Agnosticism / Atheism: What's Hot Now: Flat Broke With Children

Agnosticism / Atheism: What's Hot Now These articles that had the largest increase in popularity over the last week // via fulltextrssfeed.com

Flat Broke With Children Nov 9th 2011, 10:03 Welfare reform in the United States has been hailed as a great success, reducing the number of people on the welfare rolls from 4.4 million families in 1996 to 2.1 million in 2001. But is the number of people on welfare really the only appropriate measure of “success,” and if not, how do the efforts at reform measure up against other criteria? Summary Title: Flat Broke With Children: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform Author: Sharon Hays Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0195132882 Pro: •  Provides first-hand information on how welfare reform has impacted America's poor •  Explains the cultural logic behind many contradictory welfare provisions Con: •  None Description: •  Analysis of cultural and political assumptions behind American welfare laws •  Provides the fruits of numerous interviews with welfare workers and recipients •  Describes the actual effects of welfare reform on real people in America Book Review In Flat Broke With Children: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform, Sharon Hays tries to tell the story of welfare reform from the perspective of those who live it: people who work in welfare offices attempting to help those in need and the clients they serve, mostly single mothers struggling to make ends meet while raising their children. There are two aspects to Hays’ analysis: personal and cultural. On the personal side we are given the fruits of interviews with hundreds of welfare workers and recipients, learning much more about what their lives are like than most are aware of. Through the course of this many cliches and prejudices about welfare recipients are trashed â€" and deliberately so. Hays doesn’t try to make the poor heroic or noble. She asks them tough questions and often gets admissions about how past behavior had been self-destructive, leading them to their problems today. At the same time, she also refuses to stigmatize them as they typically have been through history: “They are ordinary people. Their moral characters are as varied as those of the people who live in my neighborhood, the consumers who share my grocery store, or the college students who attend my classes. Some are lovable, some are not; some are heroic, most are not.” Flat Broke With Children: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform The other side of Hays’ analysis is cultural. As she states in the beginning of her book, “A nation’s laws reflect a nation’s values.” This leads her to the question: what do our welfare laws say about our values? Unfortunately, they say that our values are deeply confused. » Continue...

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