ORIGINAL ARTICLE Welfare Indignities: Homeless Women, Domestic Violence, and Welfare Reform in San Francisco Anne R. Roschelle Published online: 4 October 2008 Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2008 Abstract Using data collected during a 4 year ethnography, this paper examines how the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) has impacted homeless women in San Francisco who are also victims of domestic violence. Specifically this paper looks at how the behavior of abusive men prevents homeless women from successfully navigating the new welfare-to- work requirements and maintaining stable employment. Findings indicate that despite the discourse touting the success of welfare reform, the 1996 PRWORA has further disenfranchised an already devastated population systematically forcing them further onto the margins of society. Keywords Homeless families Á Welfare reform Á Domestic violence Introduction The 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) was the most profound piece of welfare legislation since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. The underlying ideology of this sweeping reform was to eliminate welfare dependency and require poor women to go to work. The new federal legislation put a maximum 5 year lifetime cap on welfare receipt, although some states chose to implement a more punitive 2 year cap. Despite more than 20 years of research indicating that the majority of welfare recipients are not long-term recipients but rather cycle on and off as their family and work lives necessitate [3, 22, 23, 26], the underlying assumption of the reform is that women stay on welfare for their entire lives as a way of avoiding work. While it is true that A. R. Roschelle (&) Department of Sociology, State University of New York, I Hawk Drive, Jacobson Faculty Tower, 516 A, New Paltz, NY 12561, USA e-mail: roschela@newpaltz.edu 123 Gend. Issues (2008) 25:193–209 DOI 10.1007/s12147-008-9061-9