In Domestic Contradictions, Priya Kandaswamy analyzes how race, class, gender, and sexuality shaped welfare practices in the United States alongside the conflicting demands that this system imposed upon Black women. She turns to an often-neglected moment in welfare history, the advent of the Freedmen's Bureau during Reconstruction, and highlights important parallels with welfare reform in the late twentieth century. Kandaswamy demonstrates continuity between the figures of the “vagrant” and “welfare queen” in these time periods, both of which targeted Black women. These constructs upheld gendered constructions of domesticity while defining Black women's citizenship in terms of an obligation to work rather than a right to public resources. Pushing back against this history, Kandaswamy illustrates how the Black female body came to represent a series of interconnected dangers—to white citizenship, heteropatriarchy, and capitalist ideals of productivity —and how a desire to curb these threats drove state policy. In challenging dominant feminist historiographies, Kandaswamy builds on Black feminist and queer of color critiques to situate the gendered afterlife of slavery as central to the historical development of the welfare state.

Priya Kandaswamy is Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Mills College.

Acknowledgments  vii
1. Welfare Reform and the Afterlife of Slavery  1
2. Making State, Making Family  29
3. Marriage and the Making of Gendered Citizenship  59
4. Domestic Labor and the Politics of Reform  105
5. The Chains of Welfare  151
Conclusion  193
Notes  197
Bibliography  215
Index  227