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This article analyzes the paternal politics underlying contemporary welfare reform in the United States. Current research on U.S. welfare reform tends to focus on the redefinition of women's responsibilities and social conceptions of motherhood. We contribute to this scholarship by explicating the ways in which reform politics also advance powerful conceptions of fatherhood. Through a discourse analysis of national-level policy debates surrounding new fatherhood legislation, we deconstruct policymakers' views on what constitutes fatherhood. We then compare their discourses to those articulated in interviews with 51 low-income, African American women. From the comparison, we argue that these groups' conceptions of fatherhood diverged in critical ways. Policy-makers' constructions prioritized the form of men's paternal relations over the content of those relations--defining fatherhood in terms of men's biological institutional or financial connection to their children. By contrast, the low-income women we interviewed prioritized the content of men's paternal relations over their form--conceptualizing fatherhood in terms of men's identification with and participation in paternal activities. By juxtaposing these discourses of fatherhood, our analysis complements feminist research on how ideologies off motherhood influence welfare policies. And by theorizing the differences between these groups' conceptions of fatherhood, we hypothesize about the policy implications of this conceptual divergence.

AN ANCIENT and enduring cross-cultural mythology explores what the texts generally perceive as a paradox: the birth of white offspring to black parents, or black offspring to white parents. This [...]

Historically shifting patterns of nonmarital fertility are particularly difficult to explain, partly because so many interacting variables were at play and partly because the assessment of individual motivations is all [...]

Child support and establishing paternity for children born out of wedlock figure importantly in the Family Support Act of 1988 and in other proposals aimed at reforming the welfare system and reducing the incidence of child poverty. Noncooperative behavior among custodial parents and interorganizational conflicts are thought to be impediments to the paternity establishment process. Subsequent research has identified the limits in various approaches for establishing paternity and the tensions that arise between the goal of an expedited paternity establishment process and concerns with due process and openness. This research points to human services-based child support systems as the model best suited for limiting the adverse effects of interorganizational conflicts associated with paternity establishment.