Fatherless child insurance: Lessons from an unsuccessful U.S. policy proposal

This article describes a policy proposal of the 1960s for a program called fatherless child insurance. If enacted, the program would have expanded the New Deal social insurance tradition by bringing divorced and separated single mothers and their minor children, regardless of income, under the umbrella of Social Security protection. The political failure of the proposal provides some evidence to suggest that Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward were correct in claiming, in a defense of Aid to Families with Dependent Children program expansions of the 1960s, that it would be politically difficult to add universal programs.