“Without Mother, You’d Have No People”: Mother Power as the Force Behind Welfare Rights

“Brood Mares” and Black Women’s Labor¹

In 1967 the US Senate Committee on Finance and the House Committee on Ways and Means proposed amendments to the Social Security Act which then forced the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) to protest. The proposed amendments sought to freeze federal funds and force mothers into work-incentive programs or risk being cut from the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program.² It also “seriously restrict[ed] the program of aid to children of unemployed fathers.”³ Louisiana Senator Russell Long led the Senate Finance Committee hearings when welfare rights activists, including Johnnie Tillmon, testified against the amendments. Angrily calling the women “brood mares,” Long went on to say, “If they can find the time to march in the streets, picket, and sit all day in committee hearing rooms, they can find the time to do some useful work.”⁴ He suggested they could pick up trash or kill rats, and even went so far as to interrupt Tillmon during her testimony and complained that he no longer had someone to iron his shirts due to welfare. With his tirade Long unleashed centuries-old stereotypes about Black women, their labor, and their sexuality. His use of “brood mare” alluded to slavery and the reliance on the fecundity of enslaved Black women to sustain the institution and build the US economy; his other statements also strongly insinuated that welfare recipients were lazy, echoing ongoing debates on the “dangers” of an expanded welfare state. A Southern Democrat in the middle of the Johnson administration’s push for a “Great Society,” Long represented the government’s true sentiments on welfare rights and Black women.⁵ Their activism and success in expanding welfare meant that this class of women no longer supplied domestic labor for the economy.⁶

In fighting for their children by expanding the welfare state, Tillmon and other welfare rights activists harnessed self-declared Mother Power and then used it to carve out their vision for a just society. Mothers in the NWRO determined what they wanted from the state, how to attain it, and made sure that their organizing tactics evoked motherhood as their motivation. Mother Power is welfare recipient-activists’ belief in their own expertise, which draws a connection between poverty, activism, and motherhood. This connection is fostered by their awareness of the ways in which their positionality is dictated by gender, race, class, and sexuality. It also represents a way to control the narrative on poor Black single mothers and, particularly at this moment in feminist and labor history, magnified the connection between capitalism and the welfare system as systems that both controlled their bodies and their sexuality.

Mother Power propelled Black women on welfare to organize local welfare rights groups, which eventually led to the formation of the NWRO and national movement for welfare rights. The phrase displays and acknowledges the role Black women play in the US economy and reminds everyone of what is at stake. The addition of social reproduction theory to the welfare rights movement further raises the stakes and the potential of this activism to liberate all groups of women, and makes this labor visible.⁷ Therefore, in this article I consider the use of Mother Power as the impetus behind the welfare rights movement and as an ideology that centered the needs of Black mothers and their children. I also posit that understanding social reproduction theory allows for a deeper examination of the women that led the welfare rights movement. Although the NWRO was multiracial and multigendered, the members were predominantly Black women. Knowing this, and with the historical denial of Black women’s right to mother in mind, this article examines how Mother Power allowed mother-activists to counter negative images of themselves as bad mothers and galvanized them to determine how to mother on their terms. This movement is particularly salient because of the recent attempts by the US government to leverage SNAP benefits (among other assistance programs) to end the government shutdown, thereby possibly starving millions of American citizens.⁸ The welfare rights movement provided a roadmap of the liberatory possibilities of a movement led by poor, Black women. These mothers operated on their own without a charismatic male leader, without being formally educated, and within a political climate that consistently demonized them. And they succeeded, albeit for a short time. This country still has no effective safety net to keep people out of poverty, but for a too brief moment, women at the bottom of the US racial hierarchy led a movement to end poverty that worked. 

