Malthus Gender and The Demarcation of Da

This article was downloaded by: [Yale University Library]
On: 11 March 2014, At: 13:15

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered
office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of

Feminist Geography
Publication details, including instructions for authors and
subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cgpc20
Malthus, gender and the demarcation of

‘dangerous’ bodies in 1996 US welfare
reform
a b
Emily Kaufman & Lise Nelson
a
Department of Geography , Syracuse University , Syracuse , NY ,
USA
b
Geography Department , University of Oregon , Eugene , OR ,
USA
Published online: 26 Oct 2011.
To cite this article: Emily Kaufman & Lise Nelson (2012) Malthus, gender and the demarcation
of ‘dangerous’ bodies in 1996 US welfare reform, Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist
Geography, 19:4, 429-448, DOI: 10.1080/0966369X.2011.625081
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2011.625081
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the
“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,
our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to
the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions
and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,
and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content
should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources
of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,
proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or
howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising
out of the use of the Content.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any
substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,
systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &
Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-
and-conditions
Downloaded by [Yale University Library] at 13:15 11 March 2014
Gender, Place and Culture
Vol. 19, No. 4, August 2012, 429–448
Malthus, gender and the demarcation of ‘dangerous’ bodies in 1996 US

welfare reform
Emily Kaufmana* and Lise Nelsonb*
a
Department of Geography, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA; bGeography Department,
University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA
This article argues that populationism as a gendered narrative provides a crucial

rhetorical architecture for welfare reform debates in the USA during the 1990s.
Populationism, which Joni Seager defines as ‘the dogma and the rhetoric of population
alarmism and population control,’ subtly legitimized efforts to control and marginalize
poor women’s bodies in the context of welfare reform. The populationism underlying
welfare reform hinges on a deep fear of engulfing social chaos if ‘we’ do not check the
fertility of poor women, and particularly women of color. This article historically
situates contemporary welfare politics by tracing in some detail how Malthus’ original
writings on population were constitutively linked to debates about ‘poor relief’ in early
nineteenth century England. Exploring the gendered linkages between Malthus and
social welfare policy in the 1800s allows us to understand how Malthus continues to
haunt discourses about social welfare in the 1990s and beyond, with direct
consequences for poor women and particularly poor women of color.
Keywords: populationism; Malthus; welfare reform; gender; USA
It is not enough to abolish all the positive institutions which encourage population; but we
must endeavor . . . to impress as strongly as possible on the public mind that it is not the duty
of man simply to propagate his species, but to propagate virtue and happiness; and that, if he
has not a tolerably fair prospect of doing this, he is by no means called upon to leave
descendents. (Malthus (1888) 2004, 436– 7)
We all recognize the need to reverse the corrupting incentives in our current welfare system.
Welfare recipients must work for their benefits, and must not have children that they cannot
support. This is the foundation on which real welfare reform rests. (Faircloth 1995)
At the dawn of the nineteenth century, Thomas Malthus forcefully argued that assistance
to the poor – food, clothing and shelter – created ‘positive institutions’ that encouraged
population growth and ultimately social chaos, war and famine. Within a few decades,
Malthus’ writings were invoked by British parliamentarians to justify reform of the
country’s poor laws from ones based on humanitarian understandings of charity and relief,
to ones designed to be punitive and to separate out the ‘unworthy’ and ‘worthy’ poor
(Poynter 1969). Specifically, the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act was designed, according
to Malthusian principles, to discourage population growth among the poor by creating
punitive institutions and abolishing outdoor relief (that is relief provided outside of the
workhouse in a nonpunitive manner). At that moment the link between populationism,
*Email: lise@uoregon.edu; eckaufma@syr.edu
ISSN 0966-369X print/ISSN 1360-0524 online

q 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2011.625081
http://www.tandfonline.com
430 E. Kaufman and L. Nelson
which feminist geographer Joni Seager (2001) defines as ‘the dogma and the rhetoric of
population alarmism and population control,’ and welfare policy was born.
Nearly 200 years after the publication of Malthus’ first treatise, members of the US
Congress, policy ‘experts’ and Clinton administration officials debated a profound
overhaul of the US welfare system in the form of the Personal Responsibility and Work
Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA 1996). Senator Faircloth’s quote above
illustrates some of the discursive strategies put forth by supporters of PRWORA, which
included alarmist rhetoric playing upon constituents’ fear of being relentlessly taxed by
the federal government to cover hand-out programs to an ever-expanding population of
‘unworthy’ poor. This article explores how Malthus’ gendered logic and ideas about
populationism haunted those debates, providing a rhetorical framework for a set of
policies that, when implemented, immediately affected 12.8 million people, including
8 million children (Clines 1996).
The politics of US welfare reform in the 1990s has been well studied. Ange-Marie
Hancock (2004) examines the racialized and gendered figure of the ‘welfare queen’
produced in the mass media, arguing that a politics of disgust is applied to welfare
recipients in order to justify removal of aid. Schram (2000, 7), placing more emphasis on
citizenship and democracy, contends that welfare reform in the 1990s was predicated on
‘the idea that welfare recipients have failed to meet the basic threshold requirement of
personal responsibility expected of full citizens of the contractual order.’ Solinger (2005)
weaves 1990s welfare politics into her critical examination of the post-1970s politics of
‘choice’ (vs. reproductive rights). Solinger argues that the politics of choice ended up
constructing poor women and women of color as unfit mothers as it became imbricated
into a range of policies and institutions between the 1970s and the 1990s, including the
1996 welfare overhaul. Finally, Dorothy Roberts’ Killing the Black Body (1997) situates
1990s welfare reform in relation to the racist origins of the welfare system beginning in the
1930s. While Roberts does not explicitly trace the Malthusian origins of this rhetoric, she
is attentive to the politics of African American women’s fertility and the ‘threat’ it poses in
neoconservative discourse:
[W]elfare has taken on a new social role: it is no longer seen as charity but as a means of
modifying people’s behavior. Chief among the pathologies to be curtailed by new regulations
is the birthrate of welfare mothers – mothers who are perceived to be Black. Welfare reform
has become the main arena for current schemes to restrict Black female fertility, raising
broader questions about the state of reproduction. (Roberts 1997, 203)
We seek to build on the work of this brilliant group of scholars by exploring how
Malthusian ideas underpin welfare politics, and in deeply gendered ways.
While few scholars of US welfare politics have directly tackled its Malthusian
connections, one notable exception is the path breaking work by sociologists Somers and
Block (2005, see also Block and Summers 2003). Their article ‘From poverty to
perversity: Ideas, markets and institutions over 200 years of welfare debate’ (2005) uses
comparative historical analysis to draw linkages between Malthus’ writings, eighteenth
century poor relief legislation and 1996 welfare reform in the USA. As reflected in the
title, however, the focus of their argument is the reproduction, in both historical periods, of
Malthus’ perversity thesis – the idea that public policies assisting the poor ‘exacerbate the
very social ills that they were meant to cure’ (2005, 268; see also Hirschman 1991). In
other words they explore how, despite a lack of empirical evidence, Malthus persuasively
argued that assistance to the poor has the perverse effect of increasing poverty,
dependence, misery and a host of social ills. Somers and Block are particularly interested
in how the perversity thesis, an idea which is derived from abstract, theoretically driven
Gender, Place and Culture 431
logic, takes on the patina of truth and naturalness by creating an internal logic that deflects
any empirical evidence that refutes its tenets. They are ultimately interested in
understanding how and why market fundamentalism became hegemonic in both periods.
We build on Somers and Block by using a feminist lens to understand the gendered
dimensions of Malthusian thought and its translation into eighteenth century English poor
laws, as well as into late-twentieth century welfare reform debates in the USA. It is not
sufficient to understand the persistence of the perversity thesis as a hegemonic, taken-
for-granted narrative in dramatically different historical periods, without considering how
particular gendered, racialized and classed bodies are reproduced and deployed in these
narratives.
In her insightful analysis of resurging ‘green’ populationism in the 1990s, Seager
(2000) argues that when environmentalists use population alarmism they obscure
structural causes of global environmental problems and blame nonwhite, gendered and
poor ‘others’ for environmental degradation. Seager builds on the work of Betsy Hartmann
who critically examines discourses linking population, environment and security by a
‘rapidly growing enterprise that involves the US Departments of State and Defense, the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), academic research institutes, private foundations and
nongovernmental organizations’ in the 1990s (Hartmann 1999, 1; see also Hartmann 1995;
Bandarage 1999). Seager elaborates two interrelated geographical issues underlying these
dynamics. First, she points to the elision of scale: green populationism problematically
conflates local population pressures with global environmental problems. Second, she
contends that the focus on population as the main cause of environmental degradation
produces a particular north – south geography of blame that ignores the ways in which most
global environmental crises ‘are caused by the economies and life ways of the
industrialized West and the affluent few, not the demands of those places and populations,
mostly poor, with the current highest growth rates’ (Seager 2001). Seager powerfully
demonstrates that many environmental groups and population control advocates in the
1990s sought to control population and ‘save the environment’ by targeting brown
women’s bodies in the Global South.
In this article we argue that feminist readings of populationism, such as those
articulated by Seager, Hartmann and Bandarage in the context of 1990s environmental
politics, shed light on domestic welfare debates during that same period. When we think of
‘population control’ policies we tend to think of global policies – policies ‘out there’ –
and feminist work to date on populationism in the 1990s has generally focused on global
population control and reproductive health policies. Although Seager, Hartmann and
Bandarage all note that populationism does not merely operate along a global north – south
axis, they do not make those domestic processes the focus of their work, instead they focus
on US foreign policy as well as global health and development initiatives (see also Ross
1998). Their feminist analysis of environmental populationism nevertheless helps reveal
the extent to which welfare reform in the 1990s enacted a form of domestic population
control policy targeting the fertility and ‘inappropriate motherhood’ of poor women and
women of color in the USA – particularly those giving birth to ‘illegitimate’ children.
Domestic populationism works differently than versions deployed globally and
adopted by some in the environmental movement. The populationism we identify
underlying welfare reform hinges less on a fear of environmental collapse than on a deep
fear of engulfing social chaos if ‘we’ do not check the fertility of poor women and
particularly women of color. To explore these issues, this article examines Congressional
hearings, drafts of welfare reform bills leading up to PRWORA and the text of PRWORA
itself in order to trace how the gendered dimensions of Malthusian thought inflect the
discourses of welfare reform advocates in the 1990s. Before moving to that discussion,
however, the following section lays the groundwork for understanding the deep and
gendered connections between populationism and 1990s welfare reform by analyzing
Malthus’ writings and his impact on social welfare policies in the early 1800s.
The historical context: Malthus and the 1830s poor laws

