21. Anna Marie Smith, Government
Anne Marie Smith
Welfare Reform and Sexual Regulation (Cambridge University Press, 2007). Smith explores the scope and structure of the child support enforcement, family cap, marriage promotion, and abstinence education measures that are embedded in contemporary United States welfare policy. She presents original legal research and draws from historical sources, social theory, and normative frameworks to argue that these measures violate the rights of poor mothers. Smith shows that welfare policy has consistently constructed the sexual conduct of the racialized poor mother as one of its primary disciplinary targets. The book concludes with a detailed critique of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s support for welfare reform law and an outline of a progressive feminist approach to poverty policy. Inspired by the political and philosophical interventions of feminist women of color and Foucauldian social theory, the author provides a comprehensive, up-to-date treatment of welfare law at the federal and state levels in the United States.