Since the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 was enacted, policy makers, agency administrators, community activists, and academics from a broad range of disciplines have debated and researched the implications of welfare reform in the United States. Most of the attention, however, has focused on urban rather than rural America. Welfare Reform in Persistent Rural Poverty examines welfare participants who live in chronically poor rural areas of the United States where there are few job opportunities and poor systems of education, transportation, and child care. Kathleen Pickering and her colleagues look at welfare reform as it has been experienced in four rural and impoverished regions of the United States: American Indian reservations in South Dakota, the Rio Grande region, Appalachian Kentucky, and the Mississippi Delta. Throughout these areas the rhetoric of reform created expectations of new opportunities to find decent work and receive education and training. In fact, these expectations have largely gone unfulfilled as welfare reform has failed to penetrate poor areas where low-income families remain isolated from the economic and social mainstream of American society. Welfare Reform in Persistent Rural Poverty sheds welcome light on the opportunities and challenges that welfare reform has imposed on low-income families situated in disadvantaged areas. Combining both qualitative and quantitative research, it will be an excellent guide for scholars and practitioners alike seeking to address the problem of poverty in rural America.

This article considers welfare reform's impact in rural America. Professor Pruitt asserts that federal welfare reform legislation, the Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), reflects an urban political agenda that failed to consider rural realities. Based on her analysis of two particular populations - those living in persistent poverty and those in female-headed households - she concludes that PRWORA has exacerbated rural poverty. While PRWORA's focus was on work and time limits on assistance, it gave individual states latitude to design and implement programs tailored to their economic and demographic circumstances. Pruitt illustrates how some states with significant rural populations used this latitude to institute programs that respond to the structural barriers endemic to rural locales: greater transportation challenges in light of spatial isolation from jobs, services, and training opportunities; limited child care choices; and deficits in human capital. But she also points out how states' responses to these challenges have been piecemeal, and their ameliorative impact limited, in the absence of rural economic development. Pruitt analyzes the contradiction between the decline in the number of rural families receiving welfare (a rate commensurate with that of urban families in the PRWORA era), and the rise in rural poverty since 2002. Building on evidence that PRWORA has aggravated the hardships of the rural poor, the article closes by theorizing our national failure to address rural poverty. Pruitt asserts that the failure is due in part to rural myths and stereotypes, including the significance of the informal economy as a safety net for the rural poor. She also discusses the difficulty in seeing the problem of rural poverty because of a tendency for urban residents to romanticize even hardship in the context of the rural idyll they imagine. Pruitt argues that rural myths must be revealed as such, and the limitations and downsides of rural interpersonal familiarity and community must be fully understood, before law and policy makers will address rural poverty in a meaningful way.

This volume presents the first comprehensive look at how welfare reforms enacted in 1996 are affecting caseloads, employment, earnings, and family well-being in rural areas.

A team of anthropologists, economists, geographers, political scientists, social workers, and sociologists examine the leading explanations for why poverty persists in rural America. Their findings discredit established theories such as the "culture of poverty" and suggest new explanations for rural poverty and new directions for antipoverty programs and policies.