ABSTRACT
In Baltimore, Maryland, USA, a cadre of low-income black and white
women who depended on government financial support for their families
formed a welfare rights coalition. The coalition included the city’s first welfare
rights group, Mother Rescuers from Poverty, which informed ‘welfare
recipients of their rights to welfare and to work for a minimum standard of
living with dignity’.1 Mother Rescuers and other local welfare rights groups
laboured to fulfil the National Welfare Rights Organization’s imperative to
fight for jobs, better welfare services, and dignity. Founded in 1966 in the United States, this national organization, clearly echoing black rights and
freedom struggles of the day, implored low-income women to: ‘Know your
rights, demand your rights, protect your rights, link up with Welfare
In 1969, the Baltimore coalition attended a meeting at the city’s welfare
headquarters. Protesting mothers, who had children in tow, wanted the
welfare agency to act on a series of demands aimed at improving their
quality of life. They not only sought to meet immediate needs such as an adequate income, food, clothing, and shelter, but also to participate in and thereby
change what they perceived as a ‘paternalistic’ and ‘dictatorial’ bureaucracy
that structured their daily lives and attacked their human dignity.3
