In Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty, Annelise Orleck tells the stories of the women involved in the Las Vegas Welfare Rights organization, Operation Life, as the book “traces their early years in cotton country and their migration to Las Vegas as part of the great exodus that took millions from the South in the 1950s and 1960s” (pg. 5). Orleck relies primarily upon interviews with the women and oral histories, but she supplements with public documents, internal memoranda, newspaper reports, and related historiography of welfare programs for background.
Like Gail Bederman’s linkage of race and gender, Orleck demonstrates how African American women suffered the brunt of both sexist and racist attacks designed by white patriarchy to deny them their rights to public assistance. Orleck writes that African American women placed more emphasis on being a good mother than on marriage and, due to a lack of birth control, they often had large families. When they sought birth control, white doctors or pharmacists attempted to block them unless a “husband” would sign off (pg. 73-77). Meanwhile, works like LBJ advisor Patrick Moynihan’s The Negro Family portrayed African American women as “too aggressive and independent…profoundly crippling and emasculating [to] black men.” Further, popular books like Frazier’s Negro Family in the United States and Dollard’s Caste and Class in a Southern Town “strongly reinforced stereotypes of black women’s voracious sexuality, suggesting that the bleakness of black women’s lives led them to seek quick gratification through casual sexual liaisons” (pg. 85). These publications laid the groundwork for the later stereotype of the welfare queen.
The later National Welfare Rights Organization helped foster consciousness raising (pg. 100). In 1969, women on welfare used access to credit as a form of access to the middle class. Orleck writes, “The group requested only fifty dollars in credit, and each cardholder could increase her debt limit only by paying off that initial sum. By the end of 1969, NWRO members had credit at E.J. Korvette’s, Gimbels, Abraham and Strauss, and Marshall Field” (pg. 123). Following Nevada’s decision to cancel all benefits, Judge Roger Foley “ordered the state to restore welfare benefits to all families who had not yet had a fair hearing. If, after a hearing, the welfare department cut any family’s benefits, it would have to provide a clear, written explanation of the reasons” (pg. 134). The state disregarded this directive, so women on welfare and their allies marched through the Las Vegas Strip and into Caesar’s Palace. This worked so effectively that, when women wanted to protest Nevada’s abysmal school lunch program, they “walked in orderly lines into the Palm Room restaurant at the Stardust” with their children and ordered large meals (pg. 186). The publicity worked so effectively that, “just one month after the eat-ins, Governor O’Callaghan recommended to the legislature that it give Clark County an emergency appropriation of $160,000 to reopen its relief office” (pg. 190). Nevada finally adopted the federal food stamp program in April 1973 (pg. 203).
Despite these successes and those of Operation Life, which Congress itself praised (pg. 220), the tide of public opinion turned against welfare in the United States. Reagan dissolved many of the programs that women used to benefit their communities, including the Community Services Administration, Legal Services, VISTA, and Basic Educational Opportunity Grants (pg. 268). Congress later repealed CETA, which removed job training from welfare programs (pg. 274). Orleck concludes with a discussion of modern welfare programs that further demonize recipients. She writes that the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996 froze federal aid “at 1996 levels, and in 2003, the House voted to continue the freeze through 2008” (pg. 304). President Bush proposed the Personal Responsibility and Individual Development for Everyone program in 2003, which doubled “the number of hours recipients are required to work, from twenty to forty,” further codifying the image of the welfare queen in the new millennium (pg. 305). ( )