Medea Hero or HeroineAuthor(s) Carolyn A. DurhamSo.docx

Medea: Hero or Heroine?
Author(s): Carolyn A. Durham
Source: Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 8, No. 1
(1984), pp. 54-59
Published by: University of Nebraska Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3346093
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Medea: Hero or Heroine?
Carolyn A. Durham
Two of the more common assumptions of feminist
literary criticism may be both logically consequential and
potentially contradictory. That most western literary
genres have been essentially male is hardly surprising in
a cultural tradition in which masculinity alone has generic
status. It follows, then, that women achieve the stature
of protagonists only at those times or in those world views
in which female experience becomes representative of the
human condition. Or does it follow? This argument's
implicit contradiction can be seen in Carolyn Heilbrun's
and Catharine Stimpson's provocative discussion of
theories of tragedy, which they characterize as "largely
masculinized. "1 Maintaining that the woman hero (note
the masculine) was born "from the author's realization
that women at that moment best symbolized the human
condition" (p. 65), Stimpson and Heilbrun go on to
distinguish the "tragic hero" from the "societal fact"; the
former's passion results from the limitations inherent in
being human and not from social evil that can be remedied
(p. 70). One might well argue that, precisely to the extent
that women remain women and therefore heroines, their
situation stems from rectifiable social conditions, that they
are therefore always "societal facts" and never "tragic
heroes." In this context, Medea provides a useful exam-
ple. Although she has the central role in three major plays,
each representative of a different, dominant western
culture, she never achieves the representative stature of the
tragic hero. The treatment of Medea in the plays of
Euripides, Seneca, and Corneille suggests that the limita-

tions associated with women somehow never seem to be
those inherent in being human.
The original audience of all three plays would have been
thoroughly familiar with the story of Medea. To succeed
in what Adrienne Rich calls the task of "re-vision-the
act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of enter-
ing an old text from a new critical direction,"2 feminist
criticism must examine the original sources of the legend
as well as the way in which each playwright effects its
transposition into dramatic form. (There is a certain
unavoidable circularity in this procedure, since Euripides
represents a key source for the legend itself.) This does
not, of course, imply that we can have access to an
ideologically neutral account, for to the extent that we
must depend upon standard guides to mythology, our
information arrives already encoded.3
It should come as no surprise, therefore, that Medea
enters into myth through the story of Jason and his heroic
quest for the golden fleece. To regain the throne of the
Greek state Iolcus, usurped by his uncle Pelias, Jason
eagerly agrees to recover the golden fleece from King
Aeetes of Colchis. In what has passed into collective
memory as the oldest story in Greek tradition and the first
important maritime adventure, Jason sets sail with the
Argonauts, the greatest heroes of Greece. In Colchis,
Aeetes agrees to give up the golden fleece if Jason
can triumph over the formidable forces that protect it.
Whether charmed by Jason, who promises marriage, or
by his divine protector Aphrodite, Aeetes' daughter Medea
falls in love with Jason and uses her magic powers to allow
him to steal the golden fleece. Medea and her younger
brother Absyrtus flee with the Argonauts; and in what

Thomas Bulfinch calls "another story of Medea almost
too revolting to record even of a sorceress, a class of per-
sons to whom both ancient and modern poets have been
accustomed to attribute every degree of atrocity,"4 Medea
assures the escape of the Greeks by killing her brother
and scattering his limbs across the water to slow her
father's pursuit.
Carolyn Durham teaches French, comparative literature, and
women's studies at the College of Wooster where she
currently chairs the Women's Studies Program. Durham is the
author of L'Art romanesque de Raymond Roussel and
has published on feminist issues in Jump Cut, Bucknell
Review, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation,
Twentieth Century Literature, and Tulsa Studies in Women's
Literature. She is presently working on a monograph of
Marie Cardinal.
FRONTIERS Vol. VIII, No. 1 @ 1984 FRONTIERS Editorial
Collective
2018 05:05:56 UTC
Durham 55
In Iolcus, where Pelias still refuses to surrender the
throne, Medea tricks his daughters into murdering him
in the belief that his death will lead to his rebirth and
rejuvenation. After Pelias' death, Jason and Medea are
forced to flee to Corinth with their two sons; there Jason
abandons Medea to marry Creusa, daughter of King

