The War on Poverty

The War on Poverty PDF

Author: Annelise Orleck

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2011-11-01

Total Pages: 516

ISBN-13: 0820341843

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Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty has long been portrayed as the most potent symbol of all that is wrong with big government. Conservatives deride the War on Poverty for corruption and the creation of "poverty pimps," and even liberals carefully distance themselves from it. Examining the long War on Poverty from the 1960s onward, this book makes a controversial argument that the programs were in many ways a success, reducing poverty rates and weaving a social safety net that has proven as enduring as programs that came out of the New Deal. The War on Poverty also transformed American politics from the grass roots up, mobilizing poor people across the nation. Blacks in crumbling cities, rural whites in Appalachia, Cherokees in Oklahoma, Puerto Ricans in the Bronx, migrant Mexican farmworkers, and Chinese immigrants from New York to California built social programs based on Johnson's vision of a greater, more just society. Contributors to this volume chronicle these vibrant and largely unknown histories while not shying away from the flaws and failings of the movement--including inadequate funding, co-optation by local political elites, and blindness to the reality that mothers and their children made up most of the poor. In the twenty-first century, when one in seven Americans receives food stamps and community health centers are the largest primary care system in the nation, the War on Poverty is as relevant as ever. This book helps us to understand the turbulent era out of which it emerged and why it remains so controversial to this day.

A War on Global Poverty

A War on Global Poverty PDF

Author: Joanne Meyerowitz

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2023-06-13

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 0691250286

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A history of US involvement in late twentieth-century campaigns against global poverty and how they came to focus on women A War on Global Poverty provides a fresh account of US involvement in campaigns to end global poverty in the 1970s and 1980s. From the decline of modernization programs to the rise of microcredit, Joanne Meyerowitz looks beyond familiar histories of development and explains why antipoverty programs increasingly focused on women as the deserving poor. When the United States joined the war on global poverty, economists, policymakers, and activists asked how to change a world in which millions lived in need. Moved to the left by socialists, social democrats, and religious humanists, they rejected the notion that economic growth would trickle down to the poor, and they proposed programs to redress inequities between and within nations. In an emerging “women in development” movement, they positioned women as economic actors who could help lift families and nations out of destitution. In the more conservative 1980s, the war on global poverty turned decisively toward market-based projects in the private sector. Development experts and antipoverty advocates recast women as entrepreneurs and imagined microcredit—with its tiny loans—as a grassroots solution. Meyerowitz shows that at the very moment when the overextension of credit left poorer nations bankrupt, loans to impoverished women came to replace more ambitious proposals that aimed at redistribution. Based on a wealth of sources, A War on Global Poverty looks at a critical transformation in antipoverty efforts in the late twentieth century and points to its legacies today.

Women, the State, and Welfare

Women, the State, and Welfare PDF

Author: Linda Gordon

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres

Published: 2012-11

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 0299126633

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A collection of essays about women and welfare in America, this book discusses how welfare programmes affect women and how gender relations have influenced the structure of such programmes. Issues such as race and class are also discussed.

Everybody's Problem

Everybody's Problem PDF

Author: Karen M. Hawkins

Publisher: University Press of Florida

Published: 2017-12-10

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 0813052041

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“Offers a new interpretation of the war on poverty by demonstrating the centrality of moderate local leadership (both white and black) in launching and operating antipoverty programs.”—Marisa Chappell, author of The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty, and Politics in Modern America “Hawkins has done a remarkable job of mining the sources and reconstructing the reality of what was going on in eastern North Carolina.”—Frank Stricker, author of Why America Lost the War on Poverty—And How to Win It While many scholars have argued that confrontation and protest were the most effective ways for the poor to empower themselves during the social change of the 1960s, Karen Hawkins demonstrates that moderate leadership and biracial cooperation were sometimes just as forceful. Everybody’s Problem shows these values at play in the nation’s first rural-based Community Action Agency to receive federal funding as a part of Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. Hawkins describes the founding of Craven Operation Progress in one of the poorest regions of North Carolina. She discusses the philosophies and tactics of its directors and outlines the tensions that arose between local leadership and federal control. Using previously untapped primary sources, including oral interviews with antipoverty workers and local citizens, records from the U.S. Office of Equal Employment Opportunity, and documents from the North Carolina Fund, Hawkins adds to the story of the factors that helped lower poverty rates and advance economic development during the 1960s and beyond. A volume in the series Southern Dissent, edited by Stanley Harrold and Randall M. Miller

Keeping Women and Children Last

Keeping Women and Children Last PDF

Author: Ruth Sidel

Publisher: Penguin Mass Market

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13:

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"Ruth Sidel revisits the condition of America's poor women, with particular focus on the federal government's attempts to dismantle the welfare system. She shows how America, in its search for a post-Cold War enemy, has turned inward to target single mothers on welfare and how politicians have scapegoated and stigmatized female-headed families both as a method of social control and to divert attention from the several problems that Americans face. Most important, she reveals the real victims of poverty - the millions of children who suffer from societal neglect, inferior education, inadequate health care, hunger, and homelessness. Citing statistics that are both terrifying and disturbing, Sidel delivers a chilling indictment of the current trends and political maneuvering that threaten to keep America's poor women and children last."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

What's Wrong with the Poor?

