A Woman Who Knows Welfare

Lately, declaring that one has made a life as a career politician commands about as much respect as a case of head lice. This citizenry wants to be represented not by a bunch of suits who have experienced the world from the Capitol steps, but by people who have stood in line at the grocery store, been outwitted by a 1040 form, clipped coupons, worked a Saturday shift.

Perhaps that is why the Congress of this decade has gradually filled with restaurant owners, real estate brokers, a couple of dentists, a plastic surgeon, a housewife, two football players, a Texas accountant who spent a summer homeless, and--from California--one used-to-be welfare mom.

At 58, Lynn Woolsey is well-spoken and steady in her navy blue suit and graying pageboy. A second-term Democratic congresswoman from Petaluma, she has a weakness for caffe latte, a pair of slippers in her stately office and a world view that lifts her apart from each of her 534 colleagues in the House and Senate.

As welfare reform becomes the defining issue of this Congress, only Lynn Woolsey has bought groceries with food stamps or paid a doctor with a Medi-Cal card. When angry Republicans rant against that faceless sector of humanity that won’t get off the dole, Woolsey can say, “That was me.”

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Twenty-seven years ago Woolsey was a Bay-area June Cleaver, wife of a stockbroker, mother of three, keeper of the comfortable suburban house. “Good Housekeeping was my Bible,” she says now. “I graduated high school in 1955; I was a sorority girl in a cashmere sweater. I did not grow up planning to be on welfare.”

Then one day her husband left, the victim of an emotional illness. He could not hold his job. She could not make the house payment. So Woolsey became the typical welfare mom, a profile that holds true today: Caucasian, mother of at least two, husband gone.

Oddly, three years of public assistance that some might consider cause for shame has earned her a healthy bipartisan respect here. The President took a moment during his State of the Union address to commend her on national TV. As one of only five freshmen named to a special House-Senate conference committee that produced last year’s federal budget, she helped save the same social programs that once saved her. Her plan to compromise the credit records of fathers who fail to make child support payments was written into law last year. Her bill to federalize child support collection was co-sponsored this year by Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Illinois), the powerful chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

And as co-chair of the Democratic Leadership Welfare Reform Task Force, Woolsey is preparing to introduce a bill that would reduce the welfare rolls through education and job training, with no time limits on benefits.

But with the new majority vowing to get tough on welfare, Woolsey quite likely has hit a wall. The Republican reform plan would reduce federal welfare funds by $40 billion over five years, cut off checks after two years and deny benefits to unwed teen-age mothers.

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Had that plan been the law when Woolsey found herself the sole support of her children, ages 1, 3 and 5, she might not have made it. Even with a couple of years of college, good health and a job as office manager at a small electronics firm, it took her three years to get off welfare.

Without those monthly checks, she could not have afforded the child care that enabled her to work. Her struggle finally ended when she married a co-worker, David Woolsey, a marketing consultant. Later, after her children were securely cared for, Woolsey was promoted to management and finally human resources director.

For Woolsey, the worst of the Republican plan is that it punishes children for their parents’ poverty. “Seventy percent of the poor in this country are children,” she says one morning over a cup of coffee. “I believe deep in my heart that if they are not cared for when they are little, they are resentful by the time they are teen-agers, and they show us their resentment.”

Woolsey’s story had a fairly happy ending. Two of her children earned college degrees; the third is a successful wine salesman. She was elected to the Petaluma City Council in 1984. In 1992, she went to Washington. Her district office currently employs as interns two welfare mothers.

“When some people sit at home getting a check while other people have to work two or three jobs to make ends meet, of course working people are furious,” she says. “But I have faith in the American public that they will invest in welfare if it puts people back to work.”

As, once upon a time, it did for her.