PREFACE
The third edition of Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present is being published shortly after Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th President of the United States. It is also 20 years after the enactment of “welfare reform” and almost 75 years after the U.S. Congress first provided Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, and Public Assistance benefits to bolster the economic security of the average household. All three programs are detailed in this book along with their historical predecessors, from the perspective of their impact on women – both African American and white women. All three programs were enacted as part of the landmark 1935 Social Security Act, which gave birth to the modern welfare state in the United States, some 50 years after most Western European nations had stepped forward to ensure at least a modicum of economic security to the individuals and families within their borders. Given that women are the majority of welfare state recipients and workers and given that the welfare state has helped subsidize women’s care work in the home, it behooves us to understand how the U.S. welfare state has regulated the lives of women since the publication of the second edition of this book and ponder what might be coming next.
To set the stage, this Preface places the development of the modern welfare state in the wider context of the forces that contributed to its rise, expansion, and contraction. From the colonial poor laws, to the social welfare programs enacted during the Progressive Era by the states, to the modern welfare state born with the 1935 Social Security Act, each expansion of social welfare provisions was resisted and fought by those who blamed poverty on the choice of individuals not to work or to marry and/ or who opposed an active role for the government in wider society.
Although Regulating the Lives of Women takes us back to colonial America, this Preface focuses on the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century. It discusses trends in the wider context that I did not understand as clearly when I first assembled this historical account of the relationship between women and the welfare
state or that developed since 1996. The discussions of the specific welfare state trends found in the 1988 and 1996 editions of the book remain accurate. However, at the time, I did not fully appreciate that the emergence of the welfare state in 1935 and subsequent contraction in the mid-1970s represented responses to two major economic crises that arose during the twentieth century. Nor was it as clear to me that the current attack on the welfare state, covered in the later chapters of the earlier editions, were the manifestation of what is now referred to as Neoliberalism that, in the United States, dates back to the mid-1970s. The book’s analysis of the relationship of women and the welfare state remains mostly unchanged but needs to be updated to reflect post-1996 changes related to gender, race, and class.
Economic crises and the U.S. welfare state
From 1935 to today, the growth of the U.S. welfare state was followed by attacks from those opposed to so-called big government. The public policies that both supported the expansion of the welfare state and its subsequent contraction since the mid-1970s were not accidental or random. Rather, as noted above, they represented responses to the two major economic crises faced by the United States during the twentieth century.1
The 1935 Social Security Act heralded the birth of the modern welfare state in the United States. The Act, which legalized federal responsibility for social welfare programs, emerged in response to the first economic crisis of the twentieth century. The collapse of the economy, marked by the 1929 stock market crash, led the nation’s business and political elite to recognize the limits of the then-prevailing laissez-faire economic doctrine. For the first time, they called upon the federal government to do more to maximize both economic profits and political stability. At the same time, no longer trusting the “unregulated” market to protect their economic security, the elderly, the jobless, housewives, and African Americans among others took to the streets. They too demanded that the federal government step up to the plate.2 Seeking to revive the economy and restore social order, the New Deal ushered in a major restructuring of economic and political institutions designed to redistribute income downwards from the haves to the have-nots and expand the role of the state, including the welfare state. The New Deal paradigm, which included a progressive tax code and government spending based on Keynesian economic theory, shifted social welfare responsibility from the states to the federal government, created an entitlement to social benefits, banned privatized social welfare provision, and supported social movements, especially the trade unions.3
From 1935–1975, however reluctantly, the national elite saw the expansion of the welfare state as a solution to their prevailing social, economic, and political problems. Welfare state programs supplied business and industry with consumers armed with increased purchasing power as well as a healthy, educated, and properly socialized workforce. The nation’s leaders also needed a way to mediate the ongoing post-war pressures from the increasingly large and militant trade union, civil rights, and women’s liberation movements, each pressing for more economic security
and greater political rights. The welfare state helped mediate this social unrest by addressing the basic needs of many households. Its social insurance and public assistance programs protected millions of people against the common risks of loss of income due to old age, illness, disability, joblessness, and absence of parental support. Its minimum level of income and employment placed a floor – however low – under poverty. The program also relieved adults, especially women of the burden of providing full support for their children as well as aging, blind, or disabled family members, and otherwise helped many people to survive when the market economy let them down. It has been said that the New Deal “saved capitalism from itself.”4
During the 1960s, the Great Society yielded a wide range of health, education, employment, social service, and other programs that dealt with illness, divorce, juvenile delinquency, substandard housing, as well as psychological distress, child abuse, male violence, and sexual harassment. Aided by years of relative peace, prosperity (for many, but not all, households), and the victories of the social movements, the economy grew, the standard of living improved for the average household (if not equally), productivity and wages rose in tandem, poverty fell, the gap between the rich and the poor narrowed, and the balance of power shifted somewhat from the haves to the have-nots.
Everything changed in the mid-1970s. Faced with the second economic crisis of the twentieth century, business and industry turned against the welfare state they once supported, albeit begrudgingly. Globalization and the exportation of production abroad reduced business and industry’s need for and stake in both the domestic workforce and U.S. consumers and thus their need for social programs to ensure productive workers and more effective consumers.5 With profits falling, they also concluded that social welfare spending interfered with private investments and profitable economic growth. Furthermore, the cost to business and the state of maintaining the social peace through concessions, reforms, and social benefits had become more than they were willing to pay. Aided and abetted by conservative politicians, they concluded that the victories of the social movements and the expanded welfare state were part of the problem rather than part of the solution. In the 1930s, the nation’s leaders called on the government to bail them out of the economic crisis. In contrast, in the mid-1970s, the elite blamed their economic woes on “big government” (especially the welfare state), the gains of the social movements, and so-called personal irresponsibility. They urged Congress to dismantle the welfare state. They called for undoing the New Deal by reversing 60 years of investment in social welfare. Their claims that the welfare state only aided the “undeserving” poor and/or rewarded irresponsible behavior obscured their real fear that welfare state programs provide people with the wherewithal to challenge the class, race, and gendered status quo and otherwise alter the terms of the political struggle in favor of those with less.
Withdrawing their always-halting support for the welfare state, the nation’s leaders instigated a U-turn in public policy once called Reaganomics or supply-side economics and now known as Neoliberalism.6 Seeking to undo the New Deal
and the Great Society, the Neoliberal U-turn called for restoring profitability by redistributing income upwards from the have-nots to the haves and downsizing the welfare state. The main tactics included tax cuts, retrenchment (budget cuts), devolution (shifting federal responsibility for social welfare from the federal government back to the states), privatization (shifting responsibility from social welfare from the public to the private sector and/or to the individual household), lowering labor costs, and weakening the influence of social movements that at the time were best positioned to resist the new austerity program. At the same time, the New Right gained a grip on public policy, calling for a singular version of family values and a color-blind social order.7
The attack on the welfare state also translated into fewer public sector jobs, washing away many of the employment gains made by women and persons of color since the mid-1970s.8 These gains had provided a route to upward mobility for these workers when the private sector refused to hire them. This loss of jobs also weakened the public sector unions that were best positioned to resist the Neoliberal austerity program. By 2015 total private sector union membership had dropped to 6.7 percent.9 With this, the foes of labor and government turned their sights on labor’s last stronghold – the public sector – which employs just under 50 percent of all unionized workers.10 Given that 61 percent of women but only 38 percent of unionized men work in the public sector, this final push against unions cost white women and women and men of color their hard-won economic protections. Unions remain one of the few institutions with the capacity to increase the standard of living among the middle and working classes and to check corporate power inside and outside of government.
The advocates of less government promised that the benefits of the tax and budget cuts would trickle down to the average person. Instead, extensive data on federal discretionary and entitlement spending reveals that this pro-market strategy yielded record high profits, sluggish economic growth, a weaker welfare state, and more people living in poverty. For 30 years, this “war on the poor” regularly targeted programs that were especially important in the lives of women.11
Neoliberals built support for policies that harmed the lives of the average household by resorting to what Naomi Klein12 calls the “shock doctrine” or the creation and/or manipulation of the resulting crises to impose retrenchment policies that people would not otherwise stand for. To seal the deal, welfare state opponents played to five prevailing panics that blinded people to their own self-interest:13 (a) the economic panic among the anxious middle class suffering falling wages and disappearing jobs; (b) the racial panic among white people as persons of color and immigrants institutionalized their hard-won gains; (c) the moral panic induced by changes in women’s roles, family structures, and the advance of women’s and gay rights; (d) the political panic among the elite who feared the dispossessed might rise up and blame them for the nation’s mounting social and economic problems; and (e) the crime panic created by officials who, seeking more authority, stoked fears of rising crime rates and the declining capacity of the state to control criminals, uprisings, and social movements. They hoped that the worried public would accept more
policing, social control, and punishment rather than mediation as the way to manage the poor and working classes.
The gender lens: the gender division of labor and social reproduction
All three editions of Regulating the Lives of Women bring women into view by using two feminist concepts to analyze the relationship between women and the welfare state: the gender division of labor and the work of social reproduction. This gender lens reveals that from colonial times to the present, the nation’s social welfare programs encoded the patriarchal and racialized arrangements found in wider society. According to Linda Gordon,14 Regulating the Lives of Women was the first book-length publication to apply a feminist analysis to the welfare state. Lacking a gender lens, many prior welfare state scholars had focused on the dynamics of class, markets, and men. Their otherwise insightful research failed to notice or ignored that (1) women reformers played a central role in the origins of the welfare state; (2) white women and women of color comprised the majority of welfare state clients and workers; (3) the welfare state enforced the gender division of labor defined by feminists as a key source of women’s oppression, compounded by racism for women of color; and (4) the welfare state underwrote the cost of women’s care work in the home, which feminists termed the work of social reproduction.