Malthus’ (1798) Essay on the Principle of Population represents one of the most influen-
tial treatises on population in Western thought, outlining a set of ideas that continue to be
treated by many as taken-for-granted truths. Perhaps less well known is the fact that social
welfare policy lay at the heart of Malthus’ work, as his essay was written largely as a
response to growing rates of rural poverty and the ensuing expansion of outdoor relief for
the poor over the several decades prior to its publication. As we explore in more detail
below, his ‘scientific’ treatment of the population question justified his call for the removal
of public support for the poor because starvation and poverty were ‘natural’ checks on
population. According to Malthus, if poor people continued to reproduce ‘unchecked,’ war
and social chaos would inevitably follow. Under this logic, it was absolutely essential to
stop providing public and nonpunitive relief to the poor since the poor laws ‘create the
poor which they maintain’ – the infamous perversity thesis (Malthus 1798, 39).
To understand Malthus’ ideas, it is crucial to situate his work historically. The decades
before Malthus wrote his essay did witness rising rates of rural poverty and the expansion
of outdoor relief for the poor in England, particularly in southeastern England where rural
industries were in decline (Bock and Summers 2003, 293). Expanding rural poverty in this
period was also linked more broadly to the enactment of enclosure laws, which forced
peasants off feudal estates and led to inflation in the price of food (Midwinter 1994).
Unsurprisingly, institutions that provided relief to the poor expanded as well, most
commonly in the form of cash and supplies given directly by local parishes to indigent
families, regardless of the reason for their poverty. The obligation of local parishes to
provide such relief reached back nearly 200 years in the form of the 1597 and 1601 poor
laws that were based on humanitarian notions of Christian charity. While strains on this
system of poor relief could be felt for decades in the later half of the eighteenth century,
the situation became critical during the war with France between 1793 and 1802 (Block
and Summers 2003).
Thus a humanitarian-framed ‘pronatalist’ period, punctuated by growing poverty, war,
famine and inflation, formed the context for the grim alarmism of Malthus’ first Essay on
the Principle of Population, written in 1798. Malthus (1798, 15) set out to warn his
educated upper class audience of the immediate hazards of demographic growth,
convincing them first of the ill-supported but ‘obvious truth,’ that ‘population must always
be kept down to the level of the means of subsistence’ should they wish to avoid a
‘perpetual oscillation between happiness and misery’ (Malthus 1798, 17). He devoted his
first three chapters to this ostensibly neutral pseudo-scientific hypothesis, followed by
general political claims, and finally, specific policy proposals.
Central to Malthus’ argument is the assertion that responsibility to decrease population
fell on the poor, for the restrictions of poverty should force one to weigh the risks of
‘satisfying their desires.’ From this perspective, poverty itself deters population growth
because ‘foresight of the difficulties attending the rearing of a family acts as a preventive
check’ and the ‘actual distresses of some of the lower classes, by which they are disabled
from giving the proper food and attention to their children, act as a positive check to the
natural increase of population’ (Malthus 1798, 34). This meant that preventive checks
(knowing that one’s poverty was such that one’s children would be hungry) should
discourage marriage and procreation. Those who irrationally and immorally reproduce
despite such knowledge would experience the ‘positive check’ of starvation, which would
bring the natural balance back to order and reduce excess population.
Although Malthus seldom mentions women in his essays, the notions of positive and
preventive checks are gendered in several ways. First, Malthus assumes that a man’s role
hinges upon independence and the ability to support his family, and thus men should have
the foresight not to marry or reproduce until they could afford to do so. Men who lacked
these attributes were not fully men, thus poor men were feminized under Malthusian logic.
Second, Malthus defines a woman’s ideal role as involving chastity until marriage, and
resistance against marriage until the suitor could support a family. He allots women no
agency beyond this, yet this particular type of feminine subject is crucial to his logic of
preventive checks. Third, despite his allegation that the responsibility to support a family
fell on the man alone, Malthus supported punitive measures directed primarily toward
women for bearing illegitimate children and nominally sowing the seeds of social
instability. We address each of these assumptions in turn.
Malthus’ explanations of the two checks depended on a particular construction of
masculinity that renders the essence of manhood as independence and ability to act as the
breadwinner of the family:
The love of independence is a sentiment that surely none would wish to be erased from the
breast of man, though the poor laws of England, it must be confessed, is a system of all others
the most calculated gradually to weaken this sentiment, and in the end may eradicate it
completely. (Malthus 1798, 35)
This construction of masculinity emasculates poor men for failing to provide for their
family and for accepting any help to do so. As importantly, this construction was essential
to his logic of the preventive checks and the perversity thesis, for ‘preventive checks’
could not succeed as long as ‘a poor man may marry with little or no prospect of being able
to support a family in independence’ (Malthus 1798, 39). In other words, public,
nonpunitive relief gave men the sense that their children would be supported despite their
destitution and thus the existence of public relief would encourage poor men to marry and
reproduce. Malthus believed that any public relief for poverty, except for punitive, work-
house organized treatment of the poor, eradicated the shame and fear perceived to be
necessary for discouraging the poor from having children.
Not only were men emasculated by the provision of public relief for poverty, but
Malthus believed that the poor laws also degraded a woman’s character and hindered her
from fulfilling her gendered role. He explains that:
The interval between the age of puberty and the period at which each individual might venture
on marriage must, according to the supposition, be passed in strict chastity, because the law of
chastity cannot be violated without producing evil. The effect of anything like a promiscuous
intercourse, which prevents the birth of children, evidently to weaken the best affections of the
heart, and in a very marked manner to degrade the female character: and any other intercourse
would, without improper arts, bring as many children into the society as marriage, with a
much greater probability of their becoming a burden to it. (Malthus 1888, 397– 98)
Malthus assumes women have complete control over their own bodies, thus if they chose
to be chaste they will avoid pregnancy. Together both male obligations and female chastity
would curtail poverty and population growth before they occurred. To reject these
gendered values and thereby bypass preventive checks was ‘an immoral act’ (Malthus
1888, 430).
According to Malthus, if the preventive checks described above – based on notions of