Creon. Though, in general, Bulfinch's hostile attitude
is common, there exist some sympathetic accounts of
Medea, and two important issues are clear in all the
sources: Medea acts not for herself but for Jason, and
Medea believes that Jason will honor her love and the
actions she performs in its name with the fidelity he has
sworn.
All three dramatic versions of the Medea legend are set
in Corinth-immediately after the day of Jason's wed-
ding to Creusa (Euripides), on the day of the wedding
(Seneca), and immediately before the day of the wedding
(Corneille). All three dramatists recount Medea's revenge:
to repay Jason for his faithlessness, Medea sends Creusa
a poisoned robe that destroys both the princess and her
father; Medea then kills her own sons and flees to Athens,
where King Aegeus has promised her protection. In the
basic focus of their interest and in the specific events they
choose to dramatize, the three plays are very similar. In-
deed, Seneca bases his play on Euripides' version, and
Corneille, in accordance with French neoclassical doctrine,
borrows from both the Greek and the Roman dramatists.
In all three dramatic versions, Creon's decision to
banish Medea determines her vengeance, which takes
place during the one-day reprieve Creon grants her. Each
includes at least one confrontation between Medea and
Jason in which she reminds him of all he owes her and
scorns his efforts at self-justification. The dramatis
personae of the plays include both partisans and enemies
of Medea, and dramatic tension builds through the con-
trasting failure of all attempts to prevent Medea's revenge
and the growing strength of her own determination. All
three plays end with Jason's despair as Medea trium-

phantly displays the bodies of their slain children.
Thematically, Euripides, Seneca, and Corneille all deal
to some degree with issues centering on love, jealousy, and
infidelity; all address the conflict within Medea between
her conjugal and maternal love and her desire for revenge;
all suggest on some level a political and cultural opposi-
tion between Medea and the Greek state or civilization.
Factual differences among the three plays tend to be minor
and to center entirely on secondary characters-for
example, the presence or absence on stage of the children,
of Aegeus, and of Creusa.
Since all three versions of Medea focus on the analysis
of the central character, important distinctions among
Euripides, Seneca, and Corneille result precisely from the
character the three dramatists ascribe to Medea and the
motives they attribute to her actions; these alone deter-
mine what her magical powers represent, how her legen-
dary past functions, how Jason is portrayed, how the
community reacts, and, ultimately, what our attitude
toward Medea will be. Differences among the three plays
can be and have been attributed to historical and cultural
factors. In the fourth century B.C., Euripides uses Medea
to illustrate by contrast the Greek ideal of moderation.
In Seneca, Medea functions as metaphor for the disorder
of first-century Rome. In seventeenth-century France, Cor-
neille's Medea illustrates the threat an independent, proud,
and sanguinary nobility poses to the authority of the state.
But despite changes in the conception of what constitutes
a human and social being, all three dramatists share a
definition that excludes women, however differently. It is
these differences and similarities in the dramatic depic-

tion of Medea as woman-treacherous daughter, betrayed
lover, destructive mother, and powerful sorceress-that
I now wish to examine.
Certainly the femaleness of the legendary Medea stands
unquestioned, as does the misogynist flavor of this male-
authored fable. Medea herself, of course, hates men
(curious absence in western languages of a convenient
adjective); she is, in fact, homocidal in the gender-
particular sense of the term. In an inversion of the com-
forting and comfortable myth of Isis as female gatherer
and weaver, as savior of the male Osiris, Medea
dismembers and scatters in the first place. Not only
defined as a killer of men, Medea also incarnates the
destruction of the private, domestic, traditionally female
world of the family.5 Herself guilty of fratricide and in-
fanticide, she arranges parricides through others: Pelias
is killed by his own daughters, and Creusa, although un-
wittingly, puts on a dress--delivered, moreover, by her
newly adopted children-that poisons her father as well
as herself. In accordance with the message of the legend,
the three dramatic treatments of Medea suggest that it
may be a contradiction in terms to speak of a tragic
heroine, that women characters who achieve heroic stature
in tragedy necessarily reject their femaleness or participate
in its devaluation. Medea becomes the central character
in each play to illustrate in turn the destructive plight of
women (in Euripides), the destructiveness of women (in
Seneca), and the destruction of women (in Corneille).
If the word could ever be taken without moral or emo-
tional connotations, the heroine of Euripides' The Medea
might qualify as the most "human" of the three dramatic
characters. She is carefully departicularized, stripped of

