Single-mother families are in a unique position. General assistance (GA) – the cash aid programs for single adults and childless couples – is much more miserly than TANF (formerly AFDC): the benefits are much lower, the work requirements more onerous, the time limits shorter, and in some states, it has been abolished. General assistance recipients are sometimes pitied, more often stigmatized, but are of low visibility, more or less out of sight. Single-mother families, however, are highly visible – the most visible of all welfare recipients. They are the most controversial and the most stigmatized. The United States is unique among the industrialized countries in how it treats this group of the poor. The reason for this hated position is the explosive combination of racial discrimination and children.

The origins of Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) started in the latter nineteenth century. In the Colonial period, poor mothers were more likely to receive aid than poor men – except poor mothers who were African American or Indian. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, Catholics, the Irish, Jews, and immigrants from southern Europe were objects of prejudice and discrimination. They suffered all the ills of poverty and neglect in the large urban slums. There was little or no public support for these groups, however needy. Most African Americans were still in the rural South. Then, by the mid-twentieth century, after the great migrations to the North, prejudice was directed primarily at African Americans.