from NWSA Journal Volume 11, Number 1

Rhetoric of (Female) Savagery: Welfare Reform in the United States and Aotearoa/New Zealand

CATHERINE P. KINGFISHER

The University of Waikato, New Zealand

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Reform of welfare provisions for single mothers and their children has become a major political agenda in both the United States and Aotearoa¹/New Zealand. In the context of a globalized shift to neo-liberalism, there has been a convergence of the two countries' approaches to welfare reform. This convergence is manifested in the social construction of poor single mothers as out of control, hedonistic, irresponsible, and dependent. As such, they both threaten and serve to define the boundaries of ordered society. In this article, I examine welfare reform within this gendered discourse of poverty, which, I argue, also mirrors discourses of colonization, in which the colonized Other is constructed as "savage"--wild and ungoverned--and in need of reformation. Poor single mothers, like indigenous populations, thus constitute an internal savage, and welfare reform may accordingly be analyzed in terms of colonizing/reformative agendas.

The discourse of welfare reform in Aotearoa/New Zealand and the United States is pervaded by a symbolic association of the "undeserving poor," most notably poor single mothers, with savagery. The "savage" is commonly constructed as wild, uncivilized, uncontrollable, and living in a "natural" state that lies outside, or historically occurred prior to, civilization.² While sometimes valorizing the savage as "noble," western colonial interests have pursued a range of paths in various attempts to educate, enlighten, uplift, or otherwise civilize the backward, primitive Other, including colonization and missionization. Cultural and physical annihilation also have been commonly practiced.

Geographically and temporally distant peoples have not been the only subjects of western colonization, however. The West has a long and still unfolding history of internal colonization, assimilation, and annihilation of indigenous peoples. Further, women as a group arguably represent a "colony" that cuts across North/South constructs and divisions of race, ethnicity, and class (Mies 1986; Mies, Bennholdt-Thomsen and von Werlhof 1988). The frequent association of women with nature (Ortner 1974; Keller 1985) points to a gendered subtext of colonial discourse, particularly regarding conquest. Many attributes of the "savage" are similarly attributed to women, including irrationality and immorality. Both figure prominently in the discourse of welfare reform in Aotearoa/New Zealand and the United States.

Like indigenous populations, the poor, and in particular "undeserving" poor single mothers, constitute an internal "savage" linked into a complex conceptual web of internal Others, including "low-level criminals, drug users, disloyalists, racial minorities, and the underclass . . . whose strains of abnormality, subversion, and perversity may reside within anyone" (Connolly 1991, 206-208, cited in Neisser and Schram 1994, 54). There are, then, two levels at which we confront the internal savage: within the polity, and within ourselves, a point to which I return in my conclusions. In this scheme, welfare reform becomes a colonial agenda that belies a tension between proposals ranging from "uplift" and incorporation to annihilation.

The Welfare State in New Zealand and the United States

My focus is on recent welfare reform debates in the United States and Aotearoa/New Zealand. I focus specifically on the reform of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) in the United States, and the Domestic Purposes Benefit (DPB) in New Zealand, the two major programs designed to provide assistance to single adults (usually women) with children. While there are a number of categories of poor women who are constructed as "deserving," for instance widows, I use the label "poor women" as shorthand for "undeserving" poor single mothers. And although levels of provisioning in both countries have been inadequate, here I emphasize the social context of provisioning, specifically, the social/cultural construction of the subjectivities of poor women, and the various social meanings attached to financial assistance.

New Zealand and the United States have widely divergent histories in terms of both the ideologies informing their general approaches to welfare, and the breadth and depth of their programs.³ New Zealand's history is marked by an ideology of collectivism, in which the community, as embodied in the state, is responsible for the basic needs of its members; indeed, until recently, New Zealand was known as a cradle-to-grave welfare state with "universal" employment and "universal" coverage in areas such as health and education. In contrast, U.S. history is marked by an unabashed individualism, with the state taking a residualist approach to welfare. Thus, despite the similar economic circumstances precipitating the development of the U.S. Social Security Act of 1935 and the New Zealand Social Security Act of 1938 (i.e., the Depression), the Acts themselves were strikingly different. First, in the United States, restrictive legislation rewarded higher earnings and protected "only a minority of the population against only a few risks," while the New Zealand Act was designed to "[cover] everybody against every risk, and [redistribute] income downward" (Richards 1994, vii-viii). Second, whereas New Zealand built its welfare state on a foundation of full employment, full employment never featured in the organization of the U.S. welfare state. Finally, while the United States has drawn on both "contributory" and "noncontributory" funding, New Zealand has tended to fund its programs from general revenues.