her legendary powers and aura, to become not simply an
ordinary woman but, in fact, Everywoman. Up to the
point of her crime, Euripides portrays Medea as the
stereotypically perfect female within the male power struc-
ture of his dramatic universe. In the opening scene of the
play, the Nurse characterizes her mistress as the good wife;
Medea is supportive, submissive, other-oriented:
She gave
Pleasure to the people of her land of exile
And she herself helped Jason in every way.
This is indeed the greatest salvation of all-
For the wife not to stand apart from the husband. (11-15)6
Now abandoned by Jason, "poor" Medea, to be "rightly"
female, must necessarily be depicted from both within and
without as victim. Euripides underplays Medea's poten-
tial for violent revenge in favor of an insistence upon her
passivity and helplessness. Much like Racine's Phedre,
though without the latter's sense of choice and will,
Medea has been reduced to a pitiful, suffering object who
desires death:
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56 FRONTIERS
She lies without food and gives herself up to suffering,
Wasting away every moment of the day in tears.
So it has gone since she knew herself slighted by him.
Not stirring an eye, not moving her face from the ground.

(24-27)
Accepting the cultural definition of her rejection as
"dishonor," Medea at first predictably cries to other men
for assistance: "She calls upon the gods" (22), "calling
out on her father's name" (31).
The use to which Euripides puts Medea's magic powers
reveals with particular clarity the price a woman pays for
an apparently sympathetic presentation as heroine.
Originally the source of her superiority, magic becomes
in Euripides' "humanized" view of Medea a metaphor
for intelligence in a world in which female intelligence is
little valued. Medea's response to Creon's admission that
he fears her because she is "a clever woman" (281-85) con-
firms that she is simply too bright and has failed to con-
ceal her sharpness of mind with proper female decorum:
This is not the first time, Creon. Often previously
Through being considered clever I have suffered much.
A person of sense ought never to have his children
Brought up to be more clever than the average.
For, apart from cleverness bringing them no profit,
It will make them objects of envy and ill-will.
If you put new ideas before the eyes of fools
They'll think you foolish and worthless into the bargain;
And if you are thought superior to those who have
Some reputation for learning, you will become hated.
I have some knowledge myself of how this happens;
For being clever, I find that some will envy me,
Others object to me. (292-304)
The male characters in the play express a hatred of
women so strong that Jason's insistence that his alliance
with Creon "was not because of a woman" (593) appears
absolutely convincing. Sadly but more significantly, the

female characters in Euripides' world have internalized
the negative image that men project upon them. One
potentially positive consequence lies in the female soli-
darity represented by the Chorus members' total sympathy
and support for Medea; their speeches generalize Medea's
experience into the female condition of slavery, oppres-
sion, and pain. But the Corinthian women of the Chorus
in fact covertly support female subservience. Euripides'
Medea, virtually free of her legendary violence against
Absyrtus and Pelias, becomes criminal only with the
murder of her children. The Chorus finds the infanticide
alone unacceptable-in fact, absolutely condemnable-
and logically so: it is the single act through which Medea
denies the female role as men have defined it and as
women have accepted it. Note Jason's opposition: "A
monster, not a woman" (1342). The play's plea for
moderation, constantly reiterated by the female Chorus,
discloses its real message: be moderate, be human, be nor-
mal; that is, be female-according to the rules laid down
by men. It matters greatly then that Euripides' heroine
is a woman, and it matters even more that she remain so,
but her female characteristics are not elevated as human
values but merely pitied as inevitable limitations on full
humanity.
Although in many ways the heroine of Seneca's The
Medea contrasts with that of Euripides, she is equally and
as necessarily female in a world in which femaleness
now openly equals subhumanity or even nonhumanity.
Carrying such standard gender traits as emotionalism,
irrationality, and capriciousness to their logical conclu-
sion, Seneca's Medea acts as an enraged, sadistic beast.
Typically, Creon retreats from her as from a wild animal:
"Threatening and fierce, she seeks to speak with us; /
Attendants, keep her off" (II.ii).7 She is a pure frenzy of