male and female roles and morality – failed to prevent population growth, then the state
would need to allow ‘positive checks’ (i.e. allowing the poor to die) to ‘naturally’ reduce
population in order to avoid societal chaos, war and/or widespread famine. Embedded
within this logic is the guilt of the poor and the threat they, and their fertility, hold for the
upper classes – an assumption that is not only class-based but one that becomes, over time,
deeply racialized as well. This brings us to the third way Malthus’ prescriptions are
gendered: it is clearly women and women’s bodies who bear the brunt of the blame and
suffer the consequences of Malthusian prescriptions, a situation which Seager (2001)
describes as populationism’s capacity for ‘woman-blaming causality and woman-
manipulating solutions.’
Illegitimacy was perceived by Malthus to lie among the highest ranking causes of this
moral and physical crisis, and women were to be blamed and punished for illegitimacy.
That mothers, not fathers, were to be punished by the state for bearing illegitimate children
was cloaked in what Susan Moller Okin terms ‘false gender neutrality’(1989). Malthus
(1888, 431) expounded on a man’s responsibility to fulfill his masculine role of supporting
his family and that ‘parents who desert their child ought to be made answerable for their
crime.’ While Malthus (1888, 279) conceded the both parties were ‘guilty’ he condoned
governmental punishment on unmarried mothers for compared to unwed fathers ‘the
offence is besides more obvious and conspicuous in the woman. The father of a child may
not always be known, but the same uncertainty cannot easily exist with regards to the
mother.’
These three gendered assumptions embedded within Malthusian thought had direct
and dire repercussions on poor women’s (and children’s) bodies. Women bore the brunt of
Malthus’s call to deny public relief to the poor, and to let the extremely poor die. Malthus
advised that within two years all parish aid be denied to everyone, including children. He
admits that ‘it may appear to be hard that a mother and her children who have been guilty
of no particular crime themselves should suffer for the ill conduct of the father; but this is
one of the invariable laws of nature’ (Malthus 1888, 431). However, he urges readers to
‘restrain the hand of benevolence from assisting those in distress in so indiscriminate a
manner as to encourage indolence and want of foresight in others’ (ibid.). Having laid out
his gendered checks to population growth, Malthus makes a final effort to justify their
harsh nature and mollify concerned readers before moving on to his policy indictments.
Addressing readers who can tolerate the mother’s fate, but balk at the plan’s neglect of her
children, Malthus (ibid.) reminds them that ‘the infant is, comparatively speaking, of little
value to the society, as others will immediately supply its place.’
Malthus assured readers that the starvation of these immoral poor resulting from
positive checks was God’s will, for ‘natural and moral evil seem to be the instruments
employed by the Deity in admonishing us to avoid any mode of conduct which is not
suited to our being’ (Malthus 1880, 390). Just as those who overindulge in food and drink
find their health impaired, those who ‘multiply too fast . . . die miserably of poverty and
contagious diseases’ (ibid.). This comparison naturalized the death rates among the lower
class in an attempt to make removal of aid more palatable. He also placated readers with
what he saw as a positive outcome of this suffering and starvation, writing ‘the poor’s rates
in a few years would begin very rapidly to decrease, and in no great length of time would
be completely extinguished’ (Malthus 1888, 434). Rhetorically the two checks served to
reinforce the sense of the poor’s moral and mental failings, because such failings applied
chiefly ‘to the lowest orders of society’ (Malthus 1798, 36). Systematic feminization and
dehumanization of the poor aided Malthus’ brutal and contentious proposals.
Despite allegations of his brutality, Malthus second edition of the Essay, written 4
years later (an edition republished in 1888), was more emboldened; he stated simply, ‘the
first grand obstacle which presents itself in this country is the system of the poor-laws,
which has been justly stated to be an evil,’ of ‘great magnitude of terror’ (Malthus 1888,
428). Asserting again the ‘perversity’ of nonpunitive poor relief, he wrote, ‘should we ever
become so fully sensible of the widespreading tyranny, dependence, indolence and
unhappiness which they [poor relief laws] create as seriously to make an effort to abolish
them, we shall be compelled to adopt the principle, if not the plan, which I shall mention’
(Mathus 1888, 429). This plan included a permanent removal of parish support for
children born up to 2 years from the date of the law, thereby gradually phasing out all
forms of outdoor, nonpunitive relief. Furthermore, to embed the law in the minds of the
lower class, in his second edition of The Essay the parish clergy were encouraged to read
an address reinforcing
the strong obligation on every man to support his own children; the impropriety, and even
immorality, of marrying without a prospect of being able to do this; the evils which had
resulted to the poor themselves from the attempt . . . to assist by public institutions which
ought to be exclusively appropriated to parents; and the absolute necessity which had at length
appeared of abandoning all institutions, on account of their producing effects totally the
opposite to those which were intended. (Malthus 1888, 430)
The second edition of his essay re-affirmed the gendered logic underlying not only his
narratives of preventive and positive checks on population growth, but also the perversity
thesis itself.
Though not before his death, Malthus’ goals were eventually realized, beginning with
a Royal Commission Report issued by Parliament in 1834 (for a detailed analysis, see
Block and Summers 2003). The Report, having examined the problem and its urgency,
came to the same conclusions as Malthus and made a series of policy proposals: the Royal
Commissioners advised shame, denial of assistance, disincentives to marriage and
corporal punishments for illegitimate childbirth among the class of society, which had
been demarcated as dangerous to the health of the nation.1 In this fashion the Report
remained true to Malthus’ brutal preventive checks and embraced the seemingly
inseparable connection between poverty, poor relief and threatening population growth.
To encourage preventive checks on illegitimacy, the Commissioners urged the
enforcement of corporal punishments and incarceration for parties found guilty of
producing illegitimate children. In practice this was a highly gendered punishment for ‘she
alone, of whose guilt there can never be any doubt, should be responsible for the
consequences of an offence which she has always the means of preventing’ (Royal
Commission 1834, 10a). Even discounting the simplistic judgment that a woman always has
a means of preventing pregnancy, let alone intercourse, the Commissioners acknowledge
the inequity ‘of punishing only one party where two are in fault’ (Royal Commission 1834,
10a). The report justifies this flaw by likening it to any other offense ‘where the accomplice
is not suffered to escape because the principle is not detected. Punishment is intended for
prevention, and to that object every question must be referred’ (ibid.). Because Malthus
(1798, 73) worried that modesty and shame operated more effectively upon the upper class,
who were both less populous and more desirable, he and the Commissioners agreed that
poor women must be punished for their pregnancies by denying them aid.
The massive overhaul and ensuing New Poor Law (NPL) issued that same year
followed the recommendations made in the Royal Commission Report of 1834 and
represents further evidence of Malthus’ political sway even after his death. The NPL
reversed the prior humanitarian trend away from institutionalization; it required that all
relief to able-bodied persons be given through the workhouse and no longer in outdoor
relief, for ‘Relief of the able-bodied and their Families is in many Places administered in
Modes productive of Evil in other respects’ (Theobald 1834, section 15). The workhouse
itself was intended to function as a mechanism of shame which would make welfare ‘so
odious that it was less attractive than even the most demeaning life without it’ (Somers and
Block 2005, 267). The workhouse also instituted direct population control, for inhabitants
were separated by sex and forced to comply with ‘formal deprivation of political and legal
rights under regimes of strict discipline and sexual celibacy’ (ibid., 267). In short, the NPL
adopted Malthusian assumptions about the perversity of nonpunitive, public relief and
assumptions about dangerous female bodies creating an expanding poor that threatened
the upper classes and social stability. Similar narratives emerge in a dramatically parallel
fashion during the overhaul of US welfare policy in 1996.
Welfare reform and populationism in the USA