The gender division of labor
Regulating the Lives of Women documents how, from the start, welfare state rules and regulations enforced the gender division of labor that assigned men to breadwinning in the market and women to homemaking or care work in the home, where without income of their own, women remained economically dependent on men. The welfare state upheld this patriarchal arrangement, which I have called “the family ethic” by rewarding marriage, penalizing employed women, and punishing single motherhood. The Social Security (SS), Unemployment Insurance (UI), and Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) programs all defined married or previously married women – such as widows and wives of sick, disabled, or temporarily unemployed men – as lacking a male breadwinner through no fault of their own and thus “deserving” of aid. These deserving women received better treatment than the so-called undeserving deserted, abandoned, and never-married women who were viewed as willfully departing from prescribed wife and mother roles.
Reflecting “welfare racism,” the welfare state also placed blacks and whites on a different footing as it reproduced the racism found in wider society.15 The enforcement of the “family ethic” fell especially hard on poor women of color, who were more likely to be single or never-married. Not viewed as “real women,” they were also subject to both the work and family ethics at a time when white middle-class norms placed women on a pedestal and defined women’s place as in the home. Regardless of their class, marital, or welfare program status, women of color regularly
suffered the impact of prejudice, discrimination, and institutionalized racism that was and still is deeply embedded in U.S. welfare state policies and procedures.
Social reproduction
The application of the gender lens to Regulating the Lives of Women also revealed how the welfare state underwrote the work of “social reproduction.” Sometimes called “care work,” social reproduction refers to those activities that further procreation, socialization, sexuality, nurturance, and family maintenance. Carried out in the family as well as in schools, religious organizations, and the welfare state, social reproduction includes (a) reproducing the next generation of workers; (b) socializing children into proper adult work and family roles; (c) ensuring the health, productivity, and socialization of the current and future workforce; (d) managing consumption; and (e) supporting those who are too old, young, sick, disabled, or jobless to support themselves. Reflecting the societal gender division of labor, the work of social reproduction is typically carried out by women’s unpaid labor in the home and their low-paid jobs in the labor market.16
The work of social reproduction, often invisible and regularly devalued as “women’s work,” is, nonetheless, critical to the well-functioning of individuals and families but also to profitable economic activity. Successful social reproduction depends on the smooth running of the economy. At the same time, the smooth running of the economy depends on the capacity of families to buy goods and services, to ensure the productivity of the current and future workforce, to care for those who cannot support themselves, and to otherwise carry out the work of social reproduction. However, the requirements for successful social reproduction often conflict with the requirements of profitable economic production. More specifically, successful social reproduction requires adequate wages, sufficient income, and low unemployment. In contrast, successful economic production depends on the opposite: low wages, low benefits, and high unemployment. When the requirements of profitable economic production cause the standard of living to fall too low, the lack of income/resources can undercut the capacity of families to carry out their socially assigned caretaking/reproductive tasks on which businesses, families, and wider society depends. The welfare state helps mediate the tension between the requirements of profitable economic production and the requirements of social reproduction by, among other interventions, underwriting the work of social reproduction.
The collapse of the economy in the 1930s led to crises in both economic production and social reproduction. The New Deal policies, including the welfare state, addressed both. Its wide range of policies helped business, labor, farmers, as well as the poor, working, and middle classes to get back on their feet. The welfare state, in addition, increased consumer purchasing power for goods and services produced in the market, subsidized wages and employment in the private sector, and created new public sector jobs. By stimulating the economy during economic downturns, the programs acted as – in economists’ terms – an automatic stabilizer, which holds off a deeper recession. At the same time, the welfare state’s cash and service programs
raised the standard of living for the average household and underwrote the work of social reproduction. The programs effectively shifted the cost of social reproduction from women to the state. As noted above, jobs in the expanded public sector also became the door to upward mobility for many white women and women and men of color who were still excluded from private sector employment.17
In contrast, the response to the economic crisis of the mid-1970s fueled rather than mediated the tension between economic production and social reproduction. Tax cuts for the wealthy, retrenchment of welfare state programs, and privatization of public services contributed to soaring profits. At the same time, the failure of the market to yield enough jobs and income lowered the standard of living and increased the number of people living below the federal poverty line. The press regularly reported on the “disappearance of the middle class” and the “rise of the working poor.” By the 1980s, the evidence of rising rates of homelessness, hunger, personal and community violence, and family disruption pointed to mounting difficulties with carrying out the work of social reproduction. Other evidence included an unprecedented decline in life expectancy. Between 2014 and 2015, deaths from heroin (up 23%) and opioid (up 73%) overdose jumped dramatically. Less sensational but as problematic have been the deaths due to intensified police harassment and high rates of poverty in neighborhoods where persons of color are forced to concentrate. Instead of mediating the mounting tension between economic production and social reproduction, the hollowed-out welfare state intensified the conflict, ignored family needs, and punished the poor. The persistence of deep poverty, rising inequality, and the sense of being left behind unleashed a right-wing populist political response, turning many blue states red in the United States.
The welfare state since 1996: public assistance, Social Security, and Unemployment Insurance
Regulating the Lives of Women focused on the three cash assistance programs (and their predecessors) that since 1935 have constituted the core of the U.S. welfare state: Public Assistance (AFDC/TANF), Social Security, and Unemployment Insurance –and how these programs regulated the lives of women from colonial times to 1996. During the past 20 years, the Neoliberal “war on the welfare state” has diminished each program in various ways. The following discussion updates the status of each program on two fronts: how the program did or did not withstand the impact of “Neoliberal austerity” and the status of the program’s relationship to women, the family ethic, the gender division of labor, and social reproduction. Most generally, the highly unpopular public assistance program (TANF) virtually disappeared. The Unemployment Insurance program gave up some of its gender biases but lost ground in benefits and coverage due to state budget cuts. The efforts to privatize the more popular Social Security program failed. However, budget cuts weakened access to the program, if not its benefits, creating the grounds for another call for its privatization. All three programs continue to support the heterosexual family ethic that defines women’s place as in the home dependent on a male breadwinner’s support.
Public assistance: 1996–2016
The first edition of Regulating the Lives of Women was published in 1988, just before Congress passed the Family Support Act (FSA), which was heralded, at the time, as the first major welfare reform in 20 years. Two decades earlier, as more women of color applied for AFDC, the 1967 Amendments to the Social Security Act began to punish women on welfare with new work requirements and less funding for families with non-marital births, but the change did not take hold. Welfare reform sat on the back burner until the passage of the Family Support Act in 1988. The FSA began as a somewhat liberal reform to help poor women manage poverty. In the end, influenced by the Neoliberal environment, Congress transformed AFDC from a program to enable single mothers to stay home with their children into a mandatory work program. The FSA’s Job Opportunity and Skills Program (JOBS) replaced the more lenient 1967 Work Incentive Program (WIN) with even stricter work requirements enforced by reducing or denying benefits for women who did not comply with the program’s rules. The tough focus on work wrongly implied that women on welfare would not work outside of the home unless forced to do so by the strong arm of the state. Penalizing single mothers and non-marital births enforced the family ethic, sending a message to all women as to what happens to those who depart from prescribed gender roles.
The FSA paved the way for the 1996 welfare reform by allowing states to experiment with changes in the AFDC program. By 1987, 42 states operated one or more of the new optional work programs, including time limits (placing limits on the number of months of aid) and/or the family cap (denying aid to women for children born while their mother was receiving benefits). Nonetheless, many observers were surprised when in 1992, Bill Clinton, while running for President of the United States, promised to “end welfare as we know it.” He kept his promise with the 1996 “welfare reform,” which replaced AFDC with the program known as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), part of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996 (PROWA).18
The second edition of Regulating the Lives of Women was published in 1996, just before Congress passed TANF. Seeking to shrink if not dismantle the welfare state, welfare reform stripped AFDC of its standing as an entitlement program. The new law transformed AFDC from a federal entitlement program with automatic funding to a patchwork of state-administered block grants. Unlike entitlement programs that must serve all families who meet a state’s eligibility requirements, block grants offer the states broad discretion to determine eligibility and to deny aid to families even if they are eligible. Additionally, unlike entitlements, which are refunded automatically, Congress must approve the funding for block grants every year, thus subjecting the program to the risk of cuts during the annual budget process.
Signaled by the title “Temporary” Assistance to “Needy” Families, TANF became a temporary/emergency stopgap measure designed to serve only the “truly needy” –defined as those who are unable to work. TANF implemented its stated goal of increasing “self-sufficiency” among the truly needy by requiring work as a condition of aid, placing a 60-month lifetime limit on welfare receipt, and requiring
Preface xvii
women on welfare to work off their benefits in menial labor dubbed “workfare.”
Officialdom justified these efforts by stigmatizing women on welfare as lazy and unwilling to work unless forced to do so by the state. TANF furthered its second goal – promoting marriage as the foundation of society – by including the abovenoted family cap (designed to penalize single motherhood and non-marital births), by defining female-headed households as “unsuitable homes” and often removing their children to foster care, and by offering marriage bonuses to encourage the formation and maintenance of two-parent heterosexual households. The government justified these policies by suggesting that women on welfare had kids for money, cheated the system, and were immoral breeders of the dangerous classes. Seeking to reduce the welfare rolls, modify work behavior, and promote the heterosexual nuclear family structure, TANF made no mention of reducing poverty.