Despite these differences, New Zealand and the United States have approached poor women in remarkably similar ways. The New Zealand Social Security Act did not, in fact, cover "everybody against every risk" (Richards 1994, viii) but excluded women and Maori; the "everybody" covered was European and male. "Undeserving," morally suspect women--non-European, non-widows--had difficulty gaining state support; indeed, no provisions were made for single mothers under the 1938 Act, and the Domestic Purposes Benefit was not instituted until 1973 (Beaglehole 1993). Similarly, in the United States, Mothers' Pensions, the forerunner to AFDC, supported white widows to the exclusion of most other women. Regulations such as the "suitable home" and "man in the house rules" worked to control poor mother's sexuality and employment from the 1940s to the 1960s (Abramovitz 1988; Piven and Cloward 1971).

In addition, recent social policy in the United States and New Zealand has converged, in the context of a globalized shift to neo-liberalism, regarding the organization of financial assistance.⁴ Changes in welfare policy in New Zealand in 1991 included major cuts in the nominal value of most social welfare benefits, stricter eligibility criteria, benefits ceasing to be indexed to inflation, longer stand down (unpaid waiting period) for the unemployment benefit, the introduction of a raft of new part charges for health care and education along with tighter targeting, the removal of lump-sum payments for accident victims and the introduction of employee contributions to the scheme, targeting cash subsidies for accommodation, and a move to market rentals (replacing income-related rents) for state-provided housing. (Waldegrave and Frater 1996, 163)

This shift in the New Zealand welfare state from universal to targeted provisioning (Boston 1992a) has been underpinned by an individualist rather than collectivist approach, and employs an absolute rather than relative definition of poverty (Waldegrave and Frater 1996, 163-4; see also Boston 1992b).

Although the increasing residualism of the New Zealand welfare state in no way matches that of the United States, New Zealand seems to be heading in the direction of the United States (see, e.g., Bedggood 1996). New Zealand is thus a relative newcomer to an orientation familiar to the United States, characterized by valorization of the possessive individualism of liberal theory, market liberalism, and a shrinking of the welfare state.

Nature, Poverty, Gender, and Savagery

⁵

In her discussion of the naturalization of poverty, Ruth Smith claims that the existence of poverty challenges the basic assumptions of liberal society, among which are included individual autonomy and self-sufficiency (1990, 212). Smith's exploration of the liberal bourgeois symbolization of poverty, on the one hand, and of society, on the other, highlights a non-poor/poor binary in which the non-poor represent society and civilization, maleness, "good"--that is, controllable-nature, order, autonomy and freedom, intentionality, independence, universality, morality, and rationality; and the poor represent nature and savagery, femaleness, "bad"--or, uncontrollable-nature, disorder, need and necessity, want, desire, particularity, dependence, immorality, and irrationality. Gender is a key axis of this binary, with the various attributes on the "masculine" side having a positive valence in relation to those on the "feminine" side, which are hierarchically and definitively secondary.

In their savage attack on the assumptions and organization of liberal bourgeois society, the poor, by their very existence, serve to define the boundaries of ordered society. By being "naturally" outside of civil society, and thus representative of disorder, the poor establish the outer limits of that society.⁶ Civilization is what it is--and those who inhabit it are who they are--by virtue of not being uncivilized, of being the opposite of the Other to civilization, the savage. The center is defined by the margins, and the savage poor become a pedagogical instrument in our own identity and social formation. They are not benign teachers, however, but rather represent the abject, threatening the boundary (Sibley 1995, 14; see also Kristeva 1984).

The problem, then, becomes "whether or not the poor can be realigned with freedom⁷ and if so, whether this is most likely to be accomplished by reforming the poor to fit society or by extending society to encompass the poor" (Smith 1990, 210). Neo-liberal welfare reform proponents in New Zealand and the United States deploy two kinds of argument in this regard. The first is economic in nature, and the second is developmental and moral. While they are to some extent overlapping,⁸ I separate them here for purposes of discussion, and focus, for the most part, on the latter.

The Economic Argument, or, Poor People are Hurting the Economy

Proponents of the economic argument against welfare claim that public relief is too expensive along a number of dimensions, including national debt, and "the extra costs of reducing inequality," such as the higher tax rates needed to finance redistribution (Hum 1993, 107). In addition, it is claimed, welfare spending has failed to relieve poverty.

In a July 1996 speech, for instance, Peter Gresham, then New Zealand Minister of Social Welfare, provided justification for the 1991 benefit cuts, which reduced the benefit for a single adult with one child by $25 per week, and also transformed a system of more or less universal benefits into one of increasingly targeted benefits. One rationale for the cuts was that New Zealanders could simply "no longer sustain the cost of their comprehensive social security scheme," that in the face of a depressed economy, the government had to reduce expenditure (New Zealand Executive Government Speech Archive, 1996). Calls for cutting welfare spending in New Zealand have also been made in the name of "inter-generational equity" (Kelsey 1995, 281).

