WASHINGTON — This column concerns women on welfare. So let’s all take a second to put on our armor.
We’ll be hearing from women who didn’t marry before giving birth. Women whose income is largely supplied by taxpayers. Women whom we feel we know — and whom we wish we’d never heard of.
So let’s slip on our assumptions and close our hearts — if only a little — before wading into their stories.
Ready?
I thought I was on Wednesday when I met nine women from Stand With Sisters for Economic Dignity who were practicing a skit about their real-life experiences with welfare and the Work Experience Program (workfare).
The women were preparing to perform the skit the next day in a Senate hearing room for an audience of 200, including actors Danny Glover and Tim Robbins and Sens. Paul Wellstone, D-Minn., and Patty Murray, D-Wash., whose Safe and Healthy Families Act would offer educational opportunities and additional domestic violence protection to welfare recipients.
Little glamour was evident at Georgetown’s Center for Community Change. Instead, there were folding chairs, macaroni and cheese and Richmond, Va., activist Charlene Sinclair, quietly reminding the women that their skit "isn’t just about women on welfare."
"It’s about what women really go through trying to raise kids in economically depressed situations," Sinclair said.
Dainty Maribel Pena — all 90 pounds of her — sighed.
"I just hope we can get minimum-wage jobs out of this," said the mother of two, referring to her hope that real jobs will replace workfare under the welfare reform laws up for reauthorization.
"Just minimum wage?" someone asked.
"Well, what I’d like is to go back to school to become the social worker I’m supposed to be," Pena responded. "I’d like for our kids not to have to grow up in neighborhoods that are killing them."
The women — all mothers ranging in age from about 20 to their mid-40s — met in July to devise "a dramatic way to present their stories," Sinclair said.
Listening in were artists Gwendolen Hardwick and Tiye Giraud, who condensed the women’s stories into the still-evolving, hip-hop-flavored blend of words and music that the group presented to a standing ovation Thursday.
They sang of domestic abuse, evictions, part-time jobs taken on the sly to supplement welfare.
Shenia Rudolph recalled being a 10-year-old thrilled that her long-absent father wanted to be part of her life — and being raped by him the first night. Rosa Rodriguez described failing to qualify for unemployment insurance after losing her job.
She took a workfare position cleaning highways. Not once did she get a lunch break or a sick day.
As for legislation that pushes marriage as a cure for the welfare state, the women were curious:
How would marrying men who had abandoned them, stolen from them and beaten them be helpful? "I was married," said Rodriguez. "He raped me in front of my 9-year-old daughter."
The women were so frank, it was hard to imagine that during their first meetings, several were too embarrassed to speak. It took a while to realize that "the other women wouldn’t ridicule me," Taina Gonzalez explained.
"Because if you say you’re on welfare, you’re looked at as if you’re scum."
It’s easy, of course, to discount them. With a thousand worthy causes competing for our attention, we find it hard to get exercised over the rights of women who often made terrible choices. It’s harder still to understand the bad environments and worse luck that brought many of them to public assistance.
Hard, that is, until you meet them. Seeing them, hearing them describe each tentative step toward independence, you realize:
You know nothing about them.
How could we know that turning to welfare to help raise her daughter, 2, after her fiance abandoned them made Gonzalez feel like vermin?
"Everyone looks at a roach and says, ‘That’s disgusting,’ " Gonzalez said. When you’re on welfare, "people look at you like they want to step on you. If you were to say, ‘I’m a good mother … a community organizer, hardworking’ — they wouldn’t believe you."
So why go on welfare?
"If I can’t give my child something to eat and a place to stay, what will happen to her? I’d have to turn tricks, to sell drugs, do illegal things to eat."
I don’t know these women, but I know this: Some welfare mothers are users and manipulators. Others are like Gonzalez — people I might like, even admire, if I knew them.
Welfare may be demeaning, Gonzalez says, but it’s better "than my daughter ending up dead. Or a man coming into my life to ‘help’ who does whatever he wants to her. I’ll deal with a little degradation and say, ‘God, you know I’m better than this.’
"And hear God say to me, ‘I’ve got your back.’ "
Donna Britt can be reached at The Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071-9200.
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