Institutionalizing Poverty through Federal Policy

Title IV and Title V of the Social Security Act of 1935, created by progressive female welfare reformers and based on eugenic principles to ameliorate prevailing anxieties over ethnic and racial identity and promote degeneration of the unfit, shifted the American contract from one of rugged individualism to a welfare state driven by progressive maternalism, steeped in eugenic principles, and designed to maintain social control. This created, for the first time, national and state social supports for children and their single mothers while it maintained social control by limiting the level of support these families received to below the level of a living wage, only obtainable with restrictions. Although some changes have been made through the years, Title IV and Title V of the Act remain the foundations of ineffective modern day national public welfare systems that created and maintain poverty and oppression in America today. This is not to say that Title IV and Title V of the Act were not innovative or that gender, politics, and social experience did not influence the welfare thinking of the period as social welfare historians suggest, but that active distribution of eugenic theory presented as scientific fact in the United States during this time influenced the efforts of social welfare reformers of the early twentieth century and continue to influence policy and practice today.