Similar sentiments regarding run-away costs of welfare programs have been expressed in debates on welfare reform in the United States Congress. In support of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act 1996, Senator Ashcroft stated that, "In spite of the good intentions of the welfare program, which we have poured billions of dollars into, hundreds of billions of dollars, we have ended up trapping people at their lowest and least rather than calling people or prompting people to their highest and best" (House Proceedings of the Record of July 30, 1996).⁹ In an earlier debate, Representative Funderburk also pointed to the financial incentives for welfare reform: "Let me tell you where we will be if we do not put a brake on the runaway welfare train. Today Federal welfare spending stands at $387 billion, by 2000 we will spend $537 billion on welfare entitlements. This madness has to stop" (House Proceedings of the Record of March 24, 1995). Finally, as vice chairman of the 1996 welfare reconciliation conference, Senator Domenici mirrored Funderburk's fiscal incentive, stating that the Act would save the American taxpayers $55 billion dollars in its first six years (House Proceedings of the Record of July 30, 1996).

This approach represents a form of economic rationalism, in which "the view that social problems can progressively be solved by the application of rationally-devised state-implemented social policies" is seen as both unaffordable and inefficacious (Bryson 1992, 178). Such arguments are selective, however; and in emphasizing the need to "reinvigorate the market sector," they work to the advantage of particular groups and to the disadvantage of others (179). This welfare for the wealthy manifests itself in particular forms of government interference in the "free" market.

In economic arguments, the suffering body is the economy,¹⁰ not the individual poor body.¹¹ The claim is that resources must be diverted to, or reclaimed by, the larger body, and that in so doing the longer-term interests of the individual poor will be better served. Such a claim represents a "trickle-down" approach, to the effect that "[c]ontinuation down the free-market track will strengthen the basis for widespread opportunity and a high degree of personal security through growth of the economy" (Bates 1996; cited in Boston, St. John and Stephens 1996, 3).

The Moral Argument, or, Welfare Dependency is an Assault on Human Nature

A key rhetorical strategy deployed by neo-liberal welfare reformists in the United States and New Zealand entails pointing to the moral harm inflicted on the poor when they are provided with aid. This argument against welfare claims that "the idea of a right to welfare makes fundamental errors about the nature of human beings and their essential capacities and powers, . . . actually undermin[ing] some essential human characteristics, in particular self-respect and independence, as well as motivation to achieve these things" (Plant 1993, 33). In other words, welfare is unfair, even immoral, insofar as it robs people of the opportunity to achieve self-respect by means of the self-reliance and independence gained through paid employment (42). In the United States, this line of argument can be seen in the work of Mead (1986) and Murray (1984), among others.

President Clinton exemplified this approach in a speech to the Sixth Annual Business Enterprise Awards Luncheon on February 18, 1997, when he claimed that liberals "demeaned" welfare recipients when they argued, "well, the poor things, they can't work, and so we have to just take care of them" (Office of the Press Secretary, 2-3). In the New Zealand context, Green (whose book, From Welfare to Civil Society: Towards Welfare that Works in New Zealand, was published by the New Zealand Business Roundtable, a lobby of conservative business leaders), argues that welfare undermines human liberty. Stating that, "human nature at its best is about assuming personal responsibility for both self-improvement and making the world a better place for others" (1996, vii), Green advocates reforming the Domestic Purposes Benefit (DPB) so that "girls contemplating the possibility of pregnancy" face a future involving "a five-day working week plus caring for the child alone in the evenings and weekends" (133). Similarly draconian measures would be taken against the fathers of illegitimate children. Unrestrained sex and poverty are causally linked in this formulation, resulting in an anti-poverty strategy that rests heavily on marriage and the proper family. Green summarizes his view of liberty as one based "on a high view of human character and potential, a strong sense of solidarity which is not political, and a view not that the government is innately undesirable, but that it should be limited to the high purpose of maintaining and upholding the protected domain of initiative which is liberty" (198). His proposals for reforming the DPB, then, along with an idealized vision of philanthropy and a minimal government safety net, would "free" the poor.

A key binary in the moral argument against welfare is that of independence versus dependence. In their genealogy of dependency, Fraser and Gordon (1994) trace the historical narrowing of the concept from one referring to a constellation of normative (and thus usually unstigmatized) social relations (such as dependence on an employer), to one referring to inherent, primarily negative traits of individuals or groups. In a post-industrial society in which social-structural dependencies have ostensibly been eliminated, "whatever dependency remains . . . can be interpreted as the fault of individuals" (325). In this contracted sense, then, dependency is reformulated as individual pathology, "as if the social relations of dependency were being absorbed into personality" (331). Current relationships of dependency are thus obfuscated, and independence, narrowly defined, becomes the cornerstone of adult individuality and identity.

In the process of its historical narrowing, the concept of dependency has been both feminized and racialized. The feminization of the term is related to the development of the cult of domesticity and the "family wage" during industrialization, while the racialization of the term has its roots in industrial justifications of colonization and slavery. Dependency thus took its particular meanings in relation to its opposite, independence, particularly as represented by the free Anglo male earning a family wage (Fraser and Gordon 1994; see also Kingfisher 1996, 28-29).

