She may very well have also suffered from mental illness. “Most of the time, it worked.” She used a rotating cast of aliases to get those checks, as well as to perpetrate other frauds in other programs and private systems like life insurance. Her system “preyed on the sympathies of overworked bureaucrats and exploited rules designed to help the vulnerable and destitute,” Levin reports. She certainly perpetrated welfare fraud, showing up to aid offices and describing hardships she hadn’t experienced and children she didn’t have to get expedited checks from the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, the cash welfare program now known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Racism had limited her education, and racism also limited her employment opportunities, even if she often leaned into racial fluidity or even assumed a white identity. (Her male partners were never charged.) While she did appear to make attempts at formal employment, she was also at a disadvantage. She quickly accumulated a criminal record mostly thanks to local laws meant to control “loose women” and the spread of venereal disease her first charge was in Seattle for disorderly conduct in 1943, when she was branded “a promiscuous woman,” Levin reports. It was around then that she left home and began her own itinerant lifestyle, moving first to a mostly black neighborhood in Oakland, California. She gave birth to her first child in 1940 around the age of 14 and would go on to give birth to four more over her lifetime. She was expelled from an all-white school at age six and didn’t make it past the second grade. On top of the financial deprivation, she was often made to feel like an outsider in her own family because of her race, never allowed in her uncle’s home and kept out of family functions. Martha grew up the child of itinerant sharecroppers who made little money and were often devastated by droughts and floods. The family frequently lied about her race, as telling the truth could have made her mother guilty of a felony. She had been conceived in Alabama, where, at the time, sexual relations between white and black people were illegal and punishable by prison time. Linda Taylor was born in 1926 as Martha Louise White in Golddust, Tennessee to a white woman named Lydia Mooney White. By examining her reality, we can finally question the very concept of a welfare queen and deconstruct a myth spun out of selective details. The strength of The Queen lies in Levin’s meticulous scouring of the historical record to paint a picture of a woman who was infuriatingly difficult to pin down during her lifetime, resurrecting a biography of the person who would become the ur–welfare queen. Meanwhile, it ignored both the racism and sexism she faced throughout her life, as well as the far more horrific crimes she perpetrated-crimes that were simply of no political use to the men who wielded her story like a weapon. And it was all based on one arguably minor facet of an actual woman’s complex life: her use of fake names and fake sob stories to get public benefits.
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