Bill introduced his plan to dismantle welfare, by that point called Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC, early in his campaign. Speaking before students at Georgetown in fall 1991, he claimed that the “New Covenant” he wanted to offer the American people could “break the cycle of welfare”:

Welfare should be a second chance, not a way of life. In my administration we’re going to put an end to welfare as we have come to know it. I want to erase the stigma of welfare for good by restoring a simple, dignified principle: no one who can work can stay on welfare forever. We’ll still help people to help themselves. And those who need education and training and child care and medical coverage for their kids — they’ll get it. We’ll give them all the help they need and we’ll keep them on public assistance for up to two years, but after that, people who are able to work, they’ll have to go to work, either in the private sector or through a community service job. No more permanent dependence on welfare as a way of life.

At the time, AFDC was perhaps the most widely reviled program in government history. Since its passage, in 1935, it had become a symbol of everything that was wrong with redistributive government programs. Among its most vociferous critics were welfare recipients themselves, who were subjected to a battery of moral tests and denied the dignity and title of a worker, no matter how much unwaged housework and child care they did. Although AFDC gave all unemployed mothers the right to benefits, states were free to set additional eligibility limits, and many did. In 1943, Louisiana became the first state to institute “employable mother” laws, popular in the rural South, which suspended benefits to mothers at planting and harvest time. “Suitable home,” “man in the house,” and “substitute father” laws denied benefits to mothers who caseworkers could prove were having regular sex, the regulations being loose enough that “regular” was interpreted as anywhere from once a week to once every six months. Social workers were often sent to examine the homes of welfare recipients, searching for unwashed dishes and unmade beds. How you were treated depended on where you lived: the laws tended to be harsher in regions with more black mothers on welfare. Payments in the South were, on average, about half as large as in other parts of the country. As black Americans migrated to northern industrial cities, those cities’ welfare laws became more restrictive.