We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Contesting Family Support Obligations
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 October 2023
The expansion of responsible relative laws, including property lien and recovery laws, generated significant opposition and activism against these provisions. This chapter addresses the key critiques of those provisions, relying in part on the voices of recipients of Old Age Assistance and their families. Opponents contested the administration of these laws and the family norms underscoring support obligations. Advocacy organizations fought these provisions’ enforcement and pushed for their repeal. The organized response to responsible relative laws, as well as protests by individual recipients via fair hearings and court challenges, represent an early version of the welfare rights movement. While the efforts yielded limited success until the 1970s, they did bring attention to administrative practices in public assistance administration and offered a voice to the elderly relying on public benefits and the families required to provide support.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