The debate about jobs is peripheral firstly because putting welfare mothers to work does
nothing to reduce illegitimacy and the problems it causes. Fatherless communities where more
of the mothers work are still fatherless communities. The only way that a job program is going
to affect illegitimacy is if the work requirement is so harsh and unattractive that it deters
pregnancy in the first place. (Murray, Testimony Before the Senate Finance Committee 1995)
Debates leading up to the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity
Reconciliation Act of 1996 show striking similarity to those paving the way for the NPL of
1834 (Piven 2002; Somers and Block 2005). In both periods national-level discourses
depict the poor in pathologizing terms, as both repulsive and engaged in an expansion that
must be checked in order to preserve or restore social order. Malthusian logic was
repeatedly invoked during Senate debates over welfare reform in the 1990s, including the
assumptions that welfare ‘perversely’ expands poverty, that reproducing poor populations
(illegitimacy in particular) represents a profound threat to social order, and that the
existing system is an inherently unfair burden to taxpayers. In order to justify removal of
welfare rights, welfare recipients, especially black single mothers, were demarcated in
Congressional hearings as dangerous, reproducing bodies requiring federal control – just
as a disease calls for medical attention to halt its spread. Beyond the populationist
assumptions embedded within debates over PRWORA, specific provisions of the final
legislation signed by President Clinton explicitly sought to control poor women’s
fecundity. In short, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act
of 1996, while explicitly about welfare, acted as a de facto domestic population control
policy targeting poor women in general and poor women of color in particular.
Both House and Senate hearings on welfare reform beginning in January of 1995
represent important spaces for understanding the discursive context through which
PRWORA was produced and passed into law a year later (House legislation was titled
‘The Personal Responsibility Act’). Without mentioning Malthus by name, proponents of
welfare reform in the 1990s argued that public aid to alleviate poverty had the perverse
effect of increasing poverty, dependence and indolence – the infamous perversity thesis
(Somers and Block 2005). In other words, welfare perpetuates the problem it is seeking to
resolve in part because it encourages the poor to reproduce and expand their ranks. As
Senator Lauch Faircloth (R, NC) argued on the senate floor:
Ignoring a simple common-sense principle has gotten our nation and the poor into the present
fix: You get more of what you pay for. For the past 30 years we have subsidized and thus
promoted self-destructive behavior like illegitimacy and family disintegration. Today, almost
one in three American children are born out-of-wedlock. In some communities, the
illegitimacy rate is almost 80%. (Faircloth 1995)
As reflected in Faircloth’s statement, the idea of welfare as perverse hinges on the notion
that welfare not only encourages dependence, but encourages the procreation of
problematic subjects – illegitimate children who are assumed to reflect the disintegration
of the family (see also Jimenez 1999). Populationism is an important and explicit thread in
Faircloth’s discourse: he claims that because of the Great Society’s encouragement of
‘self-destructive’ behavior, the poor are multiplying, and ‘their out-of-wedlock birth rate
would reach 50% by 2015, a prospect that President Clinton correctly pointed to with
alarm’ (Faircloth 1995).
Central to this Malthusian-inflected discourse is the looming threat of illegitimate
children to the social order, and by implication their mothers who are nominally engaging
in immoral acts (sex outside of marriage). Just as Malthus and his supporters in the
eighteenth century promoted the idea that illegitimacy was a leading cause of Britain’s
crisis of moral degradation and ensuing overpopulation, Senator Faircloth claimed during
PRWORA debates that illegitimacy perpetuates the cycle of broken families and welfare
dependence, contending that illegitimate children were ‘twice as likely to commit crimes
and end up in jail’ (Faircloth 1995), despite a lack of solid empirical evidence to justify
this claim. From Faircloth’s perspective, criminal behavior is not rooted in conditions of
poverty, but illegitimacy and single-motherhood.
The obvious gendered dimensions of this discourse are woven together with highly
racialized ones targeting women of color in particular. Roberts (1997, 8), analyzing the
construction of Black Motherhood in US history, writes:
[for centuries] Black mothers have been thought to pass down to their offspring the traits that
marked them as inferior to any white person. Along with this biological impairment, it is
believed that Black mothers transfer a deviant lifestyle to their children that dooms each
succeeding generation to a life of poverty, delinquency, and despair. A persistent objective of
American social policy has been to monitor and restrain this corrupting tendency of Black
Motherhood.
This construction, and its reproduction within 1990s welfare reform, is closely linked to
discourses of illegitimacy that Malthusian logic assumes can ‘only’ be solved by
dismantling the welfare state. Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute for
Public Policy Research, in his testimony before the Senate Finance Committee, makes this
connection: ‘reducing illegitimacy is not one of many desirable things to do. It is the
prerequisite for rebuilding civic life in low-income black America, and for preventing a
slide into social chaos in low-income white America’ (Murray, Testimony before Senate
Finance Committee, April 1995). In his testimony, Murray frequently emphasizes the
notion of a dangerous ‘black America,’ framing African Americans as engaging in
irresponsible sexuality, laziness and motherhood marred by ‘youth, drug addiction, low
ability, or defective character’ (Murray 1995). Murray’s racialized discourse of
illegitimacy and its threat to the social order is also reflected in testimony from Robert
Rector, a senior policy analyst of welfare and family studies who testified before The
House Ways and Means Committee: ‘Among white women with some graduate education,
only 2% of births were illegitimate. . . . Within the black community, the erosion of
marriage has become so pervasive that a large percentage of better educated black women
now give birth outside of wedlock’ (Rector 1996). The racialized discourse adeptly
identified by Roberts (1997) operates through and in relation to Malthusian assumptions
about population, poor relief and social order.
Another scholar of the racialized politics of welfare reform, Hancock (2004),

systematically examines the construction of the figure of the welfare queen in public
discourse during the mid-1990s. She finds that in 149 newspaper articles concerning
welfare reform published in 1995, the ‘single-parent family’ is mentioned 52 times, among
a multitude of references to laziness, teen motherhood, system abuse, drug use, crime and
punitive policy options (ibid., 69). In a sample of 82 congressional documents the same
year, Hancock points out that single-parent families were mentioned 32 times and teen
mothers 21, with both categories linked to a similar set of derogatory adjectives and
images as those found in the newspapers. She attributes the conflation of these terms to a
construction of the ‘public identity of the welfare queen,’ the intentional myth that welfare
recipients are virtually all poor, black, lazy, single mothers (ibid., 93 –4). The image
fosters a politics of disgust ‘to produce legislative outcomes that are undemocratic both
procedurally and substantively’ (ibid., 6).
Although Hancock provides a persuasive argument about the discursive construction