What's Wrong with the Poor? PDF

Author: Mical Raz

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2013-11-11

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 146960888X

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In the 1960s, policymakers and mental health experts joined forces to participate in President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. In her insightful interdisciplinary history, physician and historian Mical Raz examines the interplay between psychiatric theory and social policy throughout that decade, ending with President Richard Nixon's 1971 veto of a bill that would have provided universal day care. She shows that this cooperation between mental health professionals and policymakers was based on an understanding of what poor men, women, and children lacked. This perception was rooted in psychiatric theories of deprivation focused on two overlapping sections of American society: the poor had less, and African Americans, disproportionately represented among America's poor, were seen as having practically nothing. Raz analyzes the political and cultural context that led child mental health experts, educators, and policymakers to embrace this deprivation-based theory and its translation into liberal social policy. Deprivation theory, she shows, continues to haunt social policy today, profoundly shaping how both health professionals and educators view children from low-income and culturally and linguistically diverse homes.

Storming Caesars Palace REVISED & UPDATED

Storming Caesars Palace REVISED & UPDATED PDF

Author: Annelise Orleck

Publisher: Beacon Press

Published: 2023-04-25

Total Pages: 394

ISBN-13: 080700796X

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The inspiration for the PBS documentary premiering March 2023 The story of the revolutionary Black women welfare organizers of Las Vegas who spearheaded an evergreen, radical revisioning of American economic justice This timely reissue tells the little-known story of a pioneering group of Black mothers who built one of this country's most successful antipoverty programs. In Storming Caesars Palace, Annelise Orleck brings into focus the hidden figures of a trailblazing movement who proved that poor mothers are the real experts on poverty, providing job training, libraries, medical access, daycare centers and housing to the poor in Las Vegas throughout the 1970s. Orleck introduces Ruby Duncan, a sharecropper turned White House advisor who led the charge on the long war on poverty waged against the poor Black mothers of Las Vegas. According to Ruby, “Poor women must dream their highest dreams and never stop,” and she, with the help of Mary Wesley and Alversa Beals, did exactly that. A vivid retelling of an overlooked American history, Orleck follows the Black women who went on to lead a revolutionary movement against welfare injustice. These women eventually founded Operation Life, one of the first women-led community organizations in the nation and one of the country’s most successful antipoverty programs. They went on to gain national traction and garnered the respect of key political figures such as Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter. With a new prologue and epilogue that explore the race and labor movements paramount to the political climate of 2021, Orleck masterfully blends together history, social analysis, and personal storytelling in a story that is as enraging as it is empowering.

Feminization of Poverty? Living Conditions of Women in the United States

Feminization of Poverty? Living Conditions of Women in the United States PDF

Author: Anja Villinger

Publisher: GRIN Verlag

Published: 2006-03-01

Total Pages: 125

ISBN-13: 3638474860

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Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2005 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,0, Technical University of Chemnitz, 104 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Introduction No novelty in the United States struck me more vividly during my stay there than the equality of conditions. (Alexis de Tocqueville) With this statement, the European aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, who came to the U.S. in 1831, took up one of America’s well-known founding myths: that of equality. The view of America as the land of unlimited opportunities and equal chances, where everybody can try his luck and pursue his own happiness, is still widespread today – inside as well as outside of America. The paradox with this myth is that today, the USA is the Western nation with the greatest percentage of the world’s rich and with the widest gap between rich and poor. A closer look into the statistics reveals that certain groups and minorities seem to be more disadvantaged than others since they are stronger represented among the poor. This fact seriously calls into question the image of America as the country of equal living conditions. Nevertheless, most Americans strongly trust in their equal opportunities for economic advancement: 72% believe in their own chance to raise their living standard – a share that is disproportionately higher than in other countries. In Germany, for example, only 41% of the interviewees estimate their opportunities in such an optimistic way (cf. Rode 1992: 192). This picture of the United States is also often predominant in the minds of adult learners of English as a foreign language. My intention with this paper is to show them the “other America”, that one far away from the rags-to-riches stories told in numerous Hollywood films. The other America shows high and persistent poverty rates for certain population groups and minorities. During my preliminary reading, I repeatedly came across the term Feminization of Poverty. I wondered what this term exactly embraces, how this phenomenon can emerge in one of the richest industrialized Western nations and why the U.S. government is not able– or not willing - to counter effectively to that phenomenon. As, in my opinion, the issue of the Feminization of Poverty in the United States needs further explanation to understand its complex nature and with it, some particularities of the American society, I decided to dedicate my thesis to poor women and their living conditions in the United States.