passion whose hesitations and abrupt changes of mood
bear witness to her almost total loss of self-control. She
is characterized throughout the play as "mad," "reckless,"
"wild," and it is in a fit of total madness, when she is
held in the power of the Furies, that she murders her sons
(V.ii). Moreover, Seneca's Medea also incarnates the prin-
ciple of cosmic destruction; she seeks to bring down the
entire universe with her, to destroy all around her without
regard for the guilt or innocence of her victims (III.i), and
her behavior is categorically condemned by the moral
universe of the Chorus. This conception of Medea deter-
mines that of the secondary characters; Seneca's Jason,
progressively ennobled as Medea is degraded, represents
self-control and reason in the face of Medea's blind
passion.
Despite her extension of stereotypically female
characteristics to logical extremes, despite the hatred and
fear she arouses, Seneca's Medea might, in her isolation
and in her very exaggeration, have been seen as more
individual than female. But, in fact, Seneca's very devalua-
tion of Medea's femaleness, her so-called "madness,"
leads to what I think must be a unique insight for a male
author and the period. Seneca's Medea is not only
rebellious as male-defined but also authentically revolu-
tionary. Seneca implicitly equates female innocence not
with freedom from crimes against men but with freedom
from men themselves. Medea's last crime repeats her first;
the killing of her son becomes an explicit act of expia-
tion for the murder of her brother, and, more remarkably,
the repetition produces literal erasure. Medea regains her
virginity and the lost paradise of her girlhood by the total
destruction of the wife and mother within her:

I have regained now my crown and throne,
My brother and my father; Colchians hold
The golden fleece; my kingdom is won back;
My lost virginity returns to me!
(V.iii)
This is an excellent example of virginity in Annis Pratt's
sense: "a form of negative emancipation in the freedom
to reject the forfeiture of the self to patriarchal demands-
by suicide, if necessary."8 Yet however perceptive this par-
ticular insight-or perhaps precisely because of it-
Seneca views Medea's female destructiveness as directly
responsible for the unhappiness of men and for the chaos
of the world. Indeed, in the final lines of the play, Jason
confirms that Medea has brought about the total dissolu-
tion of the patriarchal order: "Go through the skies
sublime, and in thy flight / Prove that where thou art
borne there are no gods" (V.iii).
I think few readers would argue for Medea's experience
2018 05:05:56 UTC
Durham 57
in Euripides or Seneca as metaphorical of the human con-
dition; rather, it represents a particular male view of a
specifically if not uniquely female situation. At first sight,
Corneille seems to have rejected such gender-specific
interpretations to raise his Medea to universal stature; it
is indeed, however, a question of ascension, for Corneille's

Medea will have to be superhuman to qualify for the
masculinity that alone can guarantee her humanity.
Even so, Medea's physical femaleness may have lessened
critical interest in Corneille's first tragedy. In spite of the
largely successful efforts of twentieth-century critics to
reconstitute Corneille's theater in its entirety, his Medea
has remained largely ignored. For example, Medea and
its companion piece, The Golden Fleece, are the only plays
omitted from Serge Doubrovsky's otherwise comprehen-
sive study of the Cornelian hero.9 This and other such
oversights stem from the common centering of critical
inquiry on the nature of the male protagonist. Yet Medea
stands clearly as the prototype of the Cornelian hero, the
first of a long line of central heroic figures, most of whom
will be men. 10
Medea already illustrates the primary values of Cor-
neille's heroic universe: unity of word and action; crea-
tion and cult of the self; surhumanity, defined against the
natural. Medea opposes efficacious action to the sterile
complaints of the other characters. She is able to keep
her word, to accomplish what she has announced. Medea
acts alone; she is self-sufficient in the fullest sense of the
term; and she preaches revolt in response to Jason's pleas
for submission. Her two accounts of the winning of the
golden fleece, echoing with "me" and "I alone" (II.ii;
III.iii),11 constitute an autocelebration. Medea's constancy
symbolizes faithfulness to the self; her continued love for
Jason results not from the self-alienation in the face of
irrational passion so common in Racine's heroines but
from a recognition of and insistence on her own identity.
Corneille's Medea first defines herself as hero(ine)
against the nonheroic world of the male characters who