The dependence/independence binary figures prominently in the discourse of welfare reform in the United States and New Zealand. For example, at the August 13, 1996 Third Annual "From Welfare to Well-Being" Business Breakfast, Peter Gresham, then New Zealand Minister of Social Welfare, referred to his vision "that positive income support enable . . . people to transform dependency into contribution" (New Zealand Executive Government Speech Archive, 1996). Mr. Gresham underscored the importance of providing New Zealand's children with the skills to become "fully developed individuals," the implication being that current beneficiaries of income support are neither fully developed (as in adult), nor fully individual (as in self-sufficient).

The New Zealand Department of Social Welfare's "From Welfare to Well-Being" strategy is foundational to the 1996 Tax Reduction and Social Policy Bill. A primary feature of the social policy program of the bill is "the positive effect it will have on work incentives and encouraging independence" (New Zealand Ministry of Finance, 1996, 25). One method for improving work incentives is to increase the margin between the benefit and paid work (the principle of less eligibility). For instance, under the program, a woman with one child on the DPB would receive $134 less from the benefit than from paid employment. This increased gap is to be accompanied by a number of support mechanisms, including changes in abatement rates to encourage increased part-time work, "more flexible funding arrangements for early-childhood education . . . [and] some development assistance grants . . . on a pilot basis for new out-of-school care services" (New Zealand Ministry of Finance 1996, 32). Significantly, no mention is made of direct childcare subsidies to employed parents.

In their commentary on the Tax Reduction and Social Policy Bill, the Finance and Expenditure Committee stated that, "[w]ork testing provides an additional incentive for those who are not motivated to move towards self-reliance" (1996, vi). The assumption here is that "beneficiaries prefer . . . not to be in paid work" (Kelsey 1995, 281). Underlying their dependence, then, is irresponsibility, similar, perhaps, to a child's innate tendency to avoid chores, or to the "savage's" inability to defer gratification. It is in this sense that "[t]he Government shares the Employment Task Force's view that an individual's rights should be balanced by their responsibilities. Therefore, along with the greater range of opportunities, assistance and improved financial incentives which the tax reduction and social policy program provides, go some increased responsibilities" (New Zealand Ministry of Finance 1996, 32). For Domestic Purposes beneficiaries, this translates into two requirements,

effective April 1, 1997: first, for those whose youngest child is between the ages of 7 and 13, a yearly interview with Income Support Services that will "signal to beneficiaries that they should be taking steps to move towards independence and employment and provide appropriate advice to help them do this"; and second, for those whose youngest child is 14 years of age or more, a work test, which includes the requirement that they be in training, seeking paid employment, or in paid employment for 15 hours per week. The penalties for failing to fulfill these requirements include benefit reductions.

In addition, in early 1997, the New Zealand Social Welfare Department sponsored a "Beyond Dependency" conference, in which high-ranking proponents of welfare reform in the United States were featured as key speakers. Particular emphasis was placed on WisconsinWorks, a program widely known for its stringent emphasis on "personal responsibility," "independence," and workfare. A year later, in February 1998, the government mailed a proposed "Code of Social and Family Responsibility" to every household in the nation. The document outlined a code of individual and family--i.e., private--responsibility for economic, social, and physical well-being, mirroring in many ways the discourse of welfare reform in the U.S., from which it got its inspiration.¹²

Welfare reform measures in the United States are even more punitive, however. The Republican Personal Responsibility Act put forward in 1994-95, for instance, called for cuts to recipients' benefits after two years and penalties for out-of-wedlock births. In discussions of the proposed Act in the House of Representatives, one Representative (Goodling) claimed that the existing welfare system "enslaved" recipients, and that they needed to be given the opportunity "to get part of that American dream" (House Proceedings of the Record of March 24, 1995). This resonates with the autonomy/freedom-need/necessity distinction Smith (1990) points to. Another Representative (Funderburk) also referred to the current programs as enslaving and degrading, adding that "they have made generations of Americans nothing more than animals in the Government barn." Funderburk makes clear, moreover, that these enslaved animals/savages are women when he argues that "The Republican reform bill takes aim at the heart of the welfare problem--the underage mother who enters the welfare rolls after conceiving an out-of-wedlock child."

