Frances Fox Piven
Personal Information
Description
Frances Fox Piven was born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Her family moved to the United States in 1933. She became a naturalized citizen in 1953, the year she received an undergraduate degree in City Planning from the University of Chicago. She received her master's degree in 1956 and her doctorate in 1962, also from the University of Chicago. She married Herman Piven, with whom she had a daughter. After graduating, she became a city planner in New York City, but soon left her profession to become a research associate at Mobilization for Youth, one of the country's first anti-poverty agencies. In 1965 she co-authored the paper "Mobilizing the Poor: How It Can Be Done," which helped her become nationally recognized as an expert on the welfare state. She married the paper's co-author, Columbia University professor Richard Cloward. She established the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). In 1966, she joined the Columbia University School of Social Work. In 1972, she became a professor of political science at Boston University. In 1982 she joined the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She has co-authored with Richard Cloward several books and papers, including Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (1971), The Politics of Turmoil: Essays on Poverty, Race and the Urban Crisis (1974), Poor People's Movements (1977), The New Class War (1982), The Mean Season (1987), Why Americans Don't Vote (1988), and The Breaking of the American Social Compact (1997). She earned her PhD from the University of Chicago in 1962. In 2006-2007 she served as the President of the American Sociological Association. She was married to her long-time collaborator Richard Cloward until his death in 2001. Together with Cloward, she designed the "Cloward-Piven Strategy," outlined in an article written in the may 1966 issue of The Nation entitled "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty." is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, and a prominent member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Books
Keeping down the black vote
Today, over forty years after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 demolished bars to voting for African Americans, the effort to prevent black people — as well as Latinos and the poor in general — from voting is experiencing a resurgence. A myriad of new tactics, some of which adopt the mantle of “election reform,” has evolved to suppress the vote. In this sharply argued new book, three of America’s leading experts on party politics and elections demonstrate that our political system is as focused on stopping people from voting as on getting Americans to go to the polls. In recent years, the Republican Party, the Bush administration, and the conservative movement have devoted a remarkable amount of effort to controlling election machinery (the scandal over federal prosecutors was in part over their refusal to gin up election-fraud cases). But Keeping Down the Black Vote shows that the effort to rig the system is as old as American political parties themselves, and race is at the heart of the game.
Why Americans Still Don't Vote
"Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward were key players in the long battle to reform voter registration laws that finally resulted in the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (also known as the motor voter law). When Why Americans Don't Vote was first published in 1988, this battle was still raging, and their book a fiery salvo. It demonstrated that the twentieth century had seen a concerted effort to restrict voting by immigrants and blacks through a combination of poll taxes, literacy tests, and unwieldy voter registration requirements.". "Why Americans Still Don't Vote takes the story up to the present. Analyzing the results of voter registration reform and drawing compelling historical parallels, Piven and Cloward reveal why neither of the major parties has made a concerted effort to appeal to the interests of the newly registered - and thus why Americans still don't vote."--BOOK JACKET.
The breaking of the American social compact
Piven and Cloward demonstrate that under the banner of "globalization," a mobilized American business class is driving down wages and benefits, breaking unions, weakening civil rights, and slashing programs that protect the disadvantaged - all at a time when income and wealth inequality has reached historic extremes. They argue that business elites' claim that ordinary people must make due with less because of the imperatives of the global markets is a hoax, and that the effort to dismantle the social compact should instead be understood as an ideologically powered political mobilization by business.
Why Americans don't vote
Examines personal voter registration, describes its supporters, and what is needed to maintain an active electorate.
Poor people's movements
Have the poor fared best by participating in conventional electoral politics or by engaging in mass defiance and disruption? The authors of the classic Regulating The Poor assess the successes and failures of these two strategies as they examine, in this provocative study, four protest movements of lower-class groups in 20th century America: the mobilization of the unemployed during the Great Depression that gave rise to the Workers' Alliance of America; the industrial strikes that resulted in the formation of the CIO; the Southern Civil Rights Movement ; the movement of welfare recipients led by the National Welfare Rights Organization.
Regulating the poor
Includes material on the New Deal and the Great Society.
The war at home
Discusses the impact of the Korean conflict on life in the United States, including the dichotomy between post-World War II optimism and consumerism versus the fear of communism and nuclear bombs.
Who's afraid of Frances Fox Piven?
"The sociologist and political scientist Frances Fox Piven and her late husband Richard Cloward have been famously credited by Glenn Beck with devising the Cloward/Piven Strategy," a world view responsible, according to Beck, for everything from creating a culture of poverty" and fomenting violent revolution" to causing global warming and the recent financial crisis. Called an enemy of the people," over the past year Piven has been subjected to an unprecedented campaign of hatred and disinformation, spearheaded by Beck. How is it that a distinguished university professor, past president of the American Sociological Association, and recipient of numerous awards and accolades for her work on behalf of the poor and for American voting rights, has attracted so much negative attention? For anyone who is skeptical of the World According to Beck, here is a guide to the ideas that Glenn fears most. Who's Afraid of Frances Fox Piven? is a concise, accessible introduction to Piven's actual thinking (versus Beck's outrageous claims), from her early work on welfare rights and poor people's movements," written with her late husband Richard Cloward, through her influential examination of American voting habits, and her most recent work on the possibilities for a new movement for progressive reform. A major corrective to right-wing bombast, this essential book is also a rich source of ideas and inspiration for anyone interested in progressive change"--
Challenging Authority
"What do the American Revolution, the abolitionist movement, the labor movement, and the Vietnam antiwar movement have in common? These are examples of the profound moments in American history when ordinary Americans collectively and persuasively told the government ENOUGH! Challenging Authority argues that ordinary people exercise extraordinary political courage and power in American politics when, frustrated by politics as usual, they rise up in anger and hope, and defy the authorities and the status quo rules that ordinarily govern their daily lives. By doing so, they disrupt the workings of important institutions and become a force in American politics."--Jacket.
Toronto's Poor
"Toronto's Poor reveals the long and too often forgotten history of poor people's resistance. It details how the homeless, the unemployed, and the destitute have struggled to survive and secure food and shelter in the wake of the many panics, downturns, recessions, and depressions that punctuate the years from the 1830s to the present. Written by a working-class historian and a poor people's activist, this is a rebellious book that links past and present in an almost two-hundred year story of struggle and resistance. It is about men, women, and children relegated to lives of desperation by an uncaring system, and how they have refused to be defeated. In that refusal, and in winning better conditions for themselves, Toronto's poor create the possibility of a new kind of society, one ordered not by acquisition and individual advance, but by appreciations of collective rights and responsibilities."--
Work, welfare and politics
From an editorial team that includes Piven, one of the foremost academic critics of conservative ideologies and practices surrounding welfare reform (including that of Bill Clinton's), comes 22 essays that explore a wide range of political, economic, ideological, and social issues surrounding the implementation of the Orwellian-named Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996 and the slashing of Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, as well as current efforts to expand upon those assaults on the social safety net. The articles are separated into sections that respectively deal with the politics and ideology of welfare reform (with Piven describing a "politics of greed"), the central issues of motherhood and sex associated with reform ideology, critiques of the stated rationales for the "Work First" ideology, welfare reform as a method of social control and repression of the poor, the effects of reform on family well-being, its impact on state and local systems, and political efforts to reverse the damage of reform. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.