Why Social Reproduction Theory Is Useful

In order to fully excavate Mother Power, the use of social reproduction theory as a framework is vital. Social reproduction theory reveals that the “animating force” behind capitalist production is human labor and not commodities.⁹ In doing this, it forces a deeper analysis of capitalism that centers women’s role in the economic process because they are the people performing the labor of birthing and raising human beings. Social reproduction theory further pushes forth the idea that any examination of capitalism must include an analysis of how the work of social reproduction reproduces and sustains the system. This is something that welfare recipient-activists understood implicitly. When a Detroit reporter interviewed Johnnie Tillmon in late August 1969 at the second annual NWRO conference, the reporter questioned the organization’s use of the term Mother Power. Tillmon responded, “You know where people come from don’t you? They come from mothers — so, really, without mother, you’d have no people — so, really, mothers have all the power.”¹⁰ Tillmon’s statement is the reason why I use social reproduction theory as a framework when revisiting the welfare rights movement. Her statement shows that Black women on welfare understood not only the importance of their role as mothers, but it also encapsulates the main facet of social reproduction theory: the notion that mothers produce people and people provide labor power which, in turn, reproduces capitalism.

A focus on Black women on welfare in this analysis both adds and requires a deeper understanding of the role of enslaved Black women’s unpaid labor in building the US economy before emancipation as well as the continued reliance on their paid and unpaid labor post-emancipation. If social reproduction theory is the theory, Mother Power is that theory in motion. Welfare rights activists did not state explicitly that their labor as mothers reproduced capitalism. However, they do describe the system, their role in the system, their value to it, and how to fix it. When this specific group of women — the late 1960s NWRO activists — are considered alongside social reproduction theory, the definition of Mother Power as well as the government pushback against welfare rights can be understood as more than an economic issue. The welfare rights movement and its intended effect, the expansion of the welfare state, exposed the state’s reliance on Black women’s labor as well as the inherent “danger” of the movement: the state’s loss of control over that labor power.

The “Brood Mare” Stampede

In 1968, on Mother’s Day, the NWRO participated in what they called a “Brood Mare Stampede.” The moniker was a cheeky response to the “brood mare” comments made by Senator Russell Long a year earlier. The march was a joint event between the NWRO and the Poor People’s Campaign aimed at preventing amendments to the Social Security Act that would lessen AFDC benefits and force mothers to take low-wage jobs. The NWRO made an appeal to all mothers “of this nation to aid welfare mothers in protecting their children against the effects of the bill.”¹¹ Specifically, the recipient-activists in NWRO viewed the series of amendments as the government taking away their children and controlling their lives: “The welfare officials want to break up our families . . . We refuse to be separated from our children one by one like puppys [sic] being separated from their mothers.”¹² This response conjured images of slavery, specifically the forced separation of mothers from their children. For these women to liken welfare officials to enslavers underscores their understanding of the legacy of slavery in how the white power structure, consisting of white leaders and lawmakers, viewed poor Black women. In conjunction with this, Black women historically had been denied the right to mother their children. Under enslavement their bodies were utilized to reproduce slavery, thereby building and sustaining the country. Through the acknowledgement of this history, poor Black mothers on welfare showed that they also understood how their labor as mothers was devalued. Under slavery, bearing and raising children meant that the slave economy grew. After slavery, their fecundity is not valued; it is a burden. In the 1960s the state continued to create hurdles through denial of welfare benefits, which kept Black women from adequately providing for and raising their children. Therefore, welfare rights activist’s adherence to Mother Power actively combatted centuries of harmful rhetoric. These women understood that although slavery had ended a long time ago, the government still controlled their bodies and their children.

The amendments to the Social Security Act were signed into law in January 1968. The NWRO responded to the amendments and Long’s remarks with a “brood mare stampede.” Coretta Scott King served as one of the speakers at the march that Mother’s Day. At the joint NWRO-People’s Power Campaign event, she proclaimed, “Our last and best hope for a future brotherhood and peace lies in the effective use of WOMAN POWER!” Although she did not use the term “Mother Power” in this instance, she did later declare, “the new force of UNITED MOTHER POWER!”¹³ Participants in the march displayed signage at the march that exclaimed, “MOTHER POWER! VIVA MAMA! MOTHERS KNOW BEST! REVOLUCION DE LAS MADRES!”¹⁴ This protest displayed the NWRO’s commitment to using Mother Power to lead and shape their own movement. Conversely, it showed the mothers’ willingness to embrace the “brood mare” label rather than distance themselves from it. They confronted this insult with political action, thereby taking back a modicum of control from the system. This, too, exemplified Mother Power. 