surround her. In an inversion of sex roles, Jason represents
the "feminine" principle of passivity. In the face of
Medea's active energy, he preaches submission: "let us
yield to fortune" (III.iii.881). His willingness to adapt to
circumstances leads directly to his "feminine" fickleness,
his inconstancy. Jason's very thought processes-his am-
bivalence about his own motivations; the contradictions
in his multiple explanations of his actions, ranging from
Creusa's beauty to political necessity to paternal love; the
continual shifting and confusion of his argument-reflect
the constant metamorphoses of his sense of self. Male
sexuality has always been metaphorically allied with
masculine power, and Jason's is no exception. But Jason
pursues position and power through a goal that is tradi-
tionally the resort of women-marriage. All Medea's
sorcery does not permit her to act on Jason's heart and
will; ironically, the weak and cowardly Jason has precisely
this most "magic" and most female of powers: Jason "is
born only to charm princesses" (I.i.22); he is an "infamous
sorcerer who charms minds" (II.v.680).
Since Corneille's sympathies undeniably lie with Medea,
and since the traits that make up her strength-autonomy,
rebellion, efficacy, constancy-are clearly unexpected in
a woman, we might think that we have here the "reassess-
ment in woman's favor of the relative capacities of the
sexes" that Ian MacClean considers a workable defini-
tion of feminism for the seventeenth century.12 But,
in fact, Corneille has merely transposed masculine
characteristics onto female characters and feminine
characteristics onto male characters, while continuing to
value the former alone. As Medea and Creusa define

themselves through the individual identity and auton-
omous action normally associated with men, Jason and
Creon define themselves as women traditionally have,
through passivity and relationships with others. Medea's
qualifications as heroic and universal thus depend upon
her masculinization, dangerous in and of itself, and upon
her denial of a femaleness that is degraded and devalued
elsewhere in the play.
Given the rejection of nature as a central tenet of Cor-
neille's theory of the superhuman hero, woman's tradi-
tional identification with the world of the natural may
well have made her the logical choice to serve as the
original illustration of his doctrine. Medea's magic powers,
which "force nature" (IV.v.1246) and "hold nature
enslaved" (III.i.706), function initially as a metaphor of
this conception of heroism. But more importantly, Cor-
neille's reversal of sex roles also permits him to illustrate
conveniently the problematical character of heroism, the
potential destructiveness of the strong-willed individual,
without needing to condemn masculinity in the process.
Corneille focuses the necessarily unnatural and therefore
monstrous aspects of his conception of heroism on the
female realm of Medea's life: her roles as daughter, sister,
and mother. Medea herself stresses that her own unnatural
acts, her willingness to betray her father and to kill her
brother, and not her magic powers, were the essential fac-
tors in the successful quest for the golden fleece:
If I had then limited my desire to my duty,
If I had preserved my glory and my faithfulness,
If I had felt horror at so many outrageous crimes,
What would have become of Jason and all your
Argonauts?

(II.ii.431-34)
Medea's ultimate act of heroism results in the murder of
her children.13 Thus, Corneille manages to have it both
ways: when Medea is masculine, she is good, but when
she is bad, even though this results only from carrying
male characteristics to an extreme, she becomes female
again.
The legendary Medea is, of course, remembered first
as a mother. Even though Corneille underplays his
heroine's direct involvement with her children far more
than do Euripides and Seneca, his play may still in fact
be the one most directly concerned with Medea as mother.
Her motherhood is first of all literal. For Medea to be
authentically heroic-and authentically monstrous-she
must love the children she sacrifices. Without a clear and
deep bond of affection to overcome, no heroic test and
no act against nature would occur. In Seneca, where
Medea carries out the murders in a fit of madness, they
lose all heroic and moral meaning.14 Corneille takes two
innovative steps in his Medea to insure our interpretation
2018 05:05:56 UTC
58 FRONTIERS
of the murders as an heroic act. In both Euripides' and

