The image of the Welfare Queen has played a prominent role in the public discourse of welfare which in turn shapes public opinion. This demonstrates the politics of disgust, the Welfare Queen was used to categorize all welfare recipients as “lazy.” Our past president Ronald Reagan described women having countless children to collect many checks and that they would trade food stamps for cigarettes and alcohol. The gendered racism that recipients of welfare have to face were overall attributed to their own personal failures rather than the structural flaws of the market. It is no coincidence that 90% of welfare recipients are single mothers. The overall study demonstrates that there is an intersection of race, gender, class on public opinion on welfare.

The data was taken from two public opinion surveys, the “Poverty in America” survey conducted by National Public Radio, Kaiser Family Foundation and the Kennedy School of Government, and the “Race and Politics” survey conducted by the Survey Research Center at UC Berkeley.  Logistic regression models were used to analyze the data, as well as Beta to determine the strength of relationship in the variables from the Poverty in America survey. In the National Race and Politics Survey they asked “experimental questions in which a hypothetical welfare mother with a 10 year old child is described to half of the respondents as a black woman, and to the other half of the respondents as a white woman. Respondents are then asked to predict how likely it is that this racially defined hypothetical welfare mother will “try hard to find a job in next year” and how likely it is that she will “have another child to get a bigger welfare check.”  The findings revealed that 54% believed that welfare recipients do not try very hard to find work and 61% thought mothers had children for financial gain. The respondents opinions are influenced by race, gender, and class. Overall, the public opinion of the Welfare Queen shapes their views on welfare.

Foster, C. H. (2008). THE WELFARE QUEEN: RACE, GENDER, CLASS, AND PUBLIC OPINION. Race, Gender & Class, 15(3), 162-179. Retrieved from http://0-search.proquest.com.books.redlands.edu/docview/218869573?accountid=14729