Children of Incarcerated Parents

Feminist Critique
Feminists argue the Moynihan Report presents a "male-centric" view of social problems.
They believe that Moynihan failed to take into account basic rational incentives for
marriage. He did not acknowledge that women had historically engaged in marriage in
part out of need for material resources, as adequate wages were otherwise denied by
cultural traditions excluding women from most jobs outside the home. With the
expansion of welfare in the US in the mid to late 20th century, women gained better
access to government resources intended to reduce family and child poverty. Women
also increasingly gained access to the workplace. As a result, more women were able to
subsist independently when men had difficulty finding work.
Counter-Response
Declaring Moynihan "prophetic," Ken Auletta, in his 1982 The Underclass, proclaimed
that "one cannot talk about poverty in America, or about the underclass, without talking
about the weakening family structure of the poor." Both the Baltimore Sun and the New
York Times ran a series on the black family in 1983, followed by a 1985 Newsweek
article called "Moynihan: I Told You So." In 1986, CBS aired the documentary, The
Vanishing Black Family, produced by Bill Moyers, a onetime aide to President Johnson.
He affirmed Moynihan's findings.
In a 2001 interview with PBS, Moynihan said:
"My view is we had stumbled onto a major social change in the circumstances of postmodern
society. It was not long ago in this past century that an anthropologist working in
London – a very famous man at the time, Malinowski – postulated what he called the first
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