Women and Poverty Psychology, Public Policy, and Social Justice

by Bullock, Heather E.

• ISBN13: 9781405183505
• ISBN10: 1405183500
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2013-12-04
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

Poor Women in an Affluent Nation provides asocial psychological analysis of social class and class-based inequity, particularly in relation to womens poverty. The books overarching goal is to provide readers with a critical analysis of the social and structural factors that contribute to womens poverty, class-based power relations, the socio-cultural beliefs that justify class-based inequality. It is useful for both graduate and upper level undergraduate courses in psychology, sociology, social work, political science, and some interdisciplinary areas as a main text or supplemental reader.

Author Biography

Heather E. Bullock is an associate professor of psychology at University of California at Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on the social psychological dimensions of poverty and economic (in)justice, particularly discrimination against low-income women and the beliefs that predict support for a wide range of welfare and anti-poverty policies. Her work is guided by an overarching interest in the psychological processes and structural forces that contribute to the political mobilization of low and middle-income women on behalf of economic justice. She is the incoming director of the Center for Justice, Tolerance, and Community at UC – Santa Cruz, a progressive research institute dedicated to tackling issues of diversity, equity, and social justice and the building of collaborative university-community partnerships.

Dr. Bullock has participated in a number of initiatives to raise psychologists’ attention to class-based discrimination and poverty. She was a member of APA's Task Force on Socioeconomic Status (SES), which advocated successfully for the creation of a permanent standing committee on SES and social class within the APA. She is currently serving a three-year term on the newly established APA Committee on SES. She is currently co-chairing the Joint Task Force on Inclusion of Social Class in the Psychology Curriculum (Divisions 9 and 35).

Before moving joining the faculty at UCSC, Washington DC to serve as an APA/AAAS Congressional Fellow with the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, and Labor, and Pensions - Democratic Office. She worked for Senator Edward M. Kennedy on a wide range of social and economic issues related to poverty, racism, welfare reform, hunger, youth violence, and early childhood education.

Her published work appears in the Journal of Social Issues, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, and Feminism & Psychology. She co-authored, Psychology and Economic Injustice: Personal, Professional, and Political Intersections (2006) with Bernice Lott. She is currently serving on the editorial board of the Journal of Social Issues.

Table of Contents

About the Author ix

1 Women and Poverty: An Ongoing Crisis 1

2 Structural Sources of Women’s Poverty and Homelessness 16

3 Beliefs about Poverty, Wealth, and Social Class: Implications for Intergroup Relations and Social Policy 40

4 Welfare Reform at 15 and Beyond: How Are Low-Income Women and Families Faring? 70

5 Low-Income Women, Critical Resistance, and Welfare Rights Activism 104
Co-authored with Wendy M. Limbert and Roberta A. Downing

6 Women and Economic Justice: Pitfalls, Possibilities, and Promise 140

References 159

Index 192