By the mid-1960s, however, relatively few AFDC mothers were widows; most were younger women whose marriages had collapsed or who had had children out of wedlock. They did not seem "deserving" at all. Working-class people, many of them poor, seemed especially upset by welfare. Many, to be sure, had themselves gone on relief during the 1930s or when tragedy, such as the loss of a major breadwinner, had hit their families. But they had tried to manage stoically, enduring the intrusions of social workers and the restrictions on possessions—no telephones, no linoleum—that the stringently run system
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