aid to dependent children

The first federal welfare benefits in the United States came in 1935, and included Aid to Dependent Children, “to enable the mother to stay at home and devote herself to housekeeping and the care of her children,” according to Social Security documents from the time.

Three of the most important were Aid to Dependent Children, unemployment insurance, and Social Security.

In the 1930s, a federal program, Aid to Dependent Children, extended help to more mothers and replaced those pensions.

One reason that Congress started giving financial assistance to poor households headed by women in the 1930s, under a program originally titled Aid to Dependent Children, was so they could stay home with their children and not compete with men for jobs, Goldin said.

“In his influential 1965 report ‘The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,’ ” Levin writes, “assistant secretary of labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan framed public aid as an explicitly racial issue. Aid to Dependent Children had been ‘established in 1935 principally to care for widows and orphans,’ Moynihan wrote, but ‘the steady expansion of this welfare program, as of public assistance programs in general, can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States.’