The Super Sexist Marriage
Imagine being too radical for both the Civil Rights and the Women’s Liberation movements. In the 1960s and 1970s, Black feminist Johnnie Tillmon and the National Welfare Rights Organization were just that. Their mission — rights, respect, and opportunity for welfare recipients — did not fit either movement’s narrative. So they wrote their own. This is the third article in my series Ask Her about Her Zero F*cks.
The Spring 1972 issue of pioneering American feminist magazine Ms. contained an article that was controversial even by women’s liberation standards. It was tellingly omitted from the front cover, which featured omg-for-1972 blurbs like “Women Tell the Truth about Abortions” and “Letty Pogrebin on Raising Kids without Sex Roles.” Nope, you would have to pick up the thing and read it to find this gem.
The article was titled “Welfare is a Women’s Issue” and its author was Johnnie Tillmon (1926–1995), Chair of the National Welfare Rights Organization. In it, she described welfare as a super-sexist and controlling marriage: “You trade in a man for the man. But you can’t divorce him if he treats you bad. He can divorce you, of course, cut you off anytime he wants. But in that case, he keeps the kids, not you. The man runs everything.” She explained that the Man controlled recipients’ lives down to every expense and denied them any reproductive agency.
If these sound like the very conditions of marriage that feminists in both the first and second waves protested, you would be correct. But the second wave did not embrace welfare rights with the same enthusiasm they showed for other feminist concerns. They did not know how to approach a cause led largely by Black women. Fool yourself not by thinking the Black Civil Rights movement welcomed welfare rights with open arms either — they did not know how to approach a cause led by Black women.
Caught between two mass movements and understood by neither, Johnnie Tillmon and her thousands-deep Mom Squad were determined to be heard and not be overshadowed by the feminist and civil rights organizations that tried to avoid them. Johnnie knew what she was doing; as a single mother of six who received welfare after losing her employment due to illness, she was used to screaming into the void that greeted welfare mothers whenever they advocated for their own humanity. She described herself this way: “I’m a black woman. I’m a poor woman. I’m a fat woman. I’m a middle-aged woman. And I’m on welfare. In this country, if you’re any of those things, you count less as a human being. If you’re all those things, you don’t count at all. Except as a statistic” (see an intersectional analysis here).
A statistic. How dehumanizing, especially when the stats themselves were used to blame Black women for every problem facing Black people in America. The stakes were incredibly high in a movement of women who had to first establish themselves not as marching statistics but as real people with real rights. Johnnie was up to the challenge, however.
Her entry into the welfare rights movement happened soon after her entry into welfare. Johnnie had moved the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles in 1959 from Arkansas with six children and no husband. She had worked in sharecropper cotton fields, as a domestic, a line cook and even as a bomb fuse inspector(!) at an ammunition plant. In 1963, her job at a laundry in Watts was lost to illness and she hesitated to apply for welfare. With good reason, too — shortly thereafter, a caseworker raided her house and turned it upside down looking for evidence that a man lived there, which would have rendered her ineligible for welfare.
Johnnie decided to use her fury and humiliation to organize the other welfare mothers in Watts. Her first group was Aid to Needy Children (ANC) Mothers Anonymous, which would join the National Welfare Rights Organization in 1967. Their cause was simple: better treatment from welfare caseworkers. What may sound like a no-brainer to us now was inflammatory heresy in the welfare environment of the 1960s, especially for Black women, for whom the program was not originally intended.
From the outset, Johnnie insisted that her organization’s leadership, and indeed that of the wider welfare rights movement, should be the very Black welfare mothers whose rights were in question. They believed and lived the radical notion that (Black) women are people (capable of sound decision-making). When the NWRO took in Johnnie’s group, she noticed that almost all the people in charge were middle-class men. This was standard for civil rights organizations of the time, and not by accident.
The cause of Black welfare mothers risked being subsumed into the larger War on Poverty, which would have been fine except that now Black and white men and white women could ignore the Black women who were literally in the same room. Instead, the welfare mothers made themselves impossible to ignore. They showed up to protests dressed in their church finery despite being encouraged to show off their destitution, refusing to denigrate themselves before a government that already overlooked their humanity. They used direct-action tactics, staging sit-ins at welfare offices and once at a Senate Finance Committee hearing. After a vocally racist Senator walked out on the welfare mothers and called them “brood mares,” Johnnie dubbed their annual Day of Protest marches “brood mare stampedes.” That’s a negative number of f*cks.
