A special report: A dozen profiles plus related news stories.

In just three years, the number of students on welfare—most of them mothers—has dropped to less than 10,000, down from 28,000. Most believe Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s Workfare program is the cause.
 

The dozen women profiled here are survivors of antagonistic or inept parents, failed relationships, domestic violence, abandonment, poverty and the insults both their families and political leaders feel free to hurl at them. They represent the nearly 700 Hunter College students are on welfare, 90 percent of whom are mothers.

They are also resistance fighters, insisting on staying in college despite intense political, bureaucratic, financial and cultural pressure to abandon their studies for a job--any job. To do so, they must make terrible choices, such as leaving an older daughter in charge of a younger sibling even though it's against the law to leave children a

They are role models as well. Most are carrying the same load as many other Hunter students --work and school--even as they are caring for their children and coping with the welfare bureaucracy.

Lastly, they are the living breathing individuals--nine welfare mothers, two raised by mothers on welfare and one who needed assistance after she completed a rehabilitation program. Their lives were and are shaped by issues most of us just read about: Workfare, domestic violence, homelessness, inadequate childcare, the reduced power of labor unions and the habit in our nation to ostracize the poor, especially women who are mothers but not wives.

The student journalists who reported and wrote these stories will be forever touched by their experiences. Each arrived at the assignment with a host of preconceptions about welfare mothers and poverty. Many walked away with new appreciation of their own good fortune and their own narrow escapes.

Several student reporters realized they and their subjects had experienced remarkably similar events. However, understanding parents or loving partners had allowed them to escape the fate of becoming a welfare mother. One student journalist confided that she, like many of the mothers interviewed, was told to leave home after confessing to her mother that she was pregnant.

``I was on my way out the door and my mother stopped me and said, `Hey. We are not going to handle things this way.''

They didn't. She stayed. Three generations are much the better for it.

In a way, the current welfare law with its time limits, work requirements even for mothers nursing infants and other punitive features codifies this family drama. It treats those needing public support for their children as if they are sinners not entitled to be part of our national household. After getting to know their subjects and researching related news stories, many of the students came away convinced that now is the time for our policy makers to change course and to begin developing welfare policies that say: Hey, we are not going to handle things this way anymore.

Prof. Rita Henley Jensen, May 1999

A special thanks to Beatrice Lopez and Dilonna C. Lewis, Welfare Rights Initiative staff members for their uncomplaining assistance in seeing this project through to the end.