It was in the context of this debate that orphanages re-entered the discourse of welfare reform in the United States (Asen 1996). Discussions about the re-institution of orphanages were in keeping with late-nineteenth to early-twentieth century arguments for removing children from poor households so that they could be "properly" raised (socialized into the work ethic) in orphanages or foster homes (Abramovitz 1988). According to Asen (1996, 299), "[a]s a benevolent, nurturing institution, the orphanage once again represented an escape for children residing in a baneful and destructive environment. If these children could be removed from their current surroundings, they might avoid the fate of their parents." But "benevolence" and "nurturance," considered absent in the home environment of the poor, take on very specific meanings in this context. For instance, in response to his encounter with a welfare family in which a 15-year-old had recently given birth, Alphonso Jackson, the chief executive of the Dallas Public Housing Authority, commented that, "[l]ogic tells me that the only chance of giving him [the baby] a future is to put him in an environment where people will teach him moral and spiritual values, along with the three R's, and by the time he's 17, we will have produced a human being who will become a taxpayer" (Jouzaitis 1994, 1; cited in Asen 1996, 300). The implication is that poor (savage) children do not only fail to learn basic knowledge (the three R's), but they do not learn moral and spiritual values; indeed, they may not even be true human beings, since the end result of the process described by Jackson would be the production "a human being." Significantly, the human being so produced would also be a taxpayer, a self-sufficient, independent entity whose relationship to society is contributive rather than parasitic.

The suggestion that poor children be forcibly removed from their homes is also reminiscent of U.S. government policies, beginning in 1879, of cultural annihilation of the quintessential internal savage, the Native American, through the institution of off-reservation boarding schools. The mission of the schools was "to civilize and Christianize young Indian people and so draw them away from tribal identification and communal living" (Lomawaima 1993, 227), by training them "to adopt the work discipline of the Protestant ethic and to accept their proper place in society as a marginal class" (236). The assimilationist/cultural annihilationist agenda of the schools was total: students were forbidden to speak their native languages, and they were subjected to a bodily discipline that included constant surveillance and, in the case of girls, an "acute, piercing focus on . . . attire, comportment, posture, and hairstyles" (229). In this construction, "savages" come from backgrounds devoid of proper bodily and moral discipline, and must be trained to fit in whatever social-productive niche is deemed to be most appropriate for them.

New Zealand also attempted educational "assimilation" of Maori in the late-1800s with the Native Schools Act. Although not explicitly forced into the schools, which were usually run by a Pakeha (European/stranger) teacher in a Maori village, Maori had little other choice in an increasingly Pakeha world. And while education for the disenfranchised can harbor subversive possibilities, the schools perpetuated the loss of the Maori language on such a scale that by 1984, only 2 percent of Maori spoke Maori as a first language (McArdell 1992). Purportedly living in a "state of barbarism" (Kaai-Oldman 1988; cited in McArdell 1992, 84), Maori needed to be recast/remolded as Christians. Like Native American girls, Maori girls needed to learn domestic arts (Barrington and Beaglehole 1974; cited in McArdell 1992, 84).

The bodily discipline characteristic of schools for Native Americans and Maori, and, one would assume, of orphanages for the children of the poor, is paralleled by the bodily discipline inherent in welfare reform measures targeting single mothers. Proposals for sanctions against women who conceive while on the welfare rolls exemplify a bodily discipline that attempts to tame, or harness, a "savage," hedonistic sexuality.¹³

The controversial Personal Responsibility Act was transformed into the somewhat less draconian, but in no way benign, Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which President Clinton signed into law in August, 1996. While not expelled from the welfare rolls after two years, recipients are required to get a job after two years, and lifetime benefits are limited to five years. A key feature of the Act is the devolution of the formerly federal AFDC to the state level, opening the door to unregulated experimentation. In addition, non-citizens ("aliens") are no longer eligible for assistance.

When signing the bill, President Clinton stated that, "It is a good thing and it will help dramatically to reduce welfare, increase independence, and reinforce parental responsibility" (CNN, August 22, 1996). Along with the contributing efforts of business, the new law would "make sure every American¹⁴ can be a part of the whole" (President Clinton, Sixth Annual Business Enterprise Awards Luncheon, 1997; emphasis added). This clearly reveals an assimilationist agenda, in which the poor are "lifted" out of poverty into mainstream self-sufficiency. If, however, the required jobs are not produced--and Clinton claimed that approximately one million new jobs would have to be generated over four years--the law will function to annihilate rather than assimilate.

A common distinction made in welfare reform debates in New Zealand and the United States is that between "contributor" and "dependent." In the former New Zealand Social Welfare Minister's transformative move from "dependency into contribution," the dependency of those who rely on the state for financial support is total; they are parasitic on the system, providing nothing in return. (Unpaid) childcare, for instance, is not counted as a contribution. This assumption holds in the United States as well, where welfare programs themselves are divided into "contributory" (male) versus "noncontributory" (female) programs, reflecting the "input," or lack thereof, of recipients, and thus their status as "deserving" or "undeserving." Despite its inaccuracies (Fraser and Gordon 1992), the distinction between so-called contributory and noncontributory programs points to the gendered subtext of social citizenship (Brodie 1996), which requires attachment to the labor market for recognition.