Mother Power in Detroit

Although the term became popular at the 1968 protest, Mother Power had been utilized by Detroit’s first welfare rights organization, the Westside Mothers (or “the Mothers”), since 1965. They made it part of the discourse in their organizing efforts and demands to alleviate poverty and supply material needs for mothers and their children. This organization came into fruition on 12^th Street, at the office of the Detroit chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). At the time, Gloria Brown, a Black housewife-turned-activist, acted as the chairperson for the chapter and worked in the office alongside Selma Goode, a white Jewish woman with a long history of leftist organizing in the Motor City. In the 1960s CORE was the only civil rights group organizing around economic justice, and many workers from CORE joined or aided welfare rights groups. CORE was instrumental in welfare rights activism because, at the time, it was one of  the only Black-led organization that was speaking on economic justice and actively engaging poor people to advocate for themselves. But CORE had been criticized by poor and working-class Black Detroiters for helping middle-class Black Americans only.¹⁵ For example, between 1960 and 1963, they worked on integrating a middle-class neighborhood of homeowners in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Black families with the means to purchase homes were the target of this activism, but many residents of Detroit did not want to move to white neighborhoods, they wanted adequate housing where they already lived. Due to redlining and urban planning, 12^th Street had gone from mostly middle-class African Americans to a street where pawn shops and illegal activities were rampant, so the placement of CORE’s Detroit office on 12^th Street was strategic. It represented an attempt to reach people living in the trenches of the city, so to speak.¹⁶

The opening of the office on 12^th Street resulted in the formation of the Westside Mothers. Sometime in 1965 a woman came to the CORE office looking for assistance attaining Aid to Children benefits. Subsequently, Goode and Brown met with other welfare mothers to hopefully improve their realities.¹⁷ The first official meeting of the Westside Mothers took place in Goode’s home, but she quickly realized that the women seemed uncomfortable, and when she questioned them, they told her they did not want to meet in her home. They also struck down her idea to fund a playground for their children. Instead, they wanted to fight Detroit Edison and the conglomeration of Detroit public service companies in order to gain public utilities.

The Mothers’ insistence to not only move the meetings out of Goode’s home but also to choose and execute what they wanted to protest is but one example of how Mother Power worked in Detroit specifically and welfare rights activism broadly. “Nothing about us, without us,” they told Goode.¹⁸ They did not need a white woman to tell them what campaigns to plan, they only needed her organizing experience to execute their ideas. Goode learned early that they were in charge, and this made the Westside Mothers very successful. In the summer 1966 the group decided to advocate for public utilities after they discovered that the gas company in Detroit considered ADC “an unreliable source of income.” The company also told them “any mother on ADC can be cut off tomorrow and then she won’t get any checks or help in paying her bills.”¹⁹ This was an immediate need, so the Mothers began to organize a plan of action. Rather than take Goode’s suggestion and build a park for recreation for their children, they wanted to tackle an issue that affected their and their children’s quality of life. On September 13, 1966 the Mothers joined with lawyers from the University of Detroit Urban Law Program to file a complaint before the Michigan Public Service Commission against Michigan Bell Telephone Company, the Detroit Edison Company, and Michigan Consolidated Gas Company.²⁰ The Westside Mothers charged the utility companies with discriminatory practices, arguing that the practice of demanding deposits based on one’s address and not the standard deposit policy based on individual credit standing disproportionately affected poor residents. More importantly, Detroit Edison refused to accept AFDC payments as deposits which directly affected the quality of life for members of the Westside Mothers. If welfare mothers could not use these payments as a deposit, they had no way to gain utilities. The head of the Commission, Peter B. Spivak, heard the complaint and suggested that Detroit Edison and the Westside Mothers negotiate the issue in private meetings rather than a courtroom. The utility company conceded that “the administration of policies has led to discrimination by the failure to evaluate persons on an individual basis.”²¹ Ultimately, Detroit Edison realized the location-based deposit practice was indeed discriminatory and could be successfully challenged. As a result, they agreed to handle the situation informally, perhaps to avoid a lengthy courtroom battle.

