The Battle for Welfare Rights: Politics and Poverty in Modern America

Politics and Culture in Modern America

by Felicia Kornbluh

The Battle for Welfare Rights chronicles an American war on poverty fought first and foremost by poor people themselves. It tells the fascinating story of the National Welfare Rights Organization, the largest membership organization of low-income people in U.S. history. Setting that story in the context of its turbulent times, the 1960s and early 1970s, historian Felicia Kornbluh shows how closely tied that story was to changes in mainstream politics, both nationally and locally in New York City.

The Battle for Welfare Rights offers new insight into women's activism, poverty policy, civil rights, urban politics, law, consumerism, social work, and the rise of modern conservatism. It tells, for the first time, the complete story of a movement that profoundly affected the meaning of citizenship and the social contract in the United States.

Genres: History, Race, Nonfiction, Gender, Class, Politics, Poverty

312 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2007

Reviews

[jennifer]

best thing i read this year. it's about mothers demanding rights as citizens and not just as wage earners or dependents on a working man at a time when caseworkers attempted to regulate what dishes you could eat off of and which dress you should clean in and whether there was evidence that a man had spent time in your house. and there are pictures of when welfare rights activists took over the department of health, education, and welfare and sitting in the secretary's desk, proclaimed the end of the vietnam war.