Myth of the Welfare Queen: A Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist's Portrait of Women on the Line

Welfare moms are "the most hated women in America," says Cheri Honkala, a dynamic activist from Philadelphia who is profiled in the engrossing Myth of the Welfare Queen. As the American mood toward welfare turned mean in the mid-1990s and politicians worked to radically change who got benefits and for how long, Honkala used her considerable talents in guerrilla theater to fight bureaucrats on behalf of a rising tide of dispossessed women and children. She keeps the TV news spotlight on the homeless with a host of inspired acts: a long-term tent city for displaced families, the takeover of a church, a grungy encampment next to the Liberty Bell. Nonetheless, folks dispute how helpful such confrontations are. Odessa Williams, a resourceful, resilient woman who supports four grandchildren and then doubles that number when new troubles strike, is the other sympathetic subject in this tough, humanizing portrait of women on welfare by Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper editor David Zucchino.