However, disagreements between CORE and the Westside Mothers about their best legal strategy highlighted some of the class animosity that existed between CORE and the people they wanted to help. The Mothers fired the attorneys from the Urban Law Program in March 1966, after finding out that CORE had been corresponding with the lawyers from the Urban Law Program without consulting them. CORE wanted this case to set a precedent for other burgeoning similar lawsuits in other states. But the Mothers wanted their needs met immediately, before the next winter, so that AFDC recipients and other poor people would have heat. In some other cities, CORE organized to integrate housing, colleges, and businesses for middle-class Black people only.²² By firing the lawyers, the Westside Mothers took control of their case. With the help of legal aid, they decided to drop the formal complaint against Detroit Edison and deal with the Michigan Public Service Commission directly. They won. The commission came to the decision that welfare grants qualified as income for the purposes acquiring public service. The victory occurred almost two years after their initial complaint to the Michigan Public Service Commission. The settlement allowed for the expansion of utilities to more of Detroit’s impoverished citizens and stipulated that companies would eliminate security deposits for welfare recipients considered “good risks.”²³

In March 1968 Selma Goode received a letter from a lawyer at the University of Pennsylvania who had heard of the Michigan Bell “experiment.” He stated that he had presented the specifics of the Mothers’ battle with Michigan Public Service Commission to a public service company in Pennsylvania and that this company “drew heavily” on the Detroit campaign, resulting in the company adopting the Detroit Edison credit procedure. The lawyer also looked forward to possibly working with the Westside Mothers in the future.²⁴ Correspondence like this reveals how the Mothers’ victory traveled across the country, to Pennsylvania and elsewhere, where it created a new precedent for other poor people’s movements.

The Westside Mothers’ success not only helped AFDC recipients but also helped anyone receiving benefits from the government obtain public service. Nevertheless, their continuous fight with the Michigan Public Service Commission after the settlement predicted how they would continue to fight the state in future battles. A pattern of appeasement and then retrenchment by the state first appeared after this fight, followed by a constant tug of war which has continued throughout the organization’s existence. A victory did not mean the fight ended, but because these women were motivated by the need to care for themselves and their children, they continued to fight in spite of the reaction of the state. 

The Mothers’ choice to focus on fighting Detroit’s public service companies may seem inconsequential. However, their choices showed an ability to form and advocate for their own agenda. It also showed activists like Selma Goode and Gloria Brown, as well as outside legal advisors and national organizations, that the Mothers did not need (or want) them to choose their battles for them. For the Westside Mothers, Brown and Goode’s organizing experience was needed, but they made sure that both women understood their roles. One way they accomplished this is by making sure a welfare mother accompanied Goode and Brown to any meetings or hearings that involved their organization. While in the NWRO tensions over leadership became one of the reasons the group ended, in establishing themselves as the leaders of their movement, the Black women in the Westside Mothers outlined the role that Brown and Goode had in the group moving forward which guaranteed that Mother Power remained as the motor of the movement in Detroit.

The NWRO succeeded in helping to expand welfare until 1972. The Westside Mothers outlasted the national organization and movement in spite of the ongoing political and social pushback against AFDC. Black women on welfare understood their positionality and refused to internalize these negative perceptions. Rather, they embraced being leaders of their families and used the power they felt from that role to advocate for themselves and their children. 