of the welfare queen in this period, we argue that translating this public identity into public
policy is facilitated by the demarcation of the welfare queen as not only disgusting, but
also dangerous. Malthus and his followers’ allegations of the perversity of poor relief
assumed that receiving aid encouraged an immorality that led directly to population
growth, which in turn threatened the social order and burdened taxpayers in an ever-
increasing fashion. As we explored in the previous section, the concept of welfare as
perverse hinges on a range of gendered assumptions and produces particular, gendered
outcomes. Much like the Royal Commission Report of 1834, the senate hearings of 1995
list illegitimacy and indolence among the key attributes of the underclass, both of which
are posed as presenting a threat to the moral, racial, economic and environmental fabric of
the nation.
Discourses of illegitimacy that constructed it as an implicit threat to the nation were
central to Congressional debates on welfare reform in this period. As Jimenez (1999, 282)
points out in her analysis of welfare reform, ‘rising rates of illegitimacy were cited
repeatedly during the hearings as both a major consequence of welfare policy and the most
serious problem facing the USA.’ While Jimenez does not explore the Malthusian roots of
this rhetoric, the ‘threat’ of supposedly expanding rates of illegitimacy and its presumed
link to welfare is deeply Malthusian in its origins and is echoed throughout media
representations of welfare reform during this period. As conservative commentator Linda
Chavez wrote in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (1995, 10):
The biggest problem with our current welfare system is that it encourages illegitimacy. Nearly
one-third of all babies born in America today are born out of wedlock. In 1960, only 5% of
children were born to unwed mothers. Welfare policy obviously isn’t totally responsible for
this calamity, but it isn’t blameless, either. Current welfare policy puts the US government
stamp of approval on illegitimacy by telling unwed mothers they can have as many children as
they want even if they can’t provide for them because Uncle Sam will. It’s hard to imagine a
more illegitimacy-friendly policy. (emphasis added)
One week prior to Chavez’ column, The Providence Journal-Bulletin deployed similar
narratives in an editorial critical of a senate vote against welfare reform:
By throwing out provisions that would deny additional cash benefits for teenagers or women
already on welfare who have another child, the senators kept intact the perverse incentives
that have contributed to our soaring illegitimacy rate, which has become a national disaster.
(emphasis added)
The problem facing America’s low-income communities was perceived to be not only that
too many women in those communities were on welfare, but that too many children in
those communities were being born to single women and absent fathers, a situation that
according to Malthusian logic was ‘encouraged’ by welfare. The ‘danger’ to society is
exponentially increased by their allegedly expanding numbers.
The ‘threat’ of poor people’s reproduction in general, and illegitimacy in particular,
infused every aspect of the debate over welfare reform. The House companion bill to
senate PRWORA legislation, The Personal Responsibility Act, held the provision that:
Mothers under the age of 18 may no longer receive AFDC payments for children born out of
wedlock and mothers who are ages 18, 19 and 20 can be prohibited by the states from
receiving AFDC payments and housing benefits. Mothers must also establish paternity to as a
condition for receiving AFDC payments, except in cases of rape and incest . . . Mothers age
18 and under who give birth to illegitimate children must live at home in order to receive aid –
unless the mother marries the biological father or marries an individual who legally adopts the
child. (The Personal Responsibility Act 1995)
This clause is out of place with the rhetoric of independence and responsibility that frames
public debates leading to welfare reform. To force a minor to marry the father of her child
in order to gain independence from her parents does not correlate with this message. It
teaches a young mother that while she must not become dependent upon the government,
she must choose between dependence on her parents or the male who impregnated her.
Statistics show, however, that ‘the majority of women receiving public assistance have
been sexually or physically abused’ and ‘poverty, more than any particular family
structure, increases the incidence of child abuse’ (Albeda, Folbre and the Center for
Popular Economics 1996, 46). As columnist Pollitt (2002) points out, this policy:
wrongly assumed that whether a woman married was only up to her; for another, it has been
well documented that the men available to poor women are also poor and often (like the
women) have other problems as well: In one study, 30 percent of poor single fathers were
unemployed in the week before the survey and almost 40 percent had been incarcerated;
drugs, drink, violence, poor health and bad attitudes were not uncommon.
The bill shirks from welfare’s important potential to help women escape abusive
relationships and households and reinforces the underlying disincentive toward childbirth
among the poor.
While the House bill was stagnating in the Senate, Senator Faircloth was formulating
an extension of the bill’s more punitive and explicit populationist measures. His first goal
in this effort was ‘to reduce illegitimacy’ (Faircloth 1995). Where the House bill allowed
states to deny welfare to unmarried mothers under age 20, Faircloth’s proposed
amendments required the nation-wide elimination of all ‘direct welfare subsidies (except
medical aid) to unmarried women under age 21 who have children out-of-wedlock.’
Murray (1995), testifying before Senate Finance Committee in April 1995, believed that
reducing illegitimacy would require ‘a radical change in the current system,’
encompassing not only the denial of welfare to young mothers, but the dismantling of
the entire welfare system. Political pundit Mickey Kaus, also testifying before the Senate
Finance Committee, argued that ‘welfare enables women to have babies out-of-wedlock
for all the non-welfare reasons they have them. If welfare weren’t there, they’d think
twice’ (Kaus 1994). His testimony harkens back to early nineteenth century Malthusian
ideas that relief for the poor should be removed – should not ‘be there’ so that poor women
would not have children.2
The nominal threat of illegitimate pregnancies by unwanted subjects was eagerly taken
up not only by the Republican authors of the bills such as Senator Faircloth, but by the
Clinton administration. Donna Shalala, Secretary of Health and Human Services,
testifying before the Senate Finance Committee in July of 1994 contended that:
Welfare as we know it has become a national tragedy. More than 14 million Americans
depend on monthly AFDC checks that now cost taxpayers more than $22 billion dollars each
year. In the last 5 years alone, well over 3 million recipients have been added to the AFDC
rolls. Almost 30 percent of all births are to unmarried mothers. And nearly one in four children
currently lives in poverty. Too many children grow up in households where none of the adults
are working. As you’ve pointed out numerous times, Mr. Chairman, a central part of the
problem is the growth in the number of births to young, unmarried mothers. As one of this
country’s most visionary thinkers on social policy, you have long recognized the need for
reform. (emphasis added)
The ‘problem’ as articulated by Shalala and others is not that children are living in poverty
per se, but that their parents are not working – reproducing dependency and laziness not
only in cultural terms but in biological ones as well. These constructions are deeply
racialized, as Roberts (1997, 21) notes: ‘many Americans believe not only that Black
mothers are likely to corrupt their children, but that Black children are predisposed to
corruption.’ After linking illegitimacy to Black women, Robert Rector claimed in his
testimony before Congress ‘children born out-of-wedlock have less ability to delay
gratification, poorer impulse control (i.e. control over anger and sexual gratification). They
have a weaker sense of conscience or sense of right and wrong’ (Rector 1996). With no
solid evidence to back up these grand statements, Rector deploys as fact the Malthusian
assumption that the reproducing poor are a threat to the social order – they are dangerous
bodies that must not reproduce. Malthusian populationism articulates with racism to
provide a convenient shield from ethical considerations such as the negative impact of
welfare reform on innocent children (assuming, as many Senate speakers did, that parents
and mothers in particular were ‘guilty’).
Writing at the dawn of the nineteenth century, Malthus was unabashed about seeing
poor children – however innocent – as disposable subjects arguing that ‘the infant is,
comparatively speaking, of little value to the society, as others will immediately supply its
place’ (1888, 431). Charles Murray, testifying before the Senate Finance Committee,
agreed that children would inevitably suffer from the removal of public aid, but expressed
‘contempt for those who want to pretend that this hard choice is avoidable, who piously
urge that we not punish the children for the mistakes of their parents,’ for children are
already thus punished and Congress can do ‘little about it’ (Murray 1995). Senator Richard
Santorum (R, PA) in the same hearing picked up Murray’s vehement campaign against
‘those that would charge that the House bill is punitive and destructive to our children,’
calling them ‘ignorant,’ ‘naive’ and seeking to ‘a convenient excuse to avoid choices on a
new direction for welfare reform’ (Santorum 1995). After all, agrees Kaus in his
testimony, ‘You can’t have a meaningful sanction that isn’t going to hurt some children.
Imposing a tough sanction on recipients who refuse to work may well be justified, even if it
means some children wind up in shelters’ (Kaus 1994). Under this discursive strategy the
ends (making the poor ‘responsible’ subjects, containing their reproduction and relieving
overburdened taxpayers) justifies the means (the damage to children).
Congressional debates over welfare reform concertedly differentiated between
responsible citizens/taxpayers and irresponsible citizen subjects/welfare recipients. The
PRWORA debates employ the rhetoric of responsibility popularized by Clinton’s
candidacy speeches in 1991, yet like the Royal Commissioners, they adjusted the word
‘responsibility’ to imply federal responsibility toward taxpayers.3 In his analysis of
welfare reform, Sanford Schram argues that the welfare overhaul and its drafts ‘reinforced
the idea that welfare recipients have failed to meet the basic threshold requirement of
personal responsibility expected of full citizens of the contractual order’ (2000, 7). In other
words, recipients were deemed unworthy because they had not conformed to the standards
of a contract; they in fact had no power to negotiate and never signed. What Schram does
not recognize is the Malthusian origins of this rhetoric. Under this logic, as welfare creates
perverse incentives toward poverty and population growth, the numbers of people
demanding welfare grow, raising the cost of relief programs. The Royal Commissioners in
the 1830s viewed this growing cost ‘a great injustice and oppression toward parishes,’
which were forced to support the indolent poor (Royal Commissioners 1834, 14a). In a
similar vein welfare reform was seen by its proponents as essential to protecting taxpayers
and liberating states burdened by federal regulations.
On August 22, 1996 The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity
Reconciliation Act was signed into law by President Clinton after having been passed
through bipartisan support in the US Senate (74 to 24) a month earlier (Clines 1996). The
description of the House version of the bill, The Personal Responsibility Act, summarizes
the goals of welfare reform: ‘The Personal Responsibility Act overhauls the American
welfare system to reduce government dependency, attack illegitimacy, require welfare