The third edition of Regulating the Lives of Women is being published 20 years after the enactment of welfare reform. What has happened since 1996 to TANF’s funding, caseload, and benefit levels, as well as its role in enforcing the family ethic?
Funding
The initial block grant – $16.5 billion a year – has remained unchanged since 1996. However, due to inflation, its real value fell to $11.1 billion in 2015 – a cumulative 32 percent, or a drop of 2.2 percent per year, since 1997.19 Granted considerable flexibility regarding the use of TANF funds, in 2014 the states spent only $8.4 billion, or 25 percent, of the $31 billion in federal (plus state matching funds) on cash benefits. Instead, they devoted a majority of TANF funds to other purposes, often using them to plug state budget holes.20 Provided with federal financial incentives, many states also cut their rolls by tightening already strict eligibility requirements and reducing already meager cash benefits – even as demand for aid increased.21
Fewer recipients
The number of TANF recipients has plummeted. From 1994 (just prior to TANF) to 2015, the TANF caseload fell by 68.3 percent. It dropped from an all-time high of 5.1 million families or 14.1 million individuals in March 1994 to a low of 1.6 million families or 3.9 million recipients in March 2015, of which 2.9 million were children.22 With this, fewer eligible (i.e., poor) families were served. In 1979, 82 families received AFDC for every 100 families in poverty. By 1996 the number had plummeted to 68 families for every 100 poor families. By 2014, just 23 of every 100 families in poverty received aid – the lowest point since the 1996 enactment of TANF.23 Similarly, TANF child recipients accounted for 61.7 percent of all poor children in 1994 but only 18.8% in 2015.24
Benefit amounts
The value of the cash benefit also fell in almost every state. TANF benefits never lifted a family above the federal poverty line and never covered basic needs. Yet most states
have allowed the value of their TANF benefits to erode. In all 50 states, TANF benefits leave families below half of the poverty line.25 In 2016, the purchasing power of TANF benefits fell below its 1996 level for 99 percent of all recipients (after adjusting for inflation). Today benefits fall below 30 percent of the poverty line in 33 states, up from 16 states in 1996. In 2016, the average TANF family of three received $432 per month, but in 13 states, the same family received less than $300 per month. About 85 percent of TANF households turn to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits to pick up the slack. Even so, families receiving both SNAP and TANF benefits still fall below 75 percent of the poverty line in every state except Alaska and New York.26 Families with disabled children or adults can apply for the more generous Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits, but many do not qualify.27
The falling support provided by TANF is having sobering consequences for clients while fulfilling Neoliberal goals related to work and marriage. By channeling many workers into low-paid jobs, TANF increases the supply of workers seeking employment, making it easier for businesses to press wages down and harder for unions to negotiate good contracts. The TANF Family Cap and the punitive treatment of recipients also perpetuates the idea that poor women (of color) cannot be trusted to socialize their children to white, native-born, middle-class American ways, but it has not succeeded in promoting marriage as the foundation of society, evidenced by falling marriage rates28 and growing numbers of single mothers in all walks of life.29 It did, however, deeply undercut support for social reproduction and increased the criminalization of poverty (see sections later in the Preface).
Social Security 1996–2016
Between 1996 and 2016, the Social Security program expanded along with the growth of the population and the aging of the baby boomers. In 2016 about 60 million people collected benefits each month, or about one in every six people in the United States,30 up from 43 million in 1996.31 In 2015, women comprised 55 percent of all adult Social Security beneficiaries compared to 45 percent for men. Although more men (81 percent) than women (65 percent) receive retired worker benefits (the largest program), the massive entry of women into the workforce has led the proportion of women among retired beneficiaries to climb steadily from 12 percent in 1940, to 47 percent in 1980, 48 percent in 1990, and 50 percent in 2015. Due to female longevity, more women (13%) than men (1%) receive survivor’s benefits.
Social Security is a particularly important source of income for seniors with low earnings and less opportunity to earn private pensions or to save. Many more women than men over age 65 depend heavily on this program as the main or only source of their retirement income. In 2016, 97 percent of the elderly (aged 60–89) relied on Social Security benefits. The program provided at least 50 percent of the income for 61 percent of all senior beneficiary units and 90 percent or more of the income for 33 percent of all beneficiary units.32 It provided 50 percent or more of the retirement income for 69.4 percent of African American beneficiaries and 73.2
percent of Latino beneficiaries.33 One-third of African Americans and 40 percent of Latino households rely on Social Security for all of their income.
Based on women’s low wages, the average woman worker generally receives a substantially smaller Social Security check than a male worker does. In 1996, women received $643.70 in benefits, much less than the $838.10 paid to men.34 By 2015, benefits for retired persons amounted to $1182.00 for women compared to $1500.00 for retired men.35 Although the female-to-male benefit rose from 63 percent in 1996 to 79 percent in 2015, the improvement reflected falling male wages (and therefore lower benefits) rather than SS benefit increases for women. Moreover, the increase was a mere 16 percent increase over almost 20 years.
Despite the benefit gender gap, Social Security lifts millions of women out of poverty. In 2015, 44.3 percent of elderly women would have been poor without benefits; the number drops to 10.3 percent with benefits. Without Social Security, about 50.6 percent of African Americans and 44.7 percent of Latino seniors would be poor. With benefits, the numbers fall to 18.2 percent for African Americans and 17.5 percent for Latinos. All told, almost nine million elderly women escaped poverty in 2014 due to Social Security.36
Social Security is often perceived as a universal program for the aged because of its wide reach. Yet 3 percent of the total U.S. population aged 60 to 89 never receive this benefit. In this group, 6.9 percent die before receiving benefits, 11.4 percent work in a non-covered occupation, 37.3 percent are immigrants who arrived at age 50 or older and cannot accumulate 10 years of employment, and 44.3 percent work infrequently. These “never beneficiaries” are more likely to be women, Latino, never married, widowed, immigrants, and less educated than other aged persons.37
Social Security and the family ethic
Social Security rules are seemingly gender neutral. That is, men and women with identical work histories and earnings should expect identical benefits. However, few women and men have identical work histories or earnings. As a result, the gendered outcomes described in Regulating the Lives of Women that disadvantaged women in 1996 persist today. That is, the Social Security program still supports the male breadwinner and female homemaker family model, defines women as dependents of male breadwinners, favors married couples over single women, and offers little support to husbandless women. In sum, the landmark Social Security Act continues to uphold the now-outdated family ethic.
The Social Security benefit formula still reflects the life and work patterns of male workers but continues to be generalized to women as if no gender differences existed. On the one hand, women benefit from Social Security because the grant replaces a higher proportion of the wages of low-wage workers than of those who earn more and because they live longer than men and thus collect benefits for more years. However, many other provisions still favor men. It takes 10 years of full-time work in a covered occupation to qualify for SS benefits, and the value of the benefit rises with longer work histories and higher wages. Women lose out because they
typically move in and out of the workforce to care for children (to do the work of social reproduction) and continue to be paid less than men.
The rules of the SSA still incorporate the outdated family ethic grounded in women’s economic dependence on men. That is, they have not kept pace with the rise of women who work and qualify for benefits on their own work record. In 2015, the number of women receiving benefits only as a dependent wife/widow (based on their husbands’ earnings record only) fell from 37.9 percent to 22 percent.38 The share of dually entitled women (benefits based on both their own earnings records and those of their husbands) hardly changed, rising from 25.9 percent to 26 percent. However, the number of women receiving benefits as a worker (based on their own work record only) jumped from 36.2 percent in 1995 to 51.1 percent in 2015.39
Despite these changes, SS favors the non-working wife. The rules allow women to receive benefits on their own work record or their husband’s (if married), whichever is higher. Given women’s lower wages, they often do better collecting one-half of their husband’s benefit as a dependent rather than taking the benefit based on their own wages, which perpetuates a woman’s status as dependent on her husband. It is also unfair to working wives. The non-working wife who receives benefits in this way does not pay any Social Security taxes, whereas the working wife who claims the same benefit is taxed during all her years of employment.
SS further enforces the traditional family structure by making life more difficult for husbandless women. For many years, divorced women had a harder time collecting benefits than their married sisters, although this has been corrected somewhat in recent years. However, women are still ignored once they are no longer needed to fulfill their reproductive and homemaking roles. A widowed mother under age 65 loses her benefits once her youngest child reaches age l6. These displaced homemakers are not covered by SS again until they reach the new status of old age (age 65). This reality is so widespread that it got tagged: the “widows’ gap.”
The SSA is designed to protect workers against the loss of income due to certain risks like illness or unemployment over which they have no control, but the program pays little or no attention to the unique risks to loss of income faced by women workers. These risks include loss of income due to pregnancy, childrearing, caretaking, sex-segregated jobs, sexual harassment, sexual assault, and other situations faced primarily by women.
Like men, women need – and receive – protection from the loss of income due to labor market failures. However, given their lower wages and family responsibilities, women also need protection against the loss of income due to marriage failures such as divorce, desertion, lack of child support, and/or wife-beating at home. These family crises can impoverish women and leave them to raise children unsupported and on their own.
