Complicating Gender: Using an Intersectional Analysis to Examine Women's Participation in the Welfare Rights Movement

Background/Purpose: The Welfare Rights Movement was an important social movement where women from varying backgrounds came together to work for change. This study of the Welfare Rights Movement uses the framework of Intersectionality to examine ways that race, class, and gender shaped women's social movement participation during 1964-1972. By using an intersectional analysis of race, class, and gender we gain new insight into how cross-coalition social movement work occurred. This study examined the question of how mobilization occurred for insiders, women directly affected by the social problem, and outsiders, women engaged in supportive roles. An Intersectional analysis examines race, class, and gender as converging and interlocking categories. This approach was used in order to examine important cross-race, cross-class mobilization.

Methods: This qualitative case study uses historiography to examine women's social movement participation. Specific methods include oral history and archival methods. Oral histories were collected from twelve women who participated in the Welfare Rights Movement in Southeastern Michigan, and document analysis was conducted on collections from five separate archives. These collections included the George Wiley Collection of the Wisconsin State Historical Society at The University of Wisconsin, the Labor History Archives of the W.P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University, the Labadie Collection at The University of Michigan, the Radical History Archives at Michigan State University, and the private collection of the Oakland County Friends of Welfare Rights in Farmington, Michigan. Oral history transcripts were analyzed using a qualitative data analysis program, and documents were assessed using conceptually clustered matrices (Miles & Huberman, 1994). The data from both oral histories and documents were analyzed using an intersectional framework. This analysis emphasizes the ways that race, class, and gender are interlocking categories rather than separate dichotomous either/or categories (Andersen & Collins, 2001). Race, class, and gender are analyzed as converging factors, shaping and influencing each other.

Results: Findings indicate that while poverty-class status was a strong cohesive factor for the welfare recipients involved in the movement, both African American and white, shared gender also became more important as their participation increased. Race shaped class in important ways as white middle-class participants focused on shared gender, particularly motherhood, as key features of their involvement in the movement. African American supporters emphasized a strong racialized component to participation, without acknowledging their class based privilege. In general, white middle-class women tended to remain unaware of their own racial privilege, over-emphasizing connections based on gender alone.

Conclusions/Implications: By analyzing race, class, and gender as simultaneously converging categories, I was able to examine the complexity of the social movement participation of women who were impacted directly by the problem, and those who were peripheral members of the movement. This question of insider/outsider mobilization and cross-coalition building is an important consideration in social movements. By developing conceptual frameworks that allow for the assessment of categories such as race, class, gender, and even sexual orientation as interlocking rather than dichotomous, we gain insight into both the spoken and the unspoken ways that these categories operate in social movement work.