The Battle for Welfare Rights: Politics and Poverty in Modern
America by Felicia Kornbluh. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2007. 287pp. Historian Felicity Kornbluh's
work illuminates important social and economic aspects of the
unfinished struggle for equality in the USA , especially
regarding poor, African American women. Her work narrates the
various successes in the 1960s and 1970s of welfare activists
and recipients (with the support of allies from universities,
churches, the social work sector and law clinics) in obtaining
more substantial welfare funds and benefits in kind. The
successes came as a result of a spectrum of activities from
"fair hearing" reviews in ad hoc welfare tribunals,
demonstrations and lobbying activities, suits against local
welfare officials and even constitutional litigation. Kornbluh
argues that welfare recipients' pursuits of their rights were
inextricably linked with the pursuit of equality, in particular
of full citizenship within the American consumer society