Privatization of Social Security
The privatization of Social Security (SS) was not discussed in the first two editions of Regulating the Lives of Women as there were few such efforts between 1983 (i.e.,
before the publication of the first edition) and 2005 (after the publication of the second edition). Privatization still looms large on Neoliberal policy agenda as a key way to downsize the welfare state. However, it has yet to gain real traction.
Interest in privatizing SS dates back to the New Deal. The 1935 Social Security Act barely passed the House of Representatives and did so without support from any Republicans, all of whom opposed the idea of government pensions. In 1936, the Republican standard bearer Alf Landon vowed to repeal SS if elected. He wasn’t. In 1953, Eisenhower’s opposition to the idea of privatizing SS dashed the Republican hopes for this policy. In following years, both Barry Goldwater (1964) and Ronald Reagan (early 1980s) raised the issue again but to no avail. After so many failed efforts and widespread public support for SS, the idea of privatizing the program became known as the “third rail” of politics – meaning that to support the idea would virtually ensure electoral defeat.
However, in 1983, in a version of Klein’s “shock doctrine,” trumped-up fears that the Social Security Trust Fund would run out of money convinced enough Republicans, Democrats, and the public that a crisis existed. In response they agreed to cut the program. Congress reduced some benefits and raised the retirement age, which was equivalent to a cut, especially for manual laborers in backbreaking jobs, but there was little, if any, discussion of privatizing the program, which was still regarded as the third rail in politics 30 years later.40 In 2005, President George W. Bush decided that the time had finally arrived. Despite Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, Bush’s campaign to replace some or all of the Social Security funds with personal savings accounts failed.41 Neither Congress nor the public supported the idea of investing SS dollars in the risky stock market. After this failure to privatize SS, between 2005 and 2016 no legislators dared to touch this political third rail.42 At the time of this writing in January 2017, it is unclear if Trump will honor his campaign pledge not to privatize Social Security or follow the wishes of House majority leader Paul Ryan (R-WI), who, since 1998, has steadfastly wanted to do just that. According to public opinion polls, only 10 percent of Americans support the idea of privatizing SS.43
Many observers have critiqued the adverse impact of privatization, especially personal savings accounts, on all workers, but for women there is a special risk. The current public system offers women important protections such as proportionately higher benefits for low earners, cost-of-living adjustments, and access to survivor and spousal benefits. Most women do not outlive their benefits, which is key given women’s longevity. The private Personal Savings Accounts alternative to SS offers none of these assurances, but private accounts do expose workers and their families to multiple market risks that, if they occur, can be catastrophic for those with low incomes and/or unsophisticated investment skills.44 Such Personal Savings Accounts may be drained by major health costs, bad luck, or misjudgment in investments. Yet even without some risky investments, women’s lower wages mean smaller accounts, lower investment yields, and lower benefits. Finally, for a young family, SS provides a substantial life insurance or disability insurance policy, but there is no such guarantee for the Personal Savings Accounts.45
Austerity and Social Security
SS has escaped privatization to date. Yet this widely popular program has suffered less publicized but significant behind-the-scenes administrative budget cuts affecting the agency’s ability to adequately serve beneficiaries. Meanwhile, the demand for these administrative services has risen to record highs as the baby boomers age into their peak years for retirement and disability and apply to the program. Since 2010, Congress has cut the program’s operating funds by 10 percent, forcing the agency to do more with significantly less.46 Tens of millions of people who rely on their hard-earned SS benefits face longer waits for benefits to be processed due to staffing reductions (down 6,000 workers) and shorter hours for the field offices. Other deteriorated services include increased wait times for appointments, delayed disability reviews, and longer hold times for the SSA’s toll-free number. These cuts have hampered the ability of the SS program to perform its essential functions, such as the timely determination of eligibility, accurate and on-time benefit payments, responsiveness to the public, and prompt benefit updates when circumstances change. According to SS officials, the cuts are penny wise and pound foolish.47 They say that the longer it takes them to get to their work, the more it costs to do it. All of these steps eat away at public confidence in the SS system, which may well be the goal of the budget cutters on Capitol Hill – as mounting problems soften the system up for a renewed effort to privatize the program.
Unemployment Insurance: 1996–2016
Regulating the Lives of Women also used the gender lens to examine the Unemployment Insurance (UI) program enacted as part of the 1935 Social Security Act. From the Great Depression until very recently, all states provided temporary (26 weeks) UI benefits to buffer the shock of layoffs and unemployment for workers who lost their job “through no fault of their own.” By providing a continuing stream of dollars to the jobless while they seek other work, UI both sustains families and helps shore up the economy.48 A powerful economic stimulus, today every $1 spent on UI benefits generates as much as $2.15 in additional economic activity and preserves over 130,000 jobs.49 Taxes on employers fund the program.
Many assume that most unemployed workers qualify for UI benefits. Yet, except during recessions, the program rarely reaches 50 percent of all jobless workers, and both coverage and benefits have declined over time. The proportion of jobless workers receiving UI (i.e., the recipiency rate) hovered around 50 percent in the 1950s, then dropped to around 40 percent during the 1960s and 1970s. With the advent of the Neoliberal budget cuts in the 1980s and 1990s, the rate fell again to around 30 percent, reaching a low of 28 percent in 1984. After climbing to a high of 42 percent in 2001, the rate began falling until it reached a consistently new low of 26 percent in 2015.50 Recipiency rates also vary widely by state. The 2015 recipiency rates ranged from a high of 66 percent in North Dakota to a low of 12 percent in North Carolina.51
The low UI recipiency rate reflects Neoliberal budget cuts but also seemingly gender-neutral eligibility rules that, until recently, actively denied benefits to many workers, especially women. Neoliberal austerity policies created a UI funding crisis that forced many states to tighten eligibility rules, lower benefit amounts, and reduce the number of weeks of coverage (below the standard 26 weeks). The states terminated extended benefits, even though unprecedented numbers of workers were out of work for more than six months. These cuts overlapped with reduced availability of welfare benefits, leaving low-income women with even less backup. In addition, although federal law prohibits states from denying benefits “solely on the basis of pregnancy,” pregnant women are generally ineligible for benefits because states consider them unavailable for work.52
UI and the family ethic
As with Social Security, since 1996, UI’s eligibility continued to reflect and support the outdated family ethic to the disadvantage of women. The rules still assume that a woman’s place is in the home dependent on a male breadwinner. It is also assumed that women’s low earnings and fewer hours of work reflect a weak commitment to work rather than the lack of jobs and/or the family demands placed on women by the societal gender division of labor.
The rules have not kept pace with changing times. Rather, they have fallen out of step with the growing number of women in low-wage, temporary, and parttime jobs who entered the workforce since the mid-1970s. Today, women make up about half of all paid workers. In 2015, 25 percent of all employed women worked part time; two-thirds of the part-time workforce was female.53 Sixty-five percent of mothers with children under age six and 78 percent of women with children ages six to 13 were in the labor force. Wives bring in more than one-third (35 percent) of their families’ total income – 40 percent in African American households – and many women support families on their own.54 Most working mothers carry a dual load, providing vital income to their families while still doing the lion’s share of care work in the home (i.e., the work of social reproduction).
The UI program’s eligibility criteria disadvantage women. They include both monetary eligibility requirements that capture a worker’s earnings history and the non-monetary criteria related to the reason for job loss and the worker’s availability for work.55 From 1935 to today, the criteria adopted by most states sustain the family ethic in ways that deny many women access to the UI program. More generally, to qualify for UI, workers must demonstrate a strong attachment to the labor force. On these grounds, the earnings test, the restriction on part-time work, and the exclusion of labor force exits to meet the demands of family life bar many women from the UI program.
These gendered requirements were baked into the seemingly gender-neutral UI regulations until Congress passed, and President Obama signed, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (better known as the stimulus package). In response to the deep recession of 2008–2009, the Act provided $7 billion in incentive payments
to states to “stimulate” the sagging economy – but also to encourage UI policy reform. To receive these funds, a state had to adopt two of four of the modernization rules, which were designed to undo some of the old rules written for a primarily male workforce that lawmakers imagined had very few women. Until it expired in 2012, the Reinvestment Act provided a temporary hike in the jobless benefits for all workers and a new dependent’s allowance. As noted next, it also redefined the base period, ended the exclusion of part-time work, and included “compelling family responsibilities” as a “good cause” for leaving a job, all of which benefited women.
Earnings test
One measure of labor force attachment – the minimum earnings test – is based on the earnings and the number of hours worked during a specified base period. Many workers, especially women, fail this test due to low wages but also the state’s definition of the base period. Most states define this period as the first four of the last five calendar quarters completed before a claim is filed. Because this definition discounts the quarter of the most recent earnings,56 it tends to exclude new labor force entrants, reentrants, and workers with sporadic work histories – statuses in which women tend to predominate.57
The Reinvestment Act revised the UI program’s base period in ways that helped women. Although not ruling out the traditional base period, it provided strong financial incentives to the states to adopt the “alternative base period,” which allows UI applicants to count their earnings in the most recent quarter when applying for benefits.58 Some 39 states replaced the traditional base period with the broader alternative – up from 19 states before 2009.59 This change in the base period increased UI eligibility by 2 to 6 percent,60 making it much easier for low-wage workers and new entrants to the workforce (i.e., large numbers of women) to qualify for benefits.
