A Footnote to Welfare

A WELFARE MOTHER is a footnote to New York City life, It presents a tiny bit of information, intentionally limited in scope, on what ought to be at least one very long chapter in the book of New York: welfare and the Department of Social Services. Susan Sheehan, a writer on the staff of the New Yorker, where this first appeared in a slightly different form, has written a profile of a Puerto Rican welfare mother, describing for 95 pages the daily comings and goings of this woman and her family.

On the surface, it is an extremely impressive journalistic work. Sheehan spent over a year with her subject and seems to know everything one in her position possibly could about the woman--Carmen Santana--and her daily routines. But, as extensive as her knowledge may be, she keeps to herself what is no doubt the most fascinating and necessary aspect of a welfare mother's life--her emotions--and instead shares with us only what pertains to her economic survival.

Perhaps the rationale behind this course is that there is a universality to economics, while personal reflections are individual and speak only particular truths. But a profile need not speak for an entire system--and, as it did here, trying to form such generalizations prevents a writer from penetrating the surface. A seven-page recounting of Santana's shopping strategy on the day she receives her welfare check, complete with the number of blocks she walks in each direction, names of the streets she passes, exactly what she buys and precisely how much she spends, sheds little light on the internals of being a welfare mother. Rather, it tells readers what most knew anyway--that a welfare check does not provide enough money to purchase life's necessities. Statistics would be pretty much as effective here as the seven-page description.

This is not to claim Sheehan's work useless; she has found, after a grueling and frustrating search (as she describes in an afterword) a woman who allowed her, and, vicariously, the reader, into her home, to observe, to question and to describe. Sheehan is familiar enough to be there when Santana discovers her son is mainlining heroin; but is that so routine that Santana accepts it in stride, without a moan or a whimper even? So it appears from the description the reader is offered.

THOUGH ON THE WHOLE this approach further stereotypes a welfare mother's lot, Sheehan does include some perceptions that hold our interest in this welfare mother. Santana does not worry about her so-called cheating of the welfare system, accepting extra money from the man she lives with and collecting for one child more than lives at home, because she needs it--there is no other way for her to get by. Similarly, she does not preoccupy herself with what an outsider may think of a welfare mother who does not even attempt to work; she has learned that the Department of Social Services taxes welfare recipients' outside earnings 100 per cent, so declines to serve as a cash funnel. Besides, where would she leave her children? Who would make sure they went to school (which she can hardly be sure of herself)?

Despite these insights, reading A Welfare Mother is an excruciatingly frustrating experience. The typical reader might mutter back at the author, "But what did she say?" The text is an ambling description that lacks any clues to the humanity behind the name Carmen Santana. It is written as a newspaper article, in crisp, clear, objective, unemotional prose, and from start to finish the journalistic facade never cracks.

Carmen Santana is a welfare mother. She lives in a four-room apartment in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn with the four children she had by a man named Vicente Santana, whom she lived with from 1959, when she first came to New York from Puerto Rico, until 1969. A present member of the household is Francisco Delgado, whom she took up with some months before she and Mr. Santana parted...

That is the opening. The tone never fluctuates.

Sheehan spent nearly two years with Santana, and hardly penetrated the pedestrian facts and figures of her life. Her view of welfare through an entirely maternal lens is tragically blind to the violent conflict and controversy surrounding the welfare system today.