It was Ronald Reagan, the king of the "welfare queen" anecdotes, who was the politician most responsible for promoting the gendering of welfare popular imagination, and beginning in the 1970s his fractured fairy tales got a great deal of media play. He specialized in the exaggerated, outrageous tale that was almost always unsubstantiated, usually false, yet so sensational that it merited repeated recounting. "We just don't know," he sputtered in 1971, "how many are getting four or five or even more checks under different names." And because his ‘examples’ of welfare queens drew on existing stereotypes of welfare cheats and resonated with news stories about welfare fraud, they did indeed gain real traction. Note the directness and certainty of the story, as if it were about a specific woman he knew personally, this one used during his campaign for president in 1976.
"The mommy myth: the idealization of motherhood and how it has undermined all women" by Susan Jeanne Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels
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