Mom on the Payroll?

The Department of Health, Education and Welfare has prepared a report that may please feminists but is hardly calculated to make the President happy. Titled "Work in America," the study delves into one of the problems Nixon faces in unraveling the snarled skein of welfare: Since Nixon favors some sort of "workfare" program for the able-bodied on the dole, at what point should welfare mothers be required to seek outside employment?

Anthropologist Elliot Liebow, a National Institute of Mental Health administrator and one of the report's authors, attacks the problem with a sharp semantic foil. Since raising children and maintaining a home is work, he argues, the Government should define it as such. Thus all mothers would meet any statutory requirements for work just by continuing to do what they are presently doing--and of course they would get paid for it.

Liebow insists that his proposal would not increase the number of mothers on welfare, currently put at 2.8 million. He cites recent detailed surveys showing that while only 400,000 of those welfare mothers hold full-or part-time jobs, most non-working mothers would prefer to join the regular work force. Liebow's approach places the President in a quandary: How can he strike down a proposal that is so inimical to his own philosophy without seeming to suggest to hundreds of thousands of American mothers that housewifing is not a full-time job?

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