A second subtext to the independence/dependence, contributory/parasitic binary is that of individualism. As Hyman (1994, 162) indicates, the current emphasis on "self-reliance" in New Zealand serves to undercut its communitarian ethos. The concept of the individual invoked here is that of the possessive individual of liberal theory, a concept that is both culturally specific and specifically masculinist (Drover and Kerans 1993, 7). In their neediness and dependence, the poor problematize this concept (Smith 1990); accordingly, they must be transformed/civilized into proper (male) "individuals" in order to become fully human/post savage. Welfare robs them of this transformative potential.¹⁵

The Moral Argument: Taming the "Savage"

The moral approach to welfare reform points to a construction of the subjectivity of poor women as expressing various dimensions of "savagery"; specifically, an inability to defer gratification, and a lack of bodily discipline. This subjectivity may be "natural," or it may be the result of lenient welfare programs. In either case, the response in New Zealand and the United States is "tough love" (Senator Domenici, House Proceedings of the Record of July 30, 1996).

Thus, in defending the 1991 benefit cuts in New Zealand, the then Minister of Social Welfare claimed that the job market was not the only factor involved in poverty. He referred to research¹⁶ demonstrating that those on the Domestic Purposes Benefit for at least two years suffer deficiencies in job skills, including educational qualifications, confidence, motivation, and information (New Zealand Executive Government Speech Archive, 1996). In this formulation, the problem resides in individual beneficiaries, who must be given the tools and support to improve themselves. Interview requirements, work tests, and increasing gaps between benefit levels and income from paid employment are the "tools" and "support" offered by the New Zealand Department of Social Welfare.

The U.S. Act also offers "support," in the form of lifetime limits for the receipt of welfare, and the elimination of the concept of "entitlement" (what Senator Domenici alluded to as a change in "the culture of welfare"; House Proceedings of the Record of July 30, 1996). In this light, Senator Ashcroft referred to the new Act as providing "a transition, that moves people from poverty into opportunity, that moves people from indolence into industry, that moves people from welfare to work." Others were more clear about the nature of this "tough love" act: Senator Gorton stated that, "without the threat of extra suffering, people would have no reason to change" (Ibid.).

The "tough love" approach to healing the human suffering inflicted by "lenient" and "entrapping" welfare programs is focused on increasing bodily and moral discipline. The first building block of "freedom" in this view is the work ethic; thus the gap between benefits and remuneration from work, thus the work tests, thus lifetime limits for welfare. More cynical observers have noted the economic benefits for the wealthy of such strategies. For example, increasing the difference between the benefit and paid work--a common policy throughout the history of public relief and one seen as a "positive" work "incentive" leading to increased "independence"--may be read as an employment strategy, insofar as it serves to provide cheap labor. It is in this sense that colonization as economic exploitation has been inextricably tied to agendas of "uplift," and has commonly entailed the inculcation of discipline associated with productive labor: newly trained, the post-savage could then be more effectively exploited in the labor market.

The second disciplinary focus of "tough love" welfare reform is sexuality. Although Green (1996) advocated the complete withdrawal of benefits for never-married mothers in New Zealand, control of women's sexuality is not an explicit cornerstone of current New Zealand welfare reform. This is not the case in the United States, where the unbridled sexuality of usually racialized welfare mothers is constructed as a major contributor to welfare dependency.

The driving assumption of "tough love" approaches to reform is that welfare beneficiaries have been denied their own humanity and need to have it returned to them. Again, quoting Representative Funderburk:

[W]hat is more cruel, what is more mean, than to condemn a child to life on the liberal welfare dole. That is the cruelest punishment imaginable. We cannot allow another generation of American children to fall victim to the compassion of the American left. We must be strong, we must be bold, and we must act now. Our children deserve no less. (House Proceedings of the Record of March 24, 1995)

Funderburk equated welfare benefits with "the loss of your freedom," claiming that the then Personal Responsibility Act "begins and ends with individual liberty." Other members of Congress echoed this sentiment. The parallels with Smith's (1990) analysis of need versus freedom in the non-poor/poor binary are striking.

As I indicated in my summary of Fraser and Gordon's (1994) genealogy of dependency, dependency is used quite narrowly in current welfare reform debate, such that other forms of dependency (for example, that on market relations [Drover and Kerans 1993, 20]) are obfuscated. Plant (1993, 48) comments in this regard that, "[o]nce we see society as a scheme of social cooperation rather than as a set of atomistic independent individuals, then issues about the fairness and degree of equality between individuals are able to be put back on the agenda in a way which is blocked by emphasizing [narrow definitions of] independence to the detriment of other ideas." Thus, an alternative reading of the neo-liberal connection between moral harm and welfare could point to its negative effect on the community as a whole, including the wealthy. In reconstituting New Zealand citizens as "customers" and divesting the state of social responsibility, for instance, neo-liberal reform has relieved the wealthy "of the burden of social responsibility and ethical human behaviour" (Kelsey 1995, 294). Similarly, in the United States, "[n]eo-liberalism is the champion of . . . individualism in which the wealthy and the business world do not need to feel public responsibility towards the poor and excluded" (de Goede 1996, 351). Punitive welfare reform may thus contribute to the erosion of good-will and community sensibility on the part of all citizens. Moreover, with regard to the poor themselves, the flip-side of the argument that welfare harms the human spirit is the claim that it is precisely the meager, punitive and stigmatized nature of assistance that "over time come[s] to produce some of the demoralizing effects attributed to the fact of provision itself" (Piven and Cloward 1987, 34).

