Single Mother Families and the Dual Welfare State

The economic status of children in single mother families should be a topic of great concern to U.S. policymakers. In a recent paper, Irwin Garfinkel and Sara McLanahan report that "[m]ore than half of the current generation of children will live with a single mother before reaching age eighteen, and many of these children will spend their entire childhood with a single mother" (Garfinkel and McLanahan, 1992, p. 1). This is particularly significant because children living with a single mother are likely to experience high levels of economic insecurity. Census data indicate that about half of these children live in families with incomes below the federal poverty level (Garfinkel and McLanahan, 1992, p. 2). In addition, international data indicate that the relative status of single mother families is far worse in the U.S. than in other Western industrialized nations.(1) Recent comparative analyses of poverty and social policy suggest that the U.S. income support system is an important factor in the relatively high levels of economic insecurity among single mother families in the United States.(2) The U.S. income support system has important structural features that distinguish it from the income support systems of other industrial nations. Perhaps the most important feature is the distinction between "social insurance" and "public assistance" income transfer programs. Social insurance programs are designed primarily to protect workers and their families from loss of income due to retirement, illness, disability, or unemployment. They are tied to previous employment and earnings, and the benefits are typically viewed as earned income. They generally have minimum or national levels set by the federal government. Public assistance programs, on the other hand, are designed to raise the income and/or consumption levels of the poor. One must pass a means-test to qualify for the benefits, which tend to be much lower than those provided by social insurance transfers and often vary significantly from state to state (Burtless, 1986, pp. 19-21; Garfinkel and Haveman, 1982, pp. 2-3). Although the term income support is used to include both types of programs, Americans "make a sharp conceptual and evaluative distinction" between public assistance and social insurance programs (Skocpol, 1988, p. 296). Social insurance and public assistance programs provide benefits of different degrees of adequacy and coverage to different groups in society. This distinction has led some authors to describe the U.S. income support system as part of a "dual" or "two-tiered welfare state" with, "a top layer of increasingly generous, politically legitimated social insurance programs and a bottom layer of politically vulnerable programs aimed at the poor" (Weir, Orloff, and Skocpol, 1988, p. 287). Previous writers have used the model of the dual welfare state to examine the status of poor women and single mother families.(3) In these earlier analyses, the emphasis was on how families headed by women have been treated differently than families headed by men in the dual welfare state. Our paper focuses more specifically on the population of single mother families and the policy distinctions that have been made within this population. We expand the concept of the dual welfare state and use it to empirically examine programs that aid children in different types of single mother families. Our paper adds to the existing literature by combining and reanalyzing many of the separate strands of thought contained in earlier works and by examining issues that have not been fully addressed in the dual welfare state literature.(4) The first section of the paper reexamines the historical evolution of the dual welfare state in the U.S. It argues that income support programs were shaped by the combined interactions of the work ethic, racial politics, and traditional gender ideology, as well as the transactions of the key players involved in the passage of the Social Security Act and its amendments. …