Of Work, Welfare and Motherhood : Reform could end the stigma that attaches to women with children having jobs outsidethe home.

Whenever I complain about the burdens of being a working mom, my mother reminds me of how it was in her day. She loved the working world and the pleasure of getting dressed for business, as she called it, but the social stigma was great. Neighbors would watch as she left for her job as an office manager in an insurance agency. “What’s the matter,” one friend asked her. “Isn’t your husband making enough to support you?”

I retell that story as the nation once again evaluates its attitudes toward the working mother, using, of all things, federal welfare reform as a test case. However mean-spirited the political rhetoric of these times, the legislative move to get women off Aid to Families With Dependent Children and back into the work force would be impossible if other attitudes toward working women had not so drastically changed.

If welfare “entitlements” are no longer popular, it’s because the concept of a woman staying at home raising her children is economically unfeasible for all but the elites. And if today we are less understanding of women living eternally on the dole, it’s because times are tougher all around. Labor statistics show that 56% of women work, including 70% of women 25 to 44, the major child-raising years. Most women don’t work for what used to be called “pin money,” the luxuries of life; their income is the difference between solvency and not getting by. Even the Pope, in his recent letter on women’s rights, called for equal pay for equal work and declared that fairness in career advancement is a matter not only of justice but necessity.

It’s ironic that the Republican Party, having made much of traditional family values including the stay-at-home mom, is the first to take advantage of the new reality of women’s lives. If Sen. Bob Dole and Speaker Newt Gingrich reap political capital by commandeering welfare reform, they’ll also be nailing the coffin on that cliche that a woman’s place is in the home.

Curiously, the welfare system may be the last arena where the old stereotyping of women still pervades. It’s no wonder: The welfare bureaucracy has always been a mix of biblical compassion and social bias. The system cut its teeth during the postwar years, the beginning of the Harriet Nelson-Donna Reed era, when American women were pulling back from employment so men could have the jobs.

The assumption that women with young children should not work for their aid is partly pity, but also stems from the sense of that time that every child needed a mother at home. Some of the 1950s-style rhetoric remains among welfare advocates and recipients. Just last week on talk radio, a woman justified her years on AFDC by staying that she “wanted to raise her children herself.” So does everyone, but most women work while they do so. How do we retrain the thinking that it’s either/or? After 40 years of social policy, it will be hard.

That’s why it’s important to see not just what Congress does to end welfare appropriations, but what we do with the savings. Until now, welfare policy has divided the haves and have-nots. But all women, regardless of income, need vehicles of independence: child-care centers, mandatory child health insurance and benefits for part-time workers. The child-care provision of the welfare reform bill was voted down in committee, a sure sign that punishment, not improvement of women’s and children’s lives, is the motive on Capitol Hill. The Clinton Administration dropped its plan of health insurance for children.

This just won’t wash. Neither will efforts by the Christian Coalition to re-create the sovereignty of the stay-at-home mom by means of tax incentives for wives who do not work. The self-interest demonstrated by the housewife write-off is probably one key reason why welfare reform would fail. History shows that the poor want what the rich have. If middle-class housewives can stay home and care for their children at taxpayer expense, why, welfare advocates are sure to argue, can’t the truly needy?

The stigma against the working mother may finally be ending, but there’s life in it yet.