The part-time worker exclusion
To qualify for UI, workers must be job “ready” – that is, available for and actively seeking work, where “work” is interpreted as full-time work.61 The view of part-time workers – especially of women – as not connected to the workforce represents a throwback to a day when the typical (white) household was headed by a full-time married male worker living with a full-time female homemaker.62 In their prime earning and child-rearing years, women are four times more likely than men to be working part time. Given the gender division of labor, they often choose this strategy as a way to balance work and family responsibilities. In 2015, 64 percent of all parttime workers were women compared to 36 percent of all men, and 25 percent of all women worked part time compared to 12.4 percent of men.63 The UI exclusion of part-time workers ignores that our changing economy increasingly depends on many low-wage, part-time, and temporary workers. Millions of women and men take parttime jobs not because they want to work less but because they cannot find full-time work. Indeed, part-time jobs may be less desirable as these workers make less per
hour for the same work as full-timers, lack access to important workplace benefits, are denied promotion opportunities, and are subject to abusive scheduling practices.64
Prior to the Reinvestment Act of 2009, low-wage and part-time workers were twice as likely to become unemployed as full-time workers but only half as likely to receive UI benefits.65 Nationally, only 12 percent of unemployed part-time workers receive unemployment benefits.66 The Act tried, with some modest success, to change this pattern by providing financial incentives to those states that opened the UI program to part-time workers. By 2012, 29 states granted benefits to part-time workers – up from 15 states before 2009.67
“Good cause” separation
The “good cause” separation rule refers to the reasons why workers leave/quit their jobs. The rule states that only workers who leave their jobs “through no fault of their own” qualify for benefits. That is, the reason for leaving must be “involuntary.” Involuntary means that the exit from the job must be initiated by or due to an employer’s policies, such as unsafe or unhealthy working conditions, a change in hours or pay, or being required to perform tasks different from those the worker was hired to perform.68
Workers who leave their job on their own initiative (i.e., quit voluntarily) do not qualify for UI. Voluntary quits include to relocate with a spouse who is forced to transfer to a new job, to care for sick family members, to fill in for the loss of child care, and/or to avoid an abusive partner stalking them at work.69 While the UI program did not consider these family responsibilities to be “good cause” reasons for leaving a job, for women these exclusions ignore the realities of their lives. They have no real choice but to leave work when it becomes necessary to fulfill family obligations or to escape family violence. The Reinvestment Act provided financial incentives to encourage the states to reform their UI program by including these “compelling family responsibilities” as a “good cause” for leaving a job. Although not all of the states accepted this option, as of 2012 women can qualify for a UI benefit if they leave their jobs due to family illness, child care conflicts, or the forced relocation of a spouse in 26 states up from 10 states before 2009 and to avoid domestic violence in 32 states up from 18 pre-2009.70
In the end, only half of the 50 states adopted any of the Act’s changes before its expiration in 2012. Yet the legislation produced an unprecedented wave of state reforms, bringing tens of thousands of workers into the unemployment system, keeping more than five million Americans out of poverty, and increasing consumption among many UI recipients. Access to UI reduced hardship and stress, strengthened family life, and provided households with resources needed to help many unemployed women carry out the work of social reproduction until a new job could be secured.
U-turn in UI policy
Despite the progress made by the Reinvestment Act, many fewer women than men qualify for UI benefits. At the end at 2016, as the economy slowly recovered,
unemployment fell to record lows for both men (4.3%) and women (4.4%). 71 Despite these matched male-female rates, many fewer women than men qualified for UI: 54 percent of all UI claimants were men compared to 45 percent for women. Likewise, in 41 states more men than women receive UI benefits. In some states, this “gender gap” reached 17 percentage points.72
Hoping to build on and extend the changes secured by the efforts to modernize the UI program (2009–2012) in 2012 and again in 2016,73 President Obama invited more states to adopt the liberalized eligibility rules outlined in the Act, including the ones targeted to women’s work. He also encouraged states to improve benefit levels and extend coverage to temporary and other non-traditional forms of employment. Given the Congressional gridlock at the time, these new proposals did not see the light of day.
Instead, some in Congress tried to tighten the rules. The Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 2012 added a “work search” requirement74 and allowed, but did not require, states to test UI applicants for drug use if they had either (a) lost their job due to drug use or (b) were seeking a new job that generally required new employees to pass a drug test.75 The law that sought to overturn the Department of Labor’s 1960 ban against drug testing of UI applicants was never implemented,76 but it was not forgotten.77 The Ready to Work Act of 201678 worked around the federal ban on drug testing by authorizing the states to allow the practice. Introduced in 2016, critics argued that the Act was solving a problem that doesn’t really exist. They suggested instead that drug testing rules were part of a mounting Neoliberal effort to stigmatize and criminalize the poor – a trend that was spreading throughout the wider welfare state.79
The criminalization of the poor and the rise of the carceral state: 1996–2016
The criminalization of the poor and poverty represents a significant trend that has intensified since the publication of the second edition of Regulating the Lives of Women in 1996. Regulating the Lives of Women documents the long history of punishing women who are viewed as departing from prescribed wife and mother roles with stigma, low benefits, child removal, work requirements, and financial penalties. However, during the Neoliberal years, punishment became more frequent, severe, and increasingly approached criminalization. Pressed by deepening economic insecurity, a hollowed-out welfare state, and high-profile social movements, such as Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the Fight for Fifteen, advocates for the poor called for the welfare state to include more of the growing number of marginalized individuals and communities. In contrast, critics of the poor – who seem to have won the day – insisted on replacing the state’s commitment to assistance and social integration with “tough” strategies of exclusion, coercion, punishment, surveillance, and the retraction of rights.80
Wacquant81 explains that in the era of Neoliberalism, the state needed new mechanisms to manage rising economic insecurity and unruly protests that had spread
from the poor and working classes (the traditional marginalized persons) to the middle class and to the white community. The favored solution included endorsing a punitive mindset and redirecting vast fiscal and administrative resources from the welfare state to the criminal justice system, or what some now call “the carceral state.” This included a stricter penal system, long and mandatory sentences, reduced access to social programs, and a vigorous deployment of the police, courts, and prisons, especially in the black community. The resulting mass incarceration was not a response to rising crime rates, as they actually fell during the last few decades.82
Many historians tend to see the U.S. welfare state and the carceral state as either totally separate or sequential policy enterprises. They assume that the carceral state supplanted the welfare state when, in fact, these systems have long been deeply intertwined and governed by similar logics about the causes and remedies for social inequality. In each system, specific policies target the same populations devastated by the evisceration of public resources and ensnare millions of people into the penal system.83
Since 1996, the already tenuous line between the welfare and criminal justice systems blurred. That is, the carceral state added new non-criminal pathways to punishment and jail, and the welfare state increasingly criminalized the behavior of the poor. The non-criminal pathways to punishment that supplement traditional “tough-on-crime” pathways include criminalizing (a) ordinary or previously noncriminal behavior such as sleeping on a park bench, loitering, selling drugs, and panhandling;84 (b) minor misdemeanors such as driving with an expired license, putting one’s feet up on a subway seat, jaywalking, and driving with a broken taillight;85 and (c) inserting penal policies into non-criminal/welfare state arenas such as public schools, social welfare programs, and public housing.86 For example, in many urban schools, the age-old behavior of truancy now incurs criminal sanctions including fining mothers, shackling students, and/or sending both child and parent to jail.87 In Berks County, Pennsylvania, more than 1,600 parents – most of them mothers – have been jailed since 2000 for failure to pay truancy fines of $300 per each unexcused absence after the third.88
At the same time, welfare state policies moved from penalties and punishment to criminalization. For many years the state stigmatized and/or penalized poor single mothers, defining them as welfare queens, accusing them of having kids for money and cheating the system, and then denying them needed benefits. However, in the 1990s, the states became more aggressive. They stepped up investigations of welfare state recipients for fraud and other suspected criminal activity. Examples include imposing zero-tolerance disciplinary rules in public schools, leading to the well-known school-to-prison pipeline,89 bringing the police into welfare and child welfare investigations regardless of evidence of criminal activity by the recipient,90 and denying public benefits to convicted drug felons91 These rules fell heavily on TANF and SNAP recipients of color who due, in part, to racism in wider society are overrepresented in welfare state programs. Today, when applying for welfare, many applicants are photographed, fingerprinted, drug-tested, and interrogated. The department may call for a criminal record search, ask the applicants if they have any
misdemeanors or a prior lease violation on their record, and require applicants to prove a child’s paternity. Law enforcement officials can use SNAP records to find and arrest people with outstanding arrests.92 Officials now also deport, detain, and seek to register undocumented immigrants, thereby criminalizing entire communities – a practice recently stepped up by the Trump administration.
