Stretched Thin

Stretched Thin looks back at a critical moment of policy change and suggests how welfare policy in the United States can be changed to better address the needs of poor families and the nation, question the claim that welfare reform has been a success.

Sandra Morgen is Professor of Anthropology and Associate Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Oregon. She is author of books including Into Our Own Hands: The Women's Health Movement in the United States, 1969–1990 and coeditor most recently of Security Disarmed: Critical Perspectives on Gender, Race, and Militarization. Joan Acker is Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of Oregon and author of Class Questions: Feminist Answers and Doing Comparable Worth: Gender, Class, and Pay Equity. Jill Weigt is Associate Professor of Sociology at California State University–San Marcos.

This is a wonderfully thoughtful and illuminating book. For more than a decade, Sandra Morgen, Joan Acker, and Jill Weigt peered into the workings of the Oregon welfare system after the implementation of the draconian reform of 1996. The result is a closely observant picture of just what went on. We learn about the real human costs to mothers and children of the much-heralded shift to 'work first' and 'personal responsibility.' We also learn about the pressures on the staff of the local agencies as they tried to adapt a neoliberal policy designed in Washington to the exigencies of the lives of the poor and troubled people they were mandated to help.

Carol Stack, author of All Our Kin and Call To Home:

A stunning dialogue between ethnography and poverty policy, Stretched Thin takes risks to chronicle the messy moral incongruities that lay at the basis of welfare reform. Sandra Morgen, Joan Acker, and Jill Weigt urge us to face the myths we so readily accept about work, family, and poverty. They have written a classic that will stand the test of time.

Sanford Schram, author of Welfare Discipline: Discourse, Governance, and Globalization:

Stretched Thin is a tour de force. It proves that the best scholarship makes for good politics. The story is sobering, but presented in highly accessible prose and based on stunning empirical research. It tells us all we need to know about neoliberal social welfare policy today: it fails to deliver for the poor. Here is engaged scholarship at its best. Read it and weep!