In 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference organized the Poor People’s March on Washington. The NWRO played a major role in organizing and fundraising for this campaign, but their specific demands were still beyond the Pale for civil rights leaders, who did not want to associate with the welfare mothers. Johnnie humbled MLK in front of an audience, grandchild in her lap, when he revealed his ignorance about key legislation affecting welfare recipients. If the relationship between recipients and the welfare system was a super sexist marriage, so was the relationship between Big Civil Rights (known for being sexist anyway) and the welfare mothers’ movement. And Johnnie was having none of it. She became Executive Director of the NWRO in 1972, after years of internal conflict with the men in charge, and narrowed its focus to welfare mothers.
Tellingly, poor white women felt more at home in NWRO than in organizations like NOW, and Johnnie welcomed their involvement. Membership in the NWRO peaked at 25,000 before the organization folded in 1975; its finances were already shaky when Johnnie assumed directorship and the country’s mood was hardening towards welfare rights. Lacking the exciting militancy of the Black Power Movement and the perpetual shock-and-awe of Women’s Liberation, the nationwide welfare rights movement receded into history but carried on in state- and local-level activism. The welfare mothers were truly ahead of their time — so much so that their “allies” never quite knew what to do with them.
Johnnie returned to the Los Angeles area after NWRO closed its doors and picked up where she had left off, working at the local and state levels for welfare rights. She became an advisor to California Governors Jerry Brown and George Deukneijian. She died in 1995, one year before then-President Bill Clinton signed the welfare reform bill that ended Aid to Families with Dependent Children and replaced it with the much more restrictive Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which is still in place today.
Sadly, the NWRO was not able to shape the national conversation about welfare after the 1970s. The administrations succeeding Lyndon B. Johnson let the War on Poverty collapse into itself until Ronald Reagan gave it the death blow with his favorite bogeywomen — “Welfare Queens,” a harmful and persistent stereotype based on literally one con artist from Chicago. Besides this ludicrous extrapolation, the increased political and economic conservatism of the 1980s turned public opinion against increasing welfare rights for anyone, least of all Black women.
I studied the welfare rights movement in college, but as I revisited it for this article, I was struck by how revolutionary Johnnie and the NWRO were considering the historical context. There was no mistaking their feminism with that of Women’s Liberation. At the core, middle-class white women wanted to be liberated into the workforce and poor Black women wanted to be liberated out of it. The denial of welfare to Black women was based on the assumption that they worked outside of the home by default, so demands to get out of the kitchen and into the factory/office rang hollow to them.
Meanwhile, Big Civil Rights was focused on Black (men’s) participation in public life, removed from the domestic realm of welfare motherhood. I find it interesting that the NWRO’s bread-and-butter concerns, i.e. job training, food on the table, and roofs over their children’s heads, were too radical even for Civil Rights. But then again, women were the face of NWRO, so that explains that. For Johnnie and countless other welfare mothers, having to choose between a super sexist marriage to the Government Guys or to the Civil Rights Guys was unacceptable. Giving zero f*cks, she led them down an uncharted path wholly their own.
Who:
- Ruby Duncan, the Johnnie Tillmon of Las Vegas, Nevada
- George Wiley, founder of NWRO
- Beulah Sanders, Vice President of NWRO who organized the 1968 Poor People’s March on Washington
- Mary Jo Bane and Peter Edelman, senior Clinton Administration officials who resigned in protest of Clinton signing the 1996 welfare reform bill
What/Where:
- NWRO National Headquarters location, Civil Rights Tour (Washington DC)
- National Center for Civil and Human Rights (Atlanta, Georgia)
- African American Museum in Philadelphia
- Welfare Rights Collection at the National Museum of African American History & Culture (Washington DC)
- KCET Exhibit on the history of racial unrest in Los Angeles, California
Read:
- Storming Caesar’s Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty. Annelise Orleck, Beacon Press 2005.
- The Battle for Welfare Rights: Politics and Poverty in Modern America. Felicia Kornbluh, University of Pennsylvania Press 2007.
- Tell it Like it Is: Women in the National Welfare Rights Movement. Mary Eleanor Triece, University of South Carolina Press 2013.
- Rethinking the Welfare Rights Movement. Premilla Nadasen, Taylor & Francis 2012.