In other words, poverty is increasingly treated as a criminal offense. Drug testing requirements provide a good example of the trends towards criminalization of the poor. Lawmakers across the country are pushing bills to drug test people who apply for certain benefits like TANF, SNAP, and UI. Since 1996 nearly all states have proposed some form of drug testing or screening for TANF applicants. Fifteen states now mandate such drug screening and 30 others are considering it.93 Although hinging public benefits on a clean drug test has become a popular idea, recent research reveals that the test is not needed, as only a small percentage of welfare applicants test positive.94 Additionally, the process can be very expensive as each state must reimburse anyone who does not test positive. In 2015, several states spent $850,909.25 to uncover only 321 positive tests. More than one state found zero positive tests.95 That the states still push for drug tests despite these high costs and poor results suggests other motives are at play, such as painting poor recipients, especially women and persons of color, with the brush of criminality. That drug tests are not required for applicants for Medicare, Social Security, and other programs serving the middle and upper classes reinforces this as a goal.96
In addition to drug testing, since 1996 welfare policy has imposed a lifetime ban on welfare and SNAP/food stamps for applicants with felony drug convictions.97
Between 1996 and 2011, the 12 states with a full ban denied benefits to an estimated 180,100 women with a felony drug conviction, and that number is higher when the 25 states with partial bans are included. Similarly, public housing policy both bans drug felons and allows the eviction of tenants based on drug use by a visiting child or grandchild.98 Although some states seek to repeal the ban on convicted drug felons, others want it strengthened. In 2013, both the Senate and the House supported a bill to expand the scope of the lifetime SNAP ban to include a retroactive denial of benefits to individuals who are convicted of murder, aggravated sexual abuse, or sexual exploitation of children. Only a technicality presented it from passing.99 These bans affect large numbers of women because women comprise almost 90 percent of TANF and SNAP recipients and because drug law enforcement disproportionately affects women. Women, who are the fastest growing if not the largest prison population, comprise a larger proportion of prisoners than ever before due to expansive law enforcement efforts, stiffer drug sentencing laws, and postconviction barriers. From 1980 to 2014 (the Neoliberal period), the number of women in prison increased by more than 700 percent from a total of 26,378 in 1980 to 215,332 in 2014.100 In 2014, African American women (109 per 100,000) were imprisoned at twice the rate of white women (53 per 100,000). The most common crime for all female offenders was drug trafficking (31.6%).101 In 2014, 24 percent of women in state prisons were incarcerated for a drug offense, up from 12 percent in 1986. Only 15 percent of male prisoners were incarcerated on these grounds.102
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Mouth in front of the snout. Eye lateral, of moderate size. Teeth in villiform bands, sometimes with the addition of canines; no molars or incisor-like teeth in the jaws; palate toothless. Præoperculum unarmed, and without bony stay. Ventrals thoracic, with one spine and five soft rays. Bones of the head with wide muciferous channels. Stomach coecal. Air-bladder frequently with numerous appendages (see pp. 144 and seq.)
The fishes of the “Meagre” family are chiefly coast-fishes of the tropical and sub-tropical Atlantic and Indian Oceans, preferring the neighbourhood of the mouths of large rivers, into which they freely enter, some of the species having become so completely naturalised in fresh water that they are never found nowadays in the sea. Some of the larger species wander far from their original home, and are not rarely found at distant localities as occasional visitors. In the Pacific and on the coast of Australia, where but a few large rivers enter the ocean, they are extremely rare and, in the Red Sea, they are absent. Many attain a large size, and almost all are eaten.
No fossil species have been as yet discovered.
P .—Snout convex, with the upper jaw overlapping the lower. Mandible with numerous small barbels. No canines. The first dorsal with ten stout spines. Two anal spines, the second very strong. Scales of moderate size.
To this fish (P. chromis) more especially is given the name of “Drum,” from the extraordinary sounds which are produced by it and other allied Sciænoids. These sounds are better expressed by the word drumming than by any other, and are frequently noticed by persons in vessels lying at anchor on the coasts of the United States, where those fishes abound. It is still a matter of uncertainty by what means the “Drum” produces the sounds. Some naturalists believe that it is caused by the clapping together of the pharyngeal teeth, which are very large molar teeth. However, if it be true that the sounds are accompanied by a tremulous motion of the vessel, it seems more probable that they are produced by the fishes beating their tails against the bottom of the vessel in order to get rid of the parasites with which that part of their body is infested. The “Drum”
attains to a length of more than four feet, and to a weight exceeding a hundred lbs. Its air-bladder has been figured on p. 146.
Micropogon is closely allied to Pogonias, but has conical pharyngeal teeth. Two species from the western parts of the Atlantic.
Fig 187 Pharyngeal bones and teeth of Pogonias chromis
A, Upper; B, Lower pharyngeals
U . Snout convex, with the upper jaw overlapping the lower; a short barbel under the symphysis of the mandible. The first dorsal with nine or ten flexible spines, the anal with one or two. Scales of moderate size.
Twenty species are known from the Mediterranean, Atlantic, and Indian Ocean. One well known to the ancients, under the name of Umbra, is the Umbrina cirrhosa of the Mediterranean, the “Umbrine” or “Ombre” of the French, and the “Corvo” of the Italians. It ranges to the Cape of Good Hope, and attains a length of three feet. Also on the coasts of the United States several species occur, as U. alburna, U. nebulosa, etc.
Fig 188 Umbrina nasus, from Panama
Fig 189 —Umbrina nasus, from Panama
S (including Corvina). The upper jaw overlapping the lower, or both jaws equal in front. Interorbital space moderately broad and slightly convex Cleft of the mouth horizontal or slightly oblique The outer series of teeth is generally composed of teeth larger than the rest, but there are no canines Eye of moderate size, barbel none
Some fifty species are known, but their distinctive characters have been but imperfectly pointed out. They are found in all the seas and rivers in which Sciænoids generally occur, and many are entirely confined to fresh water, for instance the species figured, Sciæna richardsonii, from Lake Huron; Sc. amazonica; Sc. obliqua, ocellata, oscula, etc., from fresh waters of the United States. Sciæna diacanthus and Sc. coitor belong to the most common fishes of the coasts of the East Indies, ascending the great rivers for a long distance from the sea. One of the European species, Sciæna aquila, has an extremely wide range; it not rarely reaches the British coasts, where it is known as “Meagre,” and has been found at the Cape of Good Hope and on the coast of southern Australia. Like some of the other species it attains to a length of six feet, but the majority of the species of this genus remain within smaller dimensions. A part of the species have the second anal ray very strong, and have been placed into a distinct genus, Corvina,—thus, among others, Sc. nigra from the Mediterranean, and Sc. richardsonii.
Fig 190 Sciæna richardsonii
Pachyurus is closely allied to Sciæna, but has the vertical fins densely covered with small scales.
O . Snout obtuse or somewhat pointed, with the lower jaw longer. The first dorsal with nine or ten feeble spines. Canine teeth more or less distinct. Præoperculum denticulated. Scales of moderate or small size
About twenty species are known from the tropical and subtropical parts of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The air-bladder is figured on p. 144.
A differs from Otolithus in having very long arrowshaped or lanceolate canine teeth. Coasts of tropical America.
C —Body elongate; head very broad, with the upper surface very convex; cleft of the mouth wide and oblique; no large canines. Eye small. No barbel. Scales small, or of moderate size. The second dorsal very long, caudal pointed.
Three species from the East Indian and Chinese coasts. The great development of the muciferous system on the head and the small eye leads one to suppose that these fishes live in muddy water near the mouths of large rivers. The air-bladder has been described on p. 144.
Other genera belonging to this family are Larimus, Eques, Nebris, and Lonchurus.
Fig 191 Histiophorus pulchellus
The upper jaw is produced into a long cuneiform weapon. These fishes form one small family only, Xiphiidæ.
The “Sword-fishes” are pelagic fishes, occurring in all tropical and sub-tropical seas. Generally found in the open ocean, always vigilant, and endowed with extraordinary strength and velocity, they are but rarely captured, and still more rarely preserved. The species found in the Indian and Pacific Oceans belong to the genus Histiophorus, distinguished from the common Mediterranean Swordfish, or Xiphias, by the presence of ventral fins, which, however, are reduced to two long styliform appendages. The distinction of the species is beset with great difficulties, owing to the circumstance that but few examples exist in museums, and further, because the form of the dorsal fin, the length of the ventrals, the shape and length of the sword, appear to change according to the age of the individuals. Some specimens or species have only the anterior dorsal rays elevated, the remainder of the fin being very low, whilst in others all the rays are exceedingly elongate, so that the fin, when erected, projects beyond the surface of the water. It is stated that Swordfishes, when quietly floating with the dorsal fin erect, can sail before the wind, like a boat.
Sword-fishes are the largest of Acanthopterygians, and not exceeded in size by any other Teleostean; they attain to a length of from 12 to 15 feet, and swords have been obtained more than three feet long, and with a diameter of at least three inches at the base. The sword is formed by the prolongation and coalescence of the maxillary and intermaxillary bones; it is rough at its lower surface, owing to the development of rudimentary villiform teeth, very hard and strong, and forms a most formidable weapon. Sword-fishes never hesitate to attack whales and other large Cetaceans, and by repeatedly stabbing these animals generally retire from the combat victorious. The cause which excites them to those attacks is unknown; but they follow this instinct so blindly that they not rarely attack boats or large vessels in a similar manner, evidently mistaking them for Cetaceans. Sometimes they actually succeed in piercing
the bottom of a ship, endangering its safety; but as they are unable to execute powerful backward movements they cannot always retract their sword, which is broken off by the exertions of the fish to free itself. A piece of a two-inch plank of a whale-boat, thus pierced by a sword-fish, in which the broken sword still remains, is preserved in the British Museum.
The Rev. Wyatt Gill, who has worked as a missionary for many years in the South Sea Islands, communicates that young Swordfishes are easily caught in strong nets, but no net is strong enough to hold a fish of six feet in length. Specimens of that size are now and then captured by hook and line, a small fish being used as bait. Individuals with the sword broken off are not rarely observed. Larger specimens cannot be captured by the natives, who are in great fear of them. They easily pierce their canoes, and only too often dangerously wound persons sitting in them.