Contemporary neo-liberal views of poverty in New Zealand and the United States are not, of course, historically unique. They represent, rather, the reassertion of old ideologies and political-economic programs. Increasing the gap between benefit levels and levels of remuneration from paid work is, as already indicated, common throughout the history of relief. Deliberate intensification of punitive and humiliating conditions for inmates of poor houses in nineteenth century Britain were also considered necessary in the battle against "improvidence and imposture," serving to prompt "the motives to industry . . . frugality . . . prudence . . . filial duties . . . [and] independent exertions of the labourers during their years of ability and activity" (Thompson 1963, 296). In seventeenth and eighteenth century England, "the laziness of the Poor [and] the luxury of the Poor" (Marshall 1926, 27) were considered a major cause of poverty, and the writings of John Locke, among others, expressed what we today refer to as neo-liberal ideology. Most clearly in terms of gender, current "tough love" approaches resonate with the "moral fitness" regulations constraining women's receipt of public assistance throughout post-contact U.S. history (Abramovitz 1988). The new discourses are the old discourses.

Conclusions

Physical reformation/annihilation of poor "savages" can take place when welfare recipients lose all state support and end up homeless and hungry (and, in extreme cases, dead). Cultural reformation/annihilation can take place when dominant/colonial institutions condemn local practices or modes of social organization and forcibly impose different ones. Finally, spiritual or personal reformation/annihilation can take place in the process of convincing excluded people that they want to be in the center.

While all three forms of reformation/annihilation are inextricably tied, the issue of physical survival is perhaps the most salient for poor women in the current context of welfare reform. Greenstein, Kogan and Nichols, of the Urban Institute, argue that "a highly disproportionate share of the [U.S.] budget cuts made over the last two years has fallen on programs for low-income families and individuals" (1996, 1).¹⁷ Physical annihilation is also a clear possibility in Aotearoa/New Zealand, where the use of food banks has increased exponentially, and where, by all measures, there has been an increase in levels of poverty in the last decade (Kelsey 1995; Waldegrave and Coventry 1987). Nevertheless, the (savage) poor woman, like the indigenous "savage," continues to be constructed by the state as in need of reformation.

The characteristics and composition of the poor, however, are fluid. Economic changes add to the numbers of the poor, thus shifting the boundaries between the non-poor and the poor, the ordered and the disordered, the civilized and the savage. In this sense, the struggle is not only to reform the poor to fit civil(ized) society, but also to guard against our own slippage into savagery. The savage Other that was first identified as being beyond, on the one hand, the geographical boundaries of society (physically foreign), and, on the other, the symbolic boundaries of society (as in indigenous populations), is now potentially within each of us (Pandian 1985).

In constituting undeserving poor mothers as outside the boundaries of society, the discourse of poverty serves to define those boundaries and thus to constitute liberal society itself. Garfinkel's (1956) analysis of status degradation ceremonies provides useful insight into this stigmatization of the savage poor, which can take a number of forms, ranging from the statements of government officials and other authoritative (clerical, academic, professional) figures, to the social marking provided by the special distinction of Food Stamps in the United States or the Community Services Card in New Zealand. Specifically, such degradation is directed not only at the object of degradation (poor women), but, perhaps more important, at the other participants in the degradation, be they perpetrators (those who "serve" the poor) or witnesses (the population at large). Furthermore, degradation ceremonies always construct the character of the denounced individual in opposition to an ideal character (e.g., needy vs. autonomous) and ritually remove them from the legitimate order. The savage poor/poor solo mothers, then, serve a political function: they serve to define and support, symbolically and materially, the rest of us, the normals (Foucault 1977; Goffman 1963; Pratt 1987; cf Gans 1972), the normative (Fraser 1989). The threat of the savage poor is, at least in part, the threat of becoming one of them.

The goal of current welfare reform in Aotearoa/New Zealand and the United States is to reconstitute the poor--not to eradicate poverty as a social/economic phenomenon, but to alter what are constructed as negative personality characteristics. Thus the focus of welfare reform is on the reformation of individuals rather than structures. It is only by creating counter-discourses that challenge socio-economic systems that perpetuate (and even depend on) poverty that we can hope to avoid the annihilative othering inherent in neo-liberal welfare reform.

