PATHOLOGIZING BLACK MOTHERHOOD: WELFARE POLICY AS A VESTIGE OF SLAVERY, JIM CROW AND JANE CROW

Author

Lakendria M. Kenner, Southern Illinois University CarbondaleFollow

Date of Award

8-1-2025

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

History

First Advisor

Smoot, Pamela

Second Advisor

Brown, Ras Michael

Abstract

This dissertation challenges dominant narratives that attribute black inequality to cultural pathology, particularly the structure of Black families. Black women, due their prominent role in family life, have long served as scapegoats through which the United States escapes deflects responsibility for the conditions it created through slavery, Jim Crow, and economic exclusion. Public policy and discourse often frame Black female-headed households-especially those receiving welfare and or subsidized housing-as moral failures responsible for poverty, crime, and social decay. Since the arrival of African captives in America, controlling images have been constructed to portray Black women as biologically and culturally inferior. between the antebellum period and the Jim Crow era. This imagery made various claims about black women’s personhood and conduct. Among these claims were the notion that, black woman were expected to reproduce and expand the enslaved population and care for white families, that black women create status and domesticity for white women, that black women experience no pain-and can thus be worked beyond exhaustion, that they are licentious, promiscuous, evil, treacherous, irresponsible mothers, sexually available, and unfeminine. These stereotypes- including the Mammy, the Jezebel, the matriarch, and the welfare mother- evolved from antebellum and Jim Crow ideologies and continue to shape perceptions of Black women today. Their convergence in terms like “hood rat” reflects enduring views of Black women as hypersexual, unfeminine, irresponsible, and undeserving of support or protection.