Seneca's versions, Medea herself requests the right to leave
her children in Corinth. In Corneille's version, the children
are taken away by Medea's enemies, an act she sees as a
mutilation of her own self:
Barbarous humanity, that tears me from myself,
And feigns gentleness to take from me what I love!
If Jason and Creusa have so ordered it,
Let them return the blood I gave my children.
(II.ii.497-500)
Corneille's greatest originality is to make Jason plan to
kill the children. Because this intention is based on his
identification of Medea's only vulnerable spot-"Let the
sorceress begin to suffer in you / Let her first torment
be to see you die" (V.v.1535-36)-it focuses our attention
on her maternal love at the very moment when she is
murdering her sons.
But Medea's motherhood is also metaphorical. Sandra
Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue in The Madwoman in the
Attic for a literary interconnection between maternity,
monstrosity, and creativity. Medea's fearful powers
originate in her "grotto," the witch's cave whose womb
shape makes it the central seat of female power. For
Gilbert and Gubar, maternal creativity represents the
"sexual/artistic strength that is the female equivalent of
the male potential for literary paternity."15 Medea is a
storyteller, and the tale she recalls of her role in the con-
quest of the golden fleece deals essentially with the female
power to generate male success. The speech itself contains
a curious abundance of generative vocabulary--"to sow,"
"sterility," "fertile," "brought forth," "sown," "gave
birth" (II.ii.409-50)-and it ends with Medea's willingness

to accept her past crimes in the clear role of mother: "In
short, all your heroes owe life to me" (II.ii.441). More
importantly, it would seem at first that Medea's mater-
nal creativity is not merely the equivalent but, for once,
the metaphor of literary creativity. Theatrical producer,
director, and playwright, Medea views her revenge as a
spectacle staged for her own pleasure: "I must create a
masterpiece" (I.iv.253). This is the principal reason why,
at the risk of offending classical doctrine and taste, Creon,
Creusa, and Jason must all die on stage: "I am not"
avenged, if I do not see the result; / I owe my anger the
joy of so sweet a spectacle" (IV.v.1276-77).
But female power is viewed as destructive. Medea uses
for her own purposes that most maternal power of life
and death over men. Moreover, while Medea originally
seems to possess the essential literary power of naming,
symbolized by her magic-"Fire obeys me, and I control
the waters; / Hell trembles, and the heavens, as soon as
I name them" (III.iii.908-09)-this most male of rights
will prove as always to be denied to women.16 Medea is
asked to be quiet and to forget what Jason owes her, to
exhibit in fact "aphasia and amnesia-two illnesses which
symbolically represent (and parody) the sort of intellec-
tual incapacity patriarchal culture has traditionally re-
quired of women."17 Medea understands clearly the link
between silence and submission:
Nerine, after that you wish me to keep quiet!
Shouldn't I also appear pleased,
Shouldn't I wish for the happy day of the royal wedding,
And turn all my attention to serving his love?
(I.v.301-04)

Medea knows as well that the power of language stands
on the side of the law. Her ironic response to Jason
acknowledges the male prerogative to define terms at will,
to rewrite the past-metaphorically represented by his
constant shifting of ground-even as she mocks it:
I have only been banished! oh sovereign goodness!
Then it's a favor, and not a penalty!
I have received a pardon instead of a punishment!
And I owe thanks again for my exile!
Thus the brigand, his miserly thirst once satisfied,
Attributes the sparing of our lives to compassion;
When he doesn't slaughter, he believes he has pardoned,
And what he doesn't take away, he thinks he has given.
(III.iii.833-40)
Medea's efforts to write her own story, that is, the story
of her quest for self-definition,18 fail as she is obliged to
become the Medea whose image Jason and Creon project.
Things will now be as men have named them; notably,
Creusa takes into death the name of Jason's wife:
"Farewell: give me your hand; that, in spite of her
jealousy / I may carry off to Pluto the name of your wife"
(V.v.1497-98).
Creon and Jason wish Medea to accept the role of
scapegoat, to assume all of Jason's crimes so that he may
stand cleansed and innocent:
Give him back his innocence by going away from here;
Bear to other regions your insolent anger;
Your herbs, your poisons, your pitiless heart,
And all that ever made Jason guilty.
(III.ii.467-70)