recipients to enter work programs and cap total welfare spending’ (The Personal
Responsibility Act 1995). A sizeable number of democrats, and President Clinton himself,
embraced the rhetoric of responsibility, fiscal efficiency and the Malthusian sense that
existing welfare provisions were undermining the social order of the nation. PRWORA
passed without effective opposition.
In Rhetoric To Reform?: Welfare Policy In American Politics (1998) Anne Marie
Cammisa analyzes the rhetorical structure of welfare reform. PRWORA, she argues, is
premised on three key concerns: ‘encouraging work,’ ‘family breakdown’ and ‘cutting
spending’ (Cammisa 1998, 109 – 15). The most drastic change in the new bill was the
replacement of the federally operated aid to families and dependent children (ADCF) with
temporary assistance for needy families, a block grant that states could administer ‘much
more arbitrarily, without as many legal safeguards, and with many more punitive
requirements’ (Schram 2000, 20). Even the name, temporary assistance for needy families,
cuts straight to transforming welfare reform’s central tenet, making welfare a temporary
rehabilitative program designed to move recipients toward ‘personal responsibility.’
Responsibility is narrowly defined as supporting oneself with a paycheck from the private
sector, a transition encouraged by the two-year federal limit placed on monetary aid for the
unemployed and five-year lifetime limit, aid which the states may refuse to provide at all.
Though states have the right to virtually abolish the welfare system, they do not have the
power to extend the federally imposed limits and give aid to their struggling citizens.
Beyond the ways that Malthusian assumptions about population, gender and poor
relief discursively undergirded the rhetoric of welfare reform, PRWORA also contains a
range of provisions that explicitly address the biological reproduction of poor people,
confirming the populationist underpinnings to the politics of welfare reform. The first is
the ‘illegitimacy bonuses’ embedded in the legislation and analyzed by Boonstra (2000),
Senior Public Policy Associate at the Guttmacher Institute. These ‘illegitimacy bonuses’
are federally provided fiscal rewards given to the five states that reduce most dramatically
their out-of-wedlock births. The bonuses demonstrate PRWORA framers’ intent ‘to use
welfare reform as a vehicle to change behavior and influence individuals’ childbearing
decisions’ (Boonstra 2000, 2). To help achieve these lowered rates, PRWORA includes a
law that forces teen parents to live at home and stay in school in order to receive welfare
benefits. This provision is based on the notion ‘that some teenagers who are unhappy
living at home may have a child in order to get welfare benefits, which would enable them
to set up an independent household’ (Boonstra 2000, 4). Critics of such provisions argue
that this may put minors at risk of abuse or neglect, while a study by Cornell University
found that the new law is ‘associated with a 10% increase in nonmarital childbearing
among teens’ (ibid., 4).
A second method of directly controlling ‘irresponsible’ and ‘dangerous’ populations is
the family cap, which was permitted by Reagan’s waiver system yet was popularized
under the Clinton regime. The family cap allowed states to deny additional assistance to
mothers who had more than one child while receiving welfare, premised again on the
Malthusian assumption that public aid for the poor encouraged women to have more
children. In the twentieth century version of this assumption, ‘poor women were having
children in order to obtain AFDC benefits and birthing additional children to increase
those benefits’ (Boonstra 2000, 3). The first family cap bill in the USA, introduced by New
Jersey Assemblyman Wayne Bryant in 1992, was designed ‘to discourage AFDC
recipients from having additional children during the period of their welfare dependence’
(quoted in Goertzel and Hart 1995, 173). Later that same year, the then New Jersey
governor James Florio (D) ‘declared the cap a success after only two months . . . asserting
that birth rates among welfare recipients had declined 16%’ (Donovan 1998, 1). This
statement displays a striking lack of understanding of the reproductive process, for given a
9-month gestation period his declaration of success after two months is meaningless. More
importantly though, it showcases the blatant fertility-limiting intent of welfare reform
attempts in the 1990s. By removing the alleged incentives to reproduce, which a multitude
of studies have shown to be false, the cap advocates were making an overt attempt to limit
poor and racialized populations, having already constructed them as disgusting and
dangerous.4 Thus the new system can be thought of as a means of population control, for
much of its legislation focuses on decreasing birthrates among the poor, not to mention
enacting federal control over their personal lives.
A third method of PRWORA to control birthrates is to direct a significant amount of
money toward abstinence education, ‘and at the option of the State, where appropriate,
mentoring, counseling and adult supervision to promote abstinence from sexual activity,
with a focus on those groups which are most likely to bear children out-of-wedlock’
(PRWORA Title IX, Section 912). The legislation continues with a list of what abstinence
education accomplishes (ibid.):
(D) teaches that a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in context of marriage is
the expected standard of human sexual activity;
(E) teaches that sexual activity outside of the context of marriage is likely to have
harmful psychological and physical effects;
(F) teaches that bearing children out-of-wedlock is likely to have harmful consequences
for the child, the child’s parents and society; . . .
(H) teaches the importance of attaining self-sufficiency before engaging in sexual
activity.
This list of abstinence-education goals, to be deployed through welfare reform legislation,
is infused with Malthusian logic, from assumptions about the personal and social ‘need’ to
control (presumed hetero) sexual gratification, to the ‘harmful’ consequences to society of
bearing children out-of-wedlock. A more problematic issue, however, is the fact that these
teaching points would be directed at ‘those most likely to bear children out-of-wedlock.’
The question of who is ‘most likely’ to bear illegitimate children is an overtly gendered
and racialized calculation. It is another example of false gender neutrality, for only women
bear children, despite men’s role in the process. It also implies that it is justifiable to
subjugate primarily black women to these programs, as policy makers continually suggest
that they are the main perpetrators of illegitimate childbirth, despite data demonstrating
otherwise. Spending $50 million on such programs was at odds with a welfare bill that
promised to cut overall spending, but made sense to the architects of the legislation who
imagined it functioning as a means to rein in the reproduction of poor populations,
‘rehabilitate’ poor women and re-instate proper gendered behavior and patterns articulated
by Malthus in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
In the process of enacting PRWORA, policy makers implicitly and explicitly relied on
Malthusian logic, particularly gendered and raced fears about the threat to the social order
of illegitimacy as well as reproducing poor and brown bodies. From Malthus’ first Essay to
the passage of PRWORA, repetition of an alarmist rhetoric targeting a dependent
demographic reveals the power of discourse, be it empirically sparse, inaccurate or self-
interested, to create truth which plays out upon human bodies throughout space and time.
Conclusion
What typically worries Malthusians is the idea that everything We have had to work hard for –
property, the fruits of intellectual and physical labor, political power, survival itself – will fall
to feckless Others through mere fecundity. (Lohmann ‘The terror of scarcity’ 2005, 82)
The title of Larry Lohmann’s chapter on Malthus is an apt summary of the logic (and
emotion) of populationism: terror and scarcity. These concepts help explain why US
welfare reform advocates in the mid-1990s enacted their policies with little effective
opposition in Congress or the White House. The power of Malthusian formulations is
produced not by their empirical accuracy but by their ontology of scarcity and terror. As
Watts (2005, 103) writes, ‘[Malthus] proposed an alternative in which scarcity – limited
means and infinite needs – provided a mode of governing, a calculus for shaping the
conduct of conduct.’ If scarcity is the premise, then the power of populationism is the
notion that poor, reproducing bodies are dangerous to the social order, to a ‘we’ that is
implicitly white and middle-class. It transforms poverty into a biological process that
according to Malthusian arguments is abetted by all public efforts to relieve it – a logic
that obscures the structural causes of inequality and appears to make it essential to negate
the right of the poor (both moral and legal) to public assistance.
In formulating his theories of population growth, poor relief and social order, Malthus
relied on a profoundly gendered logic. His notion of ‘preventive’ checks on population
growth assumed, on one hand, a male breadwinner with the foresight and willingness to
‘control his desires’ unless he could provide for children. On the other hand, the idea of
preventive checks also presumed a chaste, dependent woman who had enough control over
her body to not become impregnated until she married an appropriate breadwinner. If these
preventive checks did not function properly, or the poor succumbed to immoral behavior,
then the state should step in to punish the bearers of illegitimate children, that is, women.
To let the poor starve was in fact God’s will and natural.
During Congressional and public debates over welfare reform in the USA, leading to
the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in
1996, the term ‘overpopulation’ was not mentioned as a rationale for reform. Explicitly
neo-Malthusian rhetoric in that period (in the USA) was directed largely at an ‘external’
threat – Third World women and peoples threatening scarce global resources (Bandarage
1999; Hartmann 1995, 1999; Seager 2001). Yet Malthus haunted welfare reforms debates
in the mid-1990s, not only in terms of the perversity thesis explored by Somers and Block
(2005) but in terms of the gendered logics underlying the core formulations of Malthusian
populationism. In both periods women become the wayward, irresponsible and dangerous
subjects that threaten the social order by producing ‘illegitimate’ children and biologically
expanding the ranks of the poor and creating a never-ending burden to taxpayers. The
perversity thesis in fact relies on a gendered logic and morality that is little changed
between its articulation in the early 1800s and the mid-1990s.
A front-page article in the New York Times on 29 November 2009, examined the
soaring rates of food stamp use, noting that in 239 counties in the USA at least a quarter of
the population receives food stamps. The same article, detailing the growing need among
the unemployed and employed, notes that while food stamp use has skyrocketed welfare
