Strategies for Surviving Divorce: The Contradictions of Welfare

Abstract

This article uses data from interviews with 40 divorced women to examine the strategies they employed to negotiate public assistance. Divorced women on welfare, as do caseworkers, attempt to differentiate their status from other welfare recipients, rather than focus on their common dependence on the welfare state. They manipulate the system to their best advantage to lessen the state's control of their lives. Many consider welfare to be preferable to either marriage or work. The receipt of welfare by divorced women poses a tradeoff between needed economic assistance and its penalties and fails to establish them as economically self-sufficient heads of households.Feminists have long noted the parallel between marriage and welfare. The feminist adage that every woman is one man away from welfare expresses the notion that dependence on the state is but marriage writ large. In particular, feminists have focused on the economic problems of divorced women heads of households whose plight illustrates the family and work arrangements that assume women's dependence on men (see, for example, Arendell, 1986;Smart, 1984;Weitzman, 1985).Broader public interest has also been directed at the plight of divorced women. As the number of female-headed households mounts (it doubled from 1970 to 1981, according to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1982), no area of society is left untouched. Like the shifting of continental plates, the movement of these societal structures forces ruptures that expose the workings of the societal organization of gender. After divorce, women often fall into the crevices between these social structures, which have neither accommodated their increasing number nor fully accepted their existence.

The Sole Parent Family: Family and Support Networks

“…One advantage of this methodology is that it allows participants to tell their story and to interpret their own responses. Greall (1988) using a grounded theory approach in her study of divorced women's strategies for negotiating public assistance developed thematic categories, which she derived from the transcribed interviews. Our study also used an inductive approach to extract themes and patterns with an emphasis on rich descriptive data.…”

Social Work Research: Is There a Feminist Method?

“…In an interview, for example, power can be shared actively when the researcher encourages the interviewee to take the lead in deciding what to talk about (Acker et al, 1983). Grella's (1988), Riessman's (1989), and Jones's (1994) use of women's words as data makes the participants and their experiences central to the research reports and indicates that the knower and the known are of equal importance in the endeavor.…”

“…One such method is a grounded-theory approach, which Grella (1988) used in her study of divorced women's strategies for negotiating public assistance. The interviews consisted of openended questions and probes, and the process was inductive, with patterns or &dquo;thematic categories&dquo; derived from the transcribed interviews.…”