Hey, I think I probably offended you too, I have a knack for that. Gave the impression I was calling you a sell-out. Not so. Didn't occur to me that was the implication though, until you reacted.
>One of the numerous problems I have is that I've depended on my memory
>mostly (with help from web links to refresh the aging brain), and
>never went back to study those times and all the people who were
>involved, so I have gapping holes to make up for. (I'll go back to web
>and rummage around to read about the AFDC battles Max mentioned. I
>think there is an interesting story about Governor Reagan in that
>background that directly effected our program's students...)
>
>To make up for both rudeness and ignorance, I just read a brief
>biographical sketch on Francis Piven. Her biography will be of
>interest to the list and help also fill in more backgrond on the War
>on Poverty and OEO.
>
>
>``Widely recognized as one of America's most thoughtful and provocative
>commentators on America's social welfare system, Frances Fox Piven,
>political scientist, activist, and educator, was born in Calgary,
>Alberta in 1932. She came to the U.S. in 1933 and was naturalized in
>1953, the same year she received her B.A. in City Planning from the
>University of Chicago. She also received her M.A. (1956) and
>Ph.D. (1962) from the University of Chicago. While married to Herman
>Piven, she had a daughter, Sarah. After a brief stint in New York as a
>city planner, she became a research associate at one of the country's
>first anti-poverty agencies, Mobilization for Youth -- a
>comprehensive, community-based service organization on New York City's
>Lower East Side. At its height the organization coordinated more than
>fifty experimental programs designed to reduce poverty and crime. A
>1965 paper entitled "Mobilizing the Poor: How It Can Be Done,"
>launched Piven and her co-author, Columbia University professor
>Richard Cloward, into an ongoing national conversation on the welfare
>state. Piven and Cloward's collaborative work came to influence both
>careers, and the two eventually married. Their early work together
>provided a theoretical base for the National Welfare Rights
>Organization (NWRO), the first in a long line of grass-roots
>organizations in which Piven acted as founder, advisor, and/or
>planner. Piven taught in the Columbia University School of Social Work
>from 1966 to 1972. From 1972 to 1982 she was a professor of political
>science at Boston University. In 1982 she joined the Graduate Center,
>City University of New York. She has co-authored with Richard Cloward
>Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (1971); The
>Politics of Turmoil: Essays on Poverty, Race and the Urban Crisis
>(1974); Poor People's Movements (1977); The New Class War (1982); The
>Mean Season (1987); Why Americans Don't Vote (1988); and The Breaking
>of the American Social Compact (1997), as well as dozens of articles,
>both with Cloward and independently, in scholarly and popular
>publications.
>
>Piven is known equally for her contributions to social theory and for
>her social activism. Over the course of her career, she has served on
>the boards of the ACLU and the Democratic Socialists of America, and
>has also held offices in several professional associations, including
>the American Political Science Association and the Society for the
>Study of Social Problems. In the 1960s, Piven worked with
>welfare-rights groups to expand benefits; in the eighties and nineties
>she campaigned relentlessly against welfare cutbacks. A veteran of the
>war on poverty and subsequent welfare-rights protests both in New York
>City and on the national stage, she has been instrumental in
>formulating the theoretical underpinnings of those movements. In
>Regulating the Poor, Piven and Cloward argued that any advances the
>poor have made throughout history were directly proportional to their
>ability to disrupt institutions that depend upon their
>cooperation. This academic commentary proved useful to George Wiley
>and the NWRO as well as a great many other community organizers and
>urban theorists. Since 1994, Piven has led academic and activist
>opposition to the "Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity
>Reconciliation Act of 1996," (known as the Personal Responsibility
>Act), appearing in numerous public forums, from television's Firing
>Line to the U.S. Senate, to discuss the history of welfare and the
>potential impact of welfare reform initiatives.
>
>In corollary activity, Piven's study of voter registration and
>participation patterns found fruition in the 1983 founding of the
>HumanSERVE (Human Service Employees Registration and Voter Education)
>Campaign. The Campaign's registration reform effort culminated in the
>1994 passage of the National Voter Registration Act, or the
>"Motor-Voter" bill, designed to increase voter registration,
>especially among low-income groups.
>
>Michael Harrington, whose book The Other America helped focus the
>nation's attention on poverty in the early 1960s, has said that Piven
>is "one of the few academics who bridge the world of scholarship and
>the world of activism." Of this mix, Piven herself has said: "One
>informs the other, energizes the other . . . There are dimensions of
>political life that can't be seen if you stay on the sidelines or
>close to the top . . ." The larger significance of both activism and
>academics in Piven's life can be gleaned from her remark that such
>work "also has to do with comradeship and friendship, . . . with being
>part of the social world in which you live and trying to make some
>imprint on it, . . . with the real satisfaction of throwing in with
>the ordinary people who have always been the force for humanitarian
>social change."
>
>© 2003 Smith College. All rights reserved.''
>
>http://asteria.fivecolleges.edu/findaids/sophiasmith/mnsss52_bioghist.html
>
>There is an archive FFP's papers and other material indexed at the
>above...
>
>CG
>
>___________________________________
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