rolls have remained flat (Deparle and Gebeloff 2009). If welfare rolls remain flat, despite
the skyrocketing need for assistance during the current economic crisis, then welfare
reform of the 1990s as conceived by its architects has been a ‘success.’ How tenable is this
mythology in the current moment? It may seem rational to proclaim that the contradictions
cannot hold, that Malthusian conceptions of the perversity of poor relief (as well as their
gendered logics that blame and penalize primarily women and children) cannot withstand
the even clearer structural expansion of poverty in the USA since 2008. However, we have
seen that Malthusian ideas, based on fear and images of scarcity but made concrete in
women’s bodies and lives, maintain their grasp on political discourse. On January 24,
2010, The State newspaper, based in Columbia, South Carolina, reported the following
comments made by the state’s Lt. Governor Andre Bauer, who was building his campaign
for governor (Chapman 2010):
Friday, Bauer said giving food to needy people means encouraging dependence. It also gives
the recipients a license to have children who will also be dependent on public aid, he said.
‘My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit
feeding stray animals,’ Bauer told a Greenville-area crowd. ‘You know why? Because they
breed. You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply.
They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what
you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better.’
Bauer’s statement is an example not only of general Malthusian perversity thesis, but of
Malthus’ specific rhetorical technique of comparing poor people to overbreeding animals.
Another recent political candidate, Carl Paladino running for New York State Governor,
adopted a specific policy proposal of Malthus’, namely that of the workhouse. Paladino
promised to cut spending by 20% and taxes by 10%, while providing welfare and ‘life
training’ in empty prisons (Paladino 2010). He suggested that not only should the
recipients be stored in prisons and forced to work, but that they must receive hygiene
lessons as well – a comprehensive solution which plays to both the fear and the disgust
cultivated around welfare recipients.
A number of grassroots movements in the USA have arisen at various moments to
defend the right to welfare and challenge these discourses, such as the National Welfare
Rights Organization in the 1960s and 1970s (see Nadasen 2005) and the broader
movement for ‘reproductive justice’ that draws attention to structural conditions of
women’s lives and reproductive health (see Silliman et al. 2004). Despite the efforts of
such movements, Malthusian gendered logics about population and poor relief continue to
be treated, by a range of public and political actors, as taken-for-granted truths. Although
both Bauer and Paladino were roundly criticized for their comments, and Bauer withdrew
in June 2010 from the South Carolina race, their candidacies signal the continued
resonance and power of this rhetoric. As in the 1990s, poverty has come to the forefront of
our political landscape, carrying with it both a return to Malthusian discourse and a
sharpening critique.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the support of the Robert D. Clark Honors College at
University of Oregon, as this article is based on an undergraduate honors thesis completed there in
2008. We would also like to thank Shaul Cohen (Geography) and Alex Stotts (Women’s and Gender
Studies) at University of Oregon who provided important feedback in the process of developing this
argument. Finally, we are deeply appreciative of the critical comments and insights provided to us by
anonymous reviewers and the editors of GPC. All errors or unconvincing interpretations are our own.
Notes
1. Parliament had conducted Britain’s first official census which showed England and Wales to
contain about nine million people (Cowherd 1977, 19). With no preceding census, Malthus’ 25
year doubling time prediction could not be disproved, and his apocalyptic warnings encouraged a
cautionary belief in his prophecies, belief reflected in the Royal Commission Reports of 1834.
2. We do not argue that Kaus or 1996 welfare reform in the USA is the first time this Malthusian
perversity thesis appears in US welfare policy. In her discussion of 1967 US welfare amendments
that froze federal aid to states for welfare cases stemming from ‘illegitimate’ births or desertion,
Abramovitz (1996, 337) writes ‘advocates of the freeze accepted the idea that the availability of
AFDC (aid to families with dependent children) caused the ongoing rise in desertion and
illegitimacy rates even though these demographic trends predated the growth of the AFDC
program itself’ (emphasis in original). Although Abramovitz does not trace the Malthusian
origins of this idea, her brilliant analysis of gender and the welfare state, first published in 1988,
represents a crucial contribution to feminist analysis of welfare policy in the USA.
3. In a 1991 speech announcing his candidacy, Clinton used the word responsibility 12 times,
including moral, individual, people’s and personal responsibility, as well as responsibility of the
government to take care of its neediest citizens (Clinton 1991).
4. Among others, Randy Albeda, Nancy Folbre and The Center for Popular Economics note that
‘scientific research shows that welfare does not significantly increase out-of-wedlock births’
(Albelda, Folbre and The Center for Popular Economics 1996, 42). Furthermore, the value of cash
aid and food stamps has decreased in conjunction with an increase in out-of-wedlock births
(Donovan 1998, 2).
Notes on contributors
Emily Kaufman is a master’s student in Geography at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University.
She received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Oregon in 2008, in Geography and
Women’s and Gender Studies. She is broadly interested in political and feminist geography, the
geography of security and citizenship, and public welfare policy. Her master’s research focuses on
Opportunity NYC, the first conditional cash transfer program in the USA.
Lise Nelson is Associate Professor of Geography at University of Oregon. Her research explores
citizenship and place in the context of globalization, with research based in Mexico and the USA.
She has published research on gender, ethnicity and shifting political cultures in Purhépechan
communities of Michoacán and written on the politics of race, place and belonging within
immigrant-receiving communities in Oregon, Georgia and Colorado. She coedited A Companion to
Feminist Geography (2006), with Joni Seager.
References
Abramovitz, M. 1996. Regulating the lives of women: Social policy from colonial times to the
present. Boston: South End Press, (Revised edition, first published 1988).
Albeda, R., N. Folbre, and The Center for Popular Economics. 1996. The war on the poor. New
York: W.W. Nortan & Company.
Bandarage, A. 1999. Population and development: Towards a social justice agenda. In Dangerous
intersections: Feminist perspectives on population, environment and development, ed.
J. Silliman and Y. King, 24 – 39. Cambridge: South End Press.
Block, F. and M. Somers. 2003. In the shadow of Speenhamland: Social policy and the Old Poor
Law. Politics & Society 31, no. 2: 283– 323.
Boonstra, H. 2000. Welfare law and the drive to reduce ‘illegitimacy’. The Guttmacher Report on
Public Policy 3, no. 6: 1 – 7.
Cammisa, A.M. 1998. From rhetoric to reform. Boulder: Westview Press.
Chapman, L., Jr. 2010. Bauer: Furor over comments won’t change stance. The State, January 24. http://
www.thestate.com/2010/01/24/1125111/bauer-furor-over-comments-wont.html (accessed
September 1, 2010).
Chavez, L. 1995. ‘Family caps’ crucial to real welfare reform. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel,
September 23..
Clines, F. 1996. Clinton signs bill cutting welfare: States in new role. New York Times, August 22.
Section A, page 1.
Clinton, W.J. 1991. Announcement Speech. (October 3) Available at: http://www.4president.org/
speeches/billclinton1992announcement.htm.
Cowherd, R.G. 1977. Political economists and the English poor laws. Athens: Ohio University
Press.
Deparle, J., and R. Gebeloff. 2009. Food stamp use soars across U.S., stigma fades. New York Times,
November 29. Section A, page 1.
Donovan, P. 1998. Does the family cap influence birthrates? Two new studies say ‘no’. The
Guttmacher Report on Public Policy 1, no. 1: 1 – 4.
Faircloth, L. 1995. Testimony delivered before the Senate Finance Committee, April 27. Washington,
DC: The Government Printing Office.
Goertzel, T.G., and J. Hart. 1995. New Jersey’s $64 question: Legislative entrepreneurship and the
family cap. In The politics of welfare reform, ed. D. Norris and L. Thompson, 109– 45. London:
Sage Publications.
Hancock, A.-M. 2004. The politics of disgust: The public identity of the welfare queen. New York:
New York University Press.
Hartmann, B. 1995. Reproductive rights and wrongs, The global politics of population control.
Boston: South End Press.
———. 1999. Population, environment, and security: A new trinity. In Dangerous intersections:
Feminist perspectives on population, environment and development, ed. J. Silliman and Y. King,
1 – 23. Cambridge: South End Press.
Hirschman, A.O. 1991. The rhetoric of reaction: Perversity, futility, jeopardy. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Jimenez, M.A. 1999. A feminist analysis of welfare reform: The Personal Responsibility Act of
1996. Affilia 14, no. 3: 278– 93.
Kaus, M. 1994. Testimony delivered before the House Ways and Means Committee, August 16.
Washington, DC: The Government Printing Office.
Lohmann, L. 2005. Malthusianism and the terror of scarcity. In Making threats: Biofears and
environmental anxieties, ed. B. Hartmann, B. Subramaniam, and C. Zerner, 81 – 98. Boulder:
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Malthus, T.R. 1798. An essay on the principle of population and a summary of the principle of
population. In An essay on the principle of population: Text, sources and background, criticism,
ed. P. Appleman. 1st ed., 59 – 272. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, (1976).
———. 1888. An essay on the principle of population or a view of its past and present effects on
human happiness. 9th ed. London: Reeves and Turner (Available online: http://babel.hathitrust.
org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101068776333).
Midwinter, E.C. 1994. The development of social welfare in Britain. Buckingham: Open University
Press.
Murray, C. 1995. Testimony delivered before the Senate Finance Committee, April 27. Washington,
DC: The Government Printing Office.
Nadasen, P. 2005. Welfare warriors: The welfare rights movement in the United States. New York:
Routledge.
Okin, S. 1989. Justice, gender, and the family. New York: Basic Books.
Paladino, C. 2010. Carl on welfare reform – Dignity Corps. http://www.paladinoforthepeople.
com/issuedetail.php?id¼12 (accessed October 5, 2010).
Piven, F.F. 2002. Work, welfare and politics: Confronting poverty in the wake of welfare reform.
Eugene, OR: University of Oregon Press.
Pollitt, K. 2002. Shotgun weddings. The Nation, February 4. http://www.thenation.com/article/