I would like to thank the following for their helpful comments on previous drafts of this article: Rita Gallin, Michael Goldsmith, Priya Kurian, Steve Goldwitz, Robyn Longhurst, Beryl Fletcher, members of the 1997 University of Waikato Gender and Development Reading Group, members of my 1996 class on Gender, State, and Public Policy, two anonymous reviewers for the NWSA Journal, and Patricia Beaver, Associate Editor for the NWSA Journal.

Catherine Kingfisher is a cultural anthropologist lecturing in Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand. She is the author of Women in the American Welfare Trap, and is currently editing a book titled "Western Welfare in Decline: Women's Poverty in the Age of Globalization." Correspondence should be sent to Kingfisher at Department of Women's and Gender Studies, University of Waikato, Private Bag 3105, Hamilton, New Zealand; Cati@waikato.ac.nz

Notes

1. Aotearoa is the Maori term for New Zealand. Since the New Zealand state is neither substantively nor nominally Maori, I reserve the use of the referent Aotearoa to appropriate contexts.

2. Early anthropological models, such as that of Lewis Henry Morgan (1877), divided cultural evolution into stages of savagery, barbarism, and civilization.

3. The United States and New Zealand both have roots in British culture and history, including the ideologies underlying the Elizabethan Poor Laws which stressed hard work, diligence, and economy, and stigmatized the poor as lazy, immoral, and undisciplined. How they chose such different paths, developing, in the case of New Zealand, a universal welfare state and, in the case of United States, a residual welfare structure, would make for fascinating research, which is, unfortunately, beyond the scope of this article.

4. This is not to say that there are no divergences, or that the same phenomena do not take on different nuances of meaning in different cultural, economic, and political contexts. The globalization of particular phenomena, in other words, entails neither homogenous interpretation nor homogenous outcomes.

5. Western approaches to "savages" were/are not uniform. The meaning of the term savage, like that of any concept, is subject to historical and cultural variation. Nevertheless, several general features of western constructs of "savages" are discernible, including references to pagan immorality, irrationality, inability to defer gratification, and a particular relationship with "nature" as opposed to "culture" (Berkhoffer 1978; Pandian 1985; Sibley 1995; Todorov 1987).

6. See de Goede (1996) for an analysis of the discursive strategies by means of which the poor are currently constituted as an out-group in the United States.

7. In the mid-nineteenth century, one Gustav Klemm constructed a set of evolutionary stages of cultural development moving from savagery to tameness to freedom (Winick 1975, 47).

8. There is, for instance, a clear connection between economic concerns and "family responsibilities." In the United States, this has been characterized by, among other things, proposals to negatively sanction out-of-wedlock births and positively sanction marriage. In New Zealand, Roger Kerr of the New Zealand Business Roundtable gave the following advice to graduates of Dunedin girl's high school: "Those who do the following three simple things are unlikely to stay long in poverty: complete high school, get married and stay married, stay employed at a job, any job, even at first at the minimum wage" (cited in Kelsey 1993, 345).

9. Note the play on evolutionary and developmental imagery.

10. Green (1996, 1) perhaps said it the best, when he stated that the New Zealand cradle-to-grave approach to welfare faltered in part because "it was producing harmful effects on the economy, including a weakening of the incentive to increase earnings because of higher taxes; higher unemployment because of the increased cost of social insurance for employers; and increased government debt due to irresponsible borrowing to meet welfare expenditure."

11. I borrow from Peace (1998, 7), who coined the phrase "poor bodies" "to keep the corporeality of 'the poor' clearly in mind."

12. What was interesting about this event was that the New Zealand government claimed it needed New Zealanders' help in deciding where to draw the line between the public and the private. Accordingly, the proposed Code was accompanied by a six-page questionnaire soliciting New Zealanders' opinion on the issue of individual responsibility. This move on the part of the government encapsulates the tension between New Zealand's collectivist history and its more recent experiments with neo-liberalism.

13. Paradoxically, such reproductive abandon is often constructed as calculated.

14. As indicated in the Act's exclusion of non-citizens, who counts as "American" is rather narrowly defined.

15. It is perhaps in this light that we can best understand the New Zealand Department of Social Welfare's move to refer to beneficiaries as "customers," and to caseworkers as "customer service officers." The shift, which positions beneficiaries as consumers, implies a relationship of choice on the part of the "customer," who can shop elsewhere if she so chooses.

16. The Minister of Social Welfare did not provide specific references for the research to which he referred.

17. For instance, under the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act 1996, states may withdraw their contributions to income support. In one case, a plan proposed by Governor George Pataki of New York would result in some families facing reductions of up to 45 percent of their benefit. In addition, FY1997 federal appropriations for employment and training programs are 22 percent less than FY1995 appropriations, while those for low-income housing and housing-related programs are 25 percent less than the FY1995 level (Greenstein, Kogan, and Nichols 1996).

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