The Mediterranean Sword-fish is constantly caught in the nets of the Tunny-fishers off the coast of Sicily, and brought to market, where its flesh sells as well as that of the Tunny.
The remarkable changes which Sword-fishes undergo at an early stage of their growth have been noticed above, p. 173 and seq.
Sword-fishes are as old a type as the Berycoids. Their remains have been found in the chalk of Lewes, and more frequently in the London clay of Sheppy, where an extinct genus, Coelorhynchus, has been recognised.
S D —A T .
Body elongate, compressed or band-like; cleft of the mouth wide, with several strong teeth in the jaws or on the palate. The spinous and soft portions of the dorsal fin and the anal are of nearly equal extent, long, many-rayed, sometimes terminating in finlets; caudal fin forked, if present.
F —T .
Marine fishes inhabiting the tropical and sub-tropical seas; some of them are surface-fishes, living in the vicinity of the coast, whilst others descend to moderate depths, as the Berycoids. All are powerful rapacious fishes, as is indicated by their dentition.
The oldest of the extinct genera are Enchodus and Anenchelum; they were formerly referred to the Scombroids, but belong to this family. The former has been found in the chalk of Lewes and Mæstricht; the latter is abundant in the Eocene schists of Glaris. Anenchelum is much elongate, and exhibits in the slender structure of its bones the characteristics of a deep-sea fish; it resembles much Lepidopus, but has some long rays in the ventrals. Other Eocene genera are Nemopteryx and Xiphopterus. In the Miocene of Licata in Sicily Trichiuridæ are well represented, viz. by a species of Lepidopus, and by two genera, Hemithyrsites and Trichiurichthys, which are allied to Thyrsites and Trichiurus, but covered with scales.
The following is a complete list of the genera referred to this family:—
N Body incompletely clothed with delicate scales Small teeth in the jaws and on the palatine bones; none on the vomer Two dorsal fins, the first continuous and extending to the second; finlets behind the second and anal fins Each ventral fin represented by a single small spine. A dagger-shaped spine behind the vent. Caudal fin well developed.
One specimen only of this fish (N. tripes), 10 inches long, has been obtained off Madeira; it evidently lives at a considerable depth, and comes to the surface only by accident.
N Body covered with small scales Several strong fangs in the jaws; no teeth on the palate First dorsal not extending to the second. No detached finlets. Ventrals small, but perfectly developed, thoracic. Caudal fin present. A dagger-shaped spine behind the vent.
A rather large fish (N. nasutus), very rarely found in the sea off Madeira. The two or three specimens found hitherto measure from three to four feet in length. Probably living at the same depth as the preceding genus.
A . Scales none. Two very long dorsal fins; caudal well developed; ventrals none. A strong dagger-shaped spine behind the vent Strong teeth in the jaws; none on the palate
One species only is known, named A. carbo from its coal-black colour; it is evidently a deep-sea fish, very rarely obtained in the sea off Madeira. Upwards of four feet long.
E . Body naked, very long and thin. Profile of the head regularly decurved from the nape to the snout, the occiput and forehead being elevated and trenchant. Jaws with fangs; palatine teeth present. One dorsal only, continued from the head to the caudal fin, which is distinct A dagger-shaped spine behind the vent Pectoral fins inserted almost horizontally, with the lowest rays longest, and with the posterior border emarginate Ventral fins rudimentary, scale-like
This is another deep-sea form of this family, but, at present, no observations have been made as regards the exact depth at which it occurs. A specimen has been known since the year 1812; it was found on the coast of Scotland, and described as Trichiurus lepturus. The same species has been re-discovered in the West Indies, where, however, it is also extremely scarce.
L . Body band-like; one single dorsal extends along the whole length of the back; caudal well developed. Ventrals reduced to a pair of scales. Scales none. Several fangs in the jaws; teeth on the palatine bones.
Fig. 192. Lepidopus caudatus.
The Scabbard-fish (L. caudatus) is rather common in the Mediterranean and warmer parts of the Atlantic, extending northwards to the south coast of England, where it is an occasional visitor, and southwards to the Cape of Good Hope. More recently it has been observed on the coasts of Tasmania and New Zealand. We may, therefore, justly consider it to be a deep-sea fish, which probably descends to the same depth as the preceding allied forms. It grows to a length of five or six feet, but its body is so much compressed that it does not weigh more than as many pounds. It is well known in New Zealand, where it is called “Frost-fish,” and esteemed as the most delicious fish of the colony. A still more attenuated species (L. tenuis) occurs in the sea off Japan, at a depth of some 340 fathoms.
T . Body band-like, tapering into a fine point, without caudal fin. One single dorsal extending the whole length of the back. Ventrals reduced to a pair of scales, or entirely absent. Anal fin rudimentary, with numerous extremely short spines, scarcely projecting beyond the skin. Long fangs in the jaws; teeth on the palatine bones, none on the vomer.
The “Hairtails” belong to the tropical marine fauna, and although generally found in the vicinity of land, they wander frequently out to sea, perhaps merely because they follow some ocean-currents.
Therefore they are not rarely found in the temperate zone, the common West Indian species (T. lepturus), for instance, on the coast of England. They attain to a length of about four feet. The number of their vertebræ is very large, as many as 160, and more. Six species are known.
E . Body rather elongate, covered with minute scales,[*. see below] The first dorsal fin continuous, with spines of moderate strength, and extending on to the second; finlets none; ventrals well developed. Lateral lines two. Teeth of the jaws strong; palatine teeth, none.
The “Domine” of the Havannah, E. magistralis.
T Body rather elongate, for the greater part naked The first dorsal continuous, with the spines of moderate strength, and extending on to the second From two to six finlets behind the dorsal and anal Several strong teeth in the jaws; teeth on the palatine bones
The species of this genus attain to a considerable size (from four to five feet), and are valuable food fishes; Th. atun from the Cape of Good Hope, South Australia, New Zealand, and Chili, is preserved, pickled or smoked. In New Zealand it is called “Barracuda” or “Snoek,” and exported from the colony into Mauritius and Batavia as a regular article of commerce, being worth over £17 a ton; Th. pretiosus, the “Escholar” of the Havannah, from the Mediterranean, the neighbouring parts of the Atlantic, and the West Indies; Th. prometheus from Madeira, Bermuda, St. Helena, and Polynesia; Th. solandri from Amboyna and Tasmania is probably the same as Th. prometheus.
Young specimens of this (or, perhaps, the following) genus have been described as Dicrotus. In them the finlets are not yet detached from the rest of the fin; and the ventral fins, which are entirely obsolete in the adult fish, are represented by a long crenulated spine.
G . Body very elongate, scaleless. The first dorsal fin continuous, with thirty and more spines, and extending on to the second. Six finlets behind the dorsal and anal. Several strong teeth in the jaws, none on the palate.
One species (G. serpens), inhabiting considerable depths of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
F —P .
This family has been formed for two extinct genera: Palæorhynchus from the schists of Glaris, and Hemirhynchus from tertiary formations near Paris. These genera resemble much the Trichiuridæ in their long, compressed body, and long vertical fins, but their jaws, which are produced into a long beak, are toothless, or provided with very small teeth. The dorsal fin extends the whole length of the back, and the anal reaches from the vent nearly to the caudal, which is forked. The ventrals are composed of several rays and thoracic. The vertebræ long, slender, and numerous, and, like all the bones of the skeleton, thin, indicating that these fishes were inhabitants of considerable depths of the ocean. Both the jaws of Palæorhynchus are prolonged into a beak, whilst in Hemirhynchus the upper exceeds the lower in length.
E D —A C - .
Spines developed, in one of the fins at least. Dorsal fins either continuous or close together; the spinous dorsal, if present, always short; sometimes modified into tentacles, or into a suctorial disk; soft dorsal always long, if the spinous is absent; anal similarly developed as the soft dorsal, and both generally much longer than the spinous, sometimes terminating in finlets. Ventrals, thoracic or jugular, if present, never modified into an adhesive apparatus. No prominent anal papilla.
Marine fishes, with few exceptions.
F F —A
Body compressed, oblong or elevated, covered with minute scales. Tail generally armed with one or more bony plates or spines, which are developed with age, but absent in very young individuals.
Eye lateral, of moderate size. Mouth small; a single series of more or less compressed, sometimes denticulated, sometimes pointed incisors in each jaw; palate toothless. One dorsal fin, the spinous portion being less developed than the soft; anal with two or three spines; ventral fins thoracic. Air-bladder forked posteriorly. Intestines with more or less numerous circumvolutions. Nine abdominal, and thirteen caudal vertebræ.
Inhabitants of the tropical seas, and most abundant on coralreefs. They feed either on vegetable substances or on the superficial animal matter of corals.
Extinct species of Acanthurus and Naseus have been discovered in the Monte Bolca formation.