Conclusion

The welfare rights movement existed right in the middle of debates and legislative policies that defined poor Black mothers as a problem. These narratives explain how the vilification of poor, single, Black mothers served to ostracize the welfare rights movement from other Black freedom struggles of the period. There already existed a divide between low-income Black women and affluent Black women within political movements and in everyday life, but racist depictions like the “welfare queen” widened that separation. Because Black women’s groups like the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) and the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) operated within the confines of the politics of respectability, they kept their distance politically. Middle-class Black women, for example, in response to racially and falsely perceived notions of Black women’s hypersexuality, limited the number of children they had.²⁵ One can assume that had they been labeled “brood mares,” they would not have conceived and then participated in a “brood mare stampede.” Consequently, amidst mother-activists’ fight for the right to single motherhood, middle-class Black women did not openly support the welfare rights movement.

Under capitalism, social reproduction theory reminds us that people are the most important commodity necessary for the system to function. Mother Power and welfare rights activism are thus already in conversation social reproduction theory. Theorist Susan Ferguson, suggests that social reproduction theory “explores the ways in which the daily and generational renewal of human life (and thus of human labor power) is absolutely essential to the decade-over-decade tenacity not merely of inequality, but of capitalism.”²⁶ Capitalism is more than an economic system, and Ferguson posits that analyzing it only as such “fail[s] to examine the ways in which wider social reproduction of the system — that is the daily and generational reproductive labor that occurs in households, schools, hospitals, prisons, and so on — sustains the drive for accumulation.”²⁷ Although Tillmon and other mother-activists did not explicitly name and critique capitalism, they did have a critique of how it failed them and oppressed them. Tillmon referred to it as “the man” in her article, “Welfare Is a Women’s Issue,” because it dictated how women should spend their welfare benefits. Moreover, Tillmon also highlighted how capitalism classified welfare recipients as lazy mothers while simultaneously glamorizing rich white women that relied on the combination of their husbands’ paychecks and Black women in domestic service to raise their children.²⁸

Activists from Tillmon to the Westside Mothers and their peers demonstrated their awareness of the hypocrisy of capitalism and the “work ethic,” reaffirming the fact that Black women’s reproductive labor is and always has been a key facet of how capitalism functions in the United States. Their activism underscored that due to this they had not been able to raise their own children. Mother-activists like Tillmon channeled Mother Power into boycotts, protests, sit-ins, and lawsuits. In doing so, they created their own vision of motherhood imbued with an analysis of how race, gender, sexuality, and class affected welfare’s development, procedures, and policies. They placed themselves at the forefront of a movement to make welfare equal and ensure better lives not only for themselves, but for everyone.   