hotgun-weddings (accessed on August 13, 2010).
Poynter, J.R. 1969. Society and pauperism: English ideas on poor relief, 1975– 1834. London:
Routledge & K. Paul.
PRWORA (Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act). 1996. One Hundred
and Fourth Congress, Public Law 104– 193 [H.R. 3734]. Washington, DC: Government
Printing Office.
Rector, R. 1996. Testimony delivered before the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Human
Resources, May 22. Washington, DC: The Government Printing Office.
Roberts, D. 1997. Killing the black body: Race, reproduction, and the meaning of liberty. New York:
Vintage Books.
Ross, E.B. 1998. The Malthus factor: Poverty, politics and population in capitalist development.
New York: Zed Books.
Royal Commission. 1834. Extracts from the information received by his Majesty’s Commissioners as
to the administration and operation of the Poor-laws. London: H.M.S.O.
Santorum, R. 1995. Testimony delivered before the Senate finance committee hearing on welfare
reform, April 27. Washington, DC: The Government Printing Office.

Schram, S.F. 2000. After welfare: The culture of postindustrial social policy. New York: New York
University Press.
Seager, J. 2000. The 6-billionth baby: Designated green scapegoat. (Commentaries) Environment
and Planning A 32: 1711– 1718.
———. 2001. Blaming women: Population control for the greater green good. Public lecture for
Ecological Conversations Series (video recorded) May 16, Eugene, OR: University of Oregon
Center for the Study of Women in Society.
Shalala, D. 1994. Testimony delivered before the Senate Finance Committee on March 20.
Washington, DC: The Government Printing Office.
Silliman, J., M.G. Fried, L. Ross, and E.R. Gutiérrez. 2004. Undivided rights: Women of color
organize for reproductive justice. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.
Solinger, R. 2005. Pregnancy and power: A short history of reproductive politics in America.
New York: New York University Press.
Somers, M.R., and F. Block. 2005. From poverty to perversity: Ideas, markets, and institutions over
200 years of welfare debate. American Sociological Review 70, no. 2: 260– 78.
Theobald, W. 1834. The Poor Law amendment act; with a commentary on the powers of the
commissioners; and a general introductory view, showing how the act affects the law of relief,
settlement, removals, and appeals; with the changes made in Gilbert’s and other incorporations;
also, an account of the dropped clauses, not included in the act, but recommended in the report
of the commissioners. London: S. Sweet.
Watts, M. 2005. Reflections – scarcity, modernity, terror. In Making threats: Biofears and
environmental anxieties, ed. B. Hartmann, B. Subramaniam, and C. Zerner, 99 – 108. Boulder:
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
ABSTRACT TRANSLATIONS
Malthus, el género y la demarcación de los cuerpos ‘peligrosos’ en la reforma del
sistema de asistencia social de EE.UU. en 1996
Este artı́culo propone que el poblacionismo como narrativa generizada provee una
arquitectura retórica crucial para los debates sobre la reforma del sistema de asistencia
social en los Estados Unidos durante los años 90. El poblacionismo, que Joni Seager
(2001) define como ‘el dogma y la retórica del alarmismo y control de la población,’
legitimó sutilmente los esfuerzos para controlar y marginar a los cuerpos de las mujeres
pobres en el contexto de la reforma del sistema de asistencia social. El poblacionismo que
subyace a la reforma del sistema gira en torno a un profundo miedo al caos social total si
‘nosotros’ no controlamos la fertilidad de las mujeres pobres, y particularmente de las
mujeres de color. El artı́culo sitúa históricamente la polı́tica de asistencia social
contemporánea siguiendo en detalle cómo los escritos originales de Malthus sobre la

población estaban constitutivamente ligados a los debates sobre la ‘ayuda a los pobres’ en
la Inglaterra de principios del siglo XIX. Explorando los lazos generizados entre Malthus y
las polı́ticas de asistencia social en el siglo XIX nos permite entender cómo la sombra de
Malthus sigue presente en discursos sobre la asistencia social a partir de los años 90 del
siglo XX, con consecuencias directas para las mujeres pobres y particularmente las
mujeres pobres de color.
Palabras claves: poblacionismo; Malthus; reforma de la asistencia social; género;
Estados Unidos

Malthus Gender and The Demarcation of Da

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Malthus Gender and The Demarcation of Da

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

This article was downloaded by: [Yale University Library]

On: 11 March 2014, At: 13:15

Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of

Malthus, gender and the demarcation of

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2011.625081

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Malthus, gender and the demarcation of ‘dangerous’ bodies in 1996 US

This article argues that populationism as a gendered narrative provides a crucial

*Email: lise@uoregon.edu; eckaufma@syr.edu

ISSN 0966-369X print/ISSN 1360-0524 online

The historical context: Malthus and the 1830s poor laws

According to Malthus, if the preventive checks described above – based on notions of

Welfare reform and populationism in the USA

Another scholar of the racialized politics of welfare reform, Hancock (2004),

Although Hancock provides a persuasive argument about the discursive construction

welfare system to reduce government dependency, attack illegitimacy, require welfare

Pollitt, K. 2002. Shotgun weddings. The Nation, February 4. http://www.thenation.com/article/

reform, April 27. Washington, DC: The Government Printing Office.

contemporánea siguiendo en detalle cómo los escritos originales de Malthus sobre la

You might also like