A Jaws with a single series of lobate incisors, which are sometimes movable An erectile spine hidden in a groove on each side of the tail Ventral fins with one spine and generally five rays Scales ctenoid, sometimes with minute spines Branchiostegals five
The fishes of this genus, which sometimes are termed “Surgeons,” are readily recognised by the sharp lancet-shaped spine with which each side of the tail is armed. When at rest the spine is hidden in a sheath; but it can be erected and used by the fish as a very dangerous weapon, by striking with the tail towards the right and left. “Surgeons” occur in all tropical seas, with the exception of the eastern part of the Pacific, where they disappear with the corals. They do not attain to any size, the largest species scarcely exceeding a length of eighteen inches. Many are agreeably or showily coloured, the ornamental colours being distributed in very extraordinary patterns. The larger species are eatable, and some even esteemed as food. It is stated that the fry of some species periodically approaches, in immense numbers, the coasts of some of the South Sea Islands (Caroline Archipelago), and serves as an important article of food to the natives. Nearly fifty species are known.
Fig. 193.—Acanthurus leucosternum, Indian Ocean.
At an early period of their growth these fishes present so different an aspect that they were considered a distinct genus, Acronurus. The form of the body is more circular and exceedingly compressed. No scales are developed, but the skin forms numerous oblique parallel folds. The gill-cover and the breast are shining silvery
N . Tail with two (rarely one or three) bony keeled plates on each side (in the adult). Head sometimes with a bony horn or crestlike prominence directed forwards. Ventral fins composed of one spine and three rays. From four to six spines in the dorsal; two anal spines. Scales minute, rough, forming a sort of fine shagreen. Air-bladder forked behind. Intestinal tract with many circumvolutions.
Twelve species are known from the tropical Indo-Pacific, but none of them extend eastwards beyond the Sandwich Islands. In their mode of life these fishes resemble the Acanthuri. Likewise, the young have a very different appearance, and are unarmed, and were described as a distinct genus, Keris. One of the most common species is N. unicornis, which, when adult (22 inches long), has a
horn about 2 inches long, whilst it is merely a projection in front of the eye in individuals of 7 inches in length.
Prionurus is an allied genus with a series of several keeled bony laminæ on each side of the tail.
194. Naseus unicornis.
S F —C .
Body more or less compressed, oblong or elevated, covered with small scales or naked; eye, lateral. Teeth, if present, conical. No bony stay for the præoperculum. The spinous dorsal is less developed than the soft or than the anal, either continuous with, or separated from, the soft portion; sometimes rudimentary. Ventrals thoracic, sometimes rudimentary or entirely absent. No prominent papilla near the vent. Gill-opening wide. Ten abdominal and fourteen caudal vertebræ.
Fig.
Fig. 195. Semiophoris velitans.
Inhabitants of tropical and temperate seas. Carnivorous. They appear first in cretaceous formations, where they are represented by Platax and some Caranx-like genera (Vomer and Aipichthys from the chalk of Comen in Istria). They are more numerous in various Tertiary formations, especially in the strata of Monte Bolca, where some still existing genera occur, as Zanclus, Platax, Caranx (Carangopsis), Argyriosus (Vomer), Lichia, Trachynotus. Of the extinct genera the following belong to this family:—Pseudovomer (Licata), Amphistium, Archæus, Ductor, Plionemus (?), and Semiophorus. Equula has been recently discovered in the Miocene marls of Licata in Sicily.
C (including Trachurus) Body more or less compressed, sometimes sub-cylindrical Cleft of the mouth of moderate width The
first dorsal fin continuous, with about eight feeble spines, sometimes rudimentary; the soft dorsal and anal are succeeded by finlets in a few species Two anal spines, somewhat remote from the fin Scales very small Lateral line with an anterior curved, and a posterior straight, portion, either entirely or posteriorly only covered by large plate-like scales, several of which are generally keeled, the keel ending in a spine Dentition feeble Air-bladder forked posteriorly
The “Horse-mackerels” are found in abundance in almost all temperate and, especially, tropical seas. Many species wander to other parts of the coast, or to some distance from land, and have thus gradually extended their range over two or more oceanic areas; some are found in all tropical seas. The species described are very numerous, about ninety having been properly characterised and distinguished. Some attain to a length of three feet and more, and all are eatable. They feed on other fish and various marine animals.
Of the most noteworthy species the following may be mentioned: —C. trachurus, the common British Horse-mackerel, distinguished by having the lateral line in its whole length armed with large vertical plates; it is almost cosmopolitan within the temperate and tropical zones of the northern and southern hemispheres. C. crumenophthalmus, C. carangus, and C. hippos, three of the most common sea-fishes, equally abundant in the Atlantic and IndoPacific oceans; C. ferdau, from the Indo-Pacific, upwards of three feet in length. C. armatus, ciliaris, gallus, etc., which have an exceedingly short and compressed body, with rudimentary spinous dorsal fin, and with some of the rays of the dorsal and anal prolonged into filaments.
Fig 196 —Plates of the lateral line of Caranx hippos
A is closely allied to Caranx, especially to the lastnamed species, but the lateral line has no plates whatever; and the body is scaleless, chiefly of a bright silvery colour.
Two species from the tropical Atlantic.
M Body much compressed, with prominent trenchant abdomen, covered with small scales; lateral line not shielded; præopercular margin entire Cleft of the mouth rather small; præorbital of moderate width The first dorsal continuous, with seven feeble spines No detached finlets Small teeth on the vomer and palatine bones
Micropteryx chrysurus is a semi-pelagic fish, and very common in the tropical Atlantic, less so in the Indian Ocean.
S . Body oblong, slightly compressed, with rounded abdomen, covered with very small scales; lateral line not shielded; præopercular margin entire Cleft of the mouth of moderate width, or rather wide The first dorsal continuous, with feeble spines No detached finlets Villiform teeth in the jaws, on the vomer and palatine bones
These fishes are often called “Yellow-tails,” and occur in nearly all the temperate and tropical seas, sometimes at a great distance from land. Twelve species are known, and the majority have a wide
Fig 197 Caranx ferdau
geographical range. The larger grow to a length of from four to five feet, and are esteemed as food, especially at St. Helena, the Cape of Good Hope, in Japan, Australia, and New Zealand.
Seriolella and Seriolichthys, the latter from the Indo-Pacific, and distinguished by a finlet behind the dorsal and anal, are allied genera.
N Body oblong, sub-cylindrical, covered with small scales; a keel on each side of the tail The spinous dorsal consists of a few short free spines; finlets none Villiform teeth in the jaws, on the vomer and palatine bones.
The “Pilot-fish” (N. ductor) is a truly pelagic fish, known in all tropical and temperate seas. Its name is derived from its habit of keeping company with ships and large fish, especially Sharks. It is the Pompilus of the ancients, who describe it as pointing out the way to dubious or embarrassed sailors, and as announcing the vicinity of land by its sudden disappearance. It was therefore regarded as a sacred fish. The connection between the Shark and the Pilot-fish has received various interpretations, some observers having perhaps added more sentiment than is warranted by the actual facts. It was stated that the Shark never seized the Pilot-fish, that the latter was of great use to its big companion in conducting it and showing it the way to its food. Dr. Meyen in his “Reise um die Erde” states: “The pilot swims constantly in front of the Shark; we ourselves have seen three instances in which the Shark was led by the Pilot. When the Shark neared the ship the Pilot swam close to the snout, or near one of the pectoral fins of the animal. Sometimes he darted rapidly forwards or sidewards as if looking for something, and constantly went back again to the Shark. When we threw overboard a piece of bacon fastened on a great hook, the Shark was about twenty paces from the ship. With the quickness of lightning the Pilot came up, smelt at the dainty, and instantly swam back again to the Shark, swimming many times round his snout and splashing, as if to give him exact information as to the bacon. The Shark now began to put himself in motion, the Pilot showing him the way, and in a moment he was fast upon the hook.[42] Upon a later occasion we observed two Pilots in sedulous attendance on a Blue Shark, which we caught
in the Chinese Sea. It seems probable that the Pilot feeds on the Sharks’ excrements, keeps his company for that purpose, and directs his operations solely from this selfish view.” We believe that Dr. Meyen’s opinion, as expressed in his last words, is perfectly correct. The Pilot obtains a great part of his food directly from the Shark, in feeding on the parasitic crustaceans with which Sharks and other large fish are infested, and on the smaller pieces of flesh which are left unnoticed by the Shark when it tears its prey. The Pilot also, being a small fish, obtains greater security when in company of a Shark, which would keep at a distance all other fishes of prey that would be likely to prove dangerous to the Pilot. Therefore, in accompanying the Shark, the Pilot is led by the same instinct which makes it follow a ship. With regard to the statement that the Pilot itself is never attacked by the Shark all observers agree as to its truth; but this may be accounted for in the same way as the impunity of the swallow from the hawk, the Pilot-fish being too nimble for the unwieldy Shark.
The Pilot-fish does not always leave the vessels on their approach to land. In summer, when the temperature of the sea-water is several degrees above the average, Pilots will follow ships to the south coast of England into the harbour, where they are generally speedily caught. Pilot-fish attain a length of 12 inches only. When very young their appearance differs so much from the mature fish that they have been described as a distinct genus, Nauclerus. This fry is exceedingly common in the open ocean, and constantly obtained in the tow-net; therefore the Pilot-fish retains its pelagic habits also during the spawning season, and some of the spawn found by voyagers floating on the surface is, without doubt, derived from this species.
C —Body compressed, oblong; covered with small scales, singularly shaped, lanceolate, and hidden in the skin The first dorsal is formed by free spines in small numbers; the posterior rays of the second dorsal and anal are detached finlets. Small teeth in the jaws, on the vomer and palatine bones.
Twelve species are known from the Atlantic and Indo-Pacific; some enter brackish water, whilst others are more numerous at
