterosexual marriage promotion programs while simultaneously cutting welfare services (Heath, 2012;O'Quinn, 2020;Randles, 2013;Randles & Woodward, 2018). These programs often target poor and working-class adults as part of a nation-wide "pro-marriage, antipoverty agenda" (Randles, 2013, p. 869).…”