Endnotes

1. This article is built on the work of several historians that chronicled the welfare rights movement nationally and locally. See: Felicia Kornbluh, The Battle for Welfare Rights: Politics and Poverty in Modern America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Premilla Nadasen, Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2005); Annelise Orleck, Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2006); Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994 (W.W. Norton & Company, 1999); or Rhonda Y. Williams, The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles against Urban Inequality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).[↑]
2. AFDC was the welfare program that provided benefits for mothers and children. It came as part of FDR’s New Deal in 1935 and was ended in 1996 by President Bill Clinton.[↑]
3. NWRO, Now! National Welfare Leaders Newsletter 2, no. 8 (1968).[↑]
4. White, Too Heavy a Load, 236.[↑]
5. Russell B. Long, Chairman, “The Welfare Mess: A Scandal of Legitimacy and Desertion: Address of Hon. Committee on Finance and Supporting Material,” Congress of the United States, 32nd Congress, First Session, December 14, 1971.[↑]
6. Further information on why liberals and conservatives agreed on limiting and then ending AFDC can be found in Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (Zone Books, 2017).[↑]
7. In Women and the Subversion of the Community, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James discuss how the liberation of “the working-class housewife” brings forth the liberation of all women because all women, whether working in the home, outside of the home, or both are doing the work of social reproduction which is necessary for capitalist production. The liberation of the “working class housewife,” according to Dalla Costa and James, frees women at the determinant position of all women. Similarly, welfare rights activist Johnnie Tillmon contends in “Welfare Is a Women’s Issue,” that the liberation of welfare women will really liberate women in this country because of the ways poor, Black women on welfare are oppressed in multiple ways due to race, gender, and class. Claudia Jones also expresses in “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman” that by addressing the neglect of poor, Black women in the Communist Party, and the labor movement in general, you will in effect liberate everyone. Present in all is an understanding of the importance and value of women’s reproductive labor, which these women also understand has been devalued under capitalism. Also important is they all note that the women at the “bottom” of their respective racial-gender hierarchies (working-class women for James and Dalla Costa and poor, Black women for Jones and Tillmon) inhabit a unique position that leaves them most vulnerable to be exploited by capitalism and this is the reason that their liberation ensures liberation for all.[↑]
8. “Explainer: Understanding the SNAP Program and what Cuts to these Benefits May Mean,” Harvard Kennedy School, November 10, 2025, https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/policy-topics/social-policy/explainer-understanding-snap-program-and-what-cuts.[↑]
9. Tithi Bhattacharya, “Mapping Social Reproduction Theory,” in Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (Pluto Press, 2017).[↑]
10. Susan Halas, “Without Mother, You’d Have No People,” Detroit Free Press, August 23, 1969.[↑]
11. Now! National Welfare Leaders Newsletter, Moorland Spingarn Research Collection, National Welfare Rights Organization Papers, Howard University.[↑]
12. “Statement to Governing Body of National Welfare Rights Organization,” in NOW! News, Moorland Spingarn Research Collection, NWRO Papers, Howard University.[↑]
13. Now! National Welfare Leaders Newsletter.[↑]
14. Now! National Welfare Leaders Newsletter.[↑]
15. Sidney Fine, Violence in the Model City: The Cavanaugh Administration, Race Relations, and the Detroit Riot of 1967 (Michigan State University Press, 2007), 24.[↑]
16. Letter from Gloria Brown to Floyd McKissick, December 3, 1966, TN114529, Gloria Brown Papers, Bentley Historical Library, The University of Michigan.[↑]
17. “ADC” is what Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) was called in Michigan.[↑]
18. Ben Falik, “Selma Goode Represents,” Detroit Jewish News, September 2019.[↑]
19. Westside Mothers Flyer, Box 3, Folder 13, Westside Mothers Records, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.[↑]
20. The Urban Law Project, originally called the Urban Law Clinic and now known as the Detroit-Mercy Law Clinic, was founded in 1965. It is federally funded and staffed by law students who handle litigation for people with low-income. The differing stories come from the Westside Mothers Records and the memo from the National Consumer Law Center. See “A Brief History of the Westside Mothers,” Box 2, Folder 3, Westside Mothers Records, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University; and “Utility Consumers’ Counsel and Information Act of 1971, Hearings, Ninety-Second Congress, First Session, on S. 607, to Establish an office of Utility Consumers’ Counsel and Information” – United States Senate Committee on Government Operations, Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Relations, 100; Box 4, Folder 5, Westside Mothers Records, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.[↑]
21. United States Congress, “Utility Consumers’ Counsel and Information Act of 1971: Hearings, Ninety-Second Congress, First Session, on S. 607, to Establish an Office of Utility Consumers’ Counsel and Information,” Senate Committee on Government Operations, Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Relations, Government Printing Office, 1971, 100.[↑]
22. Belinda Robnett, “Commentary and Debate: Formal Titles and Bridge Leaders: Reply to Keys,” American Journal of Sociology 102, no. 6 (1997).[↑]
23. Sharon Nelton, “Union for Poor Goal of New Unit,” Detroit Free Press, September 19, 1967.[↑]
24. “Utility Project,” Box 4, Folder 5, Westside Mothers Records, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.[↑]
25. White, Too Heavy a Load, 237.[↑]
26. Susan Ferguson, “Social Reproduction: What’s the Big Idea?,” Pluto Press Blog, 2017, https://www.plutobooks.com/blog/social-reproduction-theory-ferguson/.[↑]
27. Bhattacharya, “Mapping Social Reproduction Theory,” 3.[↑]
28. Johnnie Tillmon, “Welfare Is a Women’s Issue,” Ms. Magazine, 1972.[↑]