Ultimately, Medea agrees. In so doing, she adopts a role
that Judith Fetterly has identified as traditionally
female. 19 There is a sense, as we have seen, in which, by
becoming a murderess, Medea accedes to subjective
responsibility for her identity; but it is hardly liberating-
particularly for a woman-to become what others-
particularly men-say that she is. Medea allows herself
to be "killed into image" (in the words of Gilbert and
Gubar), to become safely "constant" through her accep-
tance of a male vision of herself.20 Jason regains his lost
memory to promise Medea a fixed portrait in exchange
for his freedom:
Your virtuous love is my greatest glory;
I would betray myself should I put it out of my mind;
And my love for you, which remains eternal,
Leaves you the solemn vow in this farewell.
May my head shatter under the sharpest arrows
That the most bitter anger of the great gods shoots out;
May they join together to punish me,
If I do not surrender my life before your memory!
(II.iii.33-40)
In Medea Corneille appears to value maleness, even if
incarnated in women, and devalue femaleness, even if
2018 05:05:56 UTC
Durham 59

represented by men. When he returns to the Medea legend
twenty years later in The Golden Fleece, he has changed
his mind about the behavior to be valued. He now une-
quivocally backs the relational female traits disparaged
in his earlier Medea and defends Jason's solution of
passivity and love against the Argonauts' reactionary
belief in action and merit. In the prologue to the play,
the individualistic hero whose self-realization comes at
the expense of others' happiness is condemned as destruc-
tive, and a symbolic France repudiates victory and
replaces war with marriage. But these newly valued
qualities are embodied by Jason, a male character, and
not by the female protagonist the Stimpson-Heilbrun
theory would have predicted.
The assumption that women can achieve the stature of
protagonists in masculine genres-or, at least, the assump-
tion that they can achieve such stature with any
frequency-may be too optimistic. So long as human
traits are distinguished by gender, it may well be that no
character, either male or female, can be generic, regardless
of how writers or readers have tried to use them. So long
as Medea is subhuman or superhuman, so long as her
humanity comes only at the price of her autonomy, so
long as we equate her humanity with mediocrity or with
masculinity, the significance of both her gender and her
humanity is lost to us. Perhaps only with the creation of
a gender-free value system can we really have a tragic
female hero, and only then will her femaleness no longer
matter.
NOTES

1. Carolyn Heilbrun and Catharine Stimpson, "Theories of
Feminist
Criticism: A Dialogue," in Feminist Literary Criticism, ed.
Josephine
Donovan (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1975), p. 67.
2. Adrienne Rich, "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-
Vision,"
College English, 34 (October 1972), 18.
3. My discussion of the story of Jason and Medea draws upon
Edith
Hamilton, Mythology (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1942);
and
Thomas Bulfinch, Bulfinch's Mythology, ed. Edmund Fuller
(New York:
Dell, 1959).
4. Bulfinch, p. 113.
5. According to Ann Jones (Women Who Kill [New York:
Fawcett
Columbine, 1981]), this is generally true of homocidal women:
"Unlike
men, who are apt to stab a total stranger in a drunken brawl or
run
amok with a high-powered rifle, we women usually kill our in-
timates.... The story of women who kill is the story of women"
(pp. xv-xvi).
6. Euripides, The Medea, trans. Rex Warner, in Euripides I, ed.
David
Grene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago
Press, 1955).
All quotations are from this edition.

7. Seneca, The Medea, trans. Ella Isabel Harris, in An
Anthology
of Roman Drama, ed. Philip Whaley Harsh (New York:
Rinehart, 1960).
All quotations are from this edition.
8. Annis Pratt, "The New Feminist Criticism," College English,
32
(May 1971), 876. One might argue that Medea's original
murder of Ab-
syrtus simply represents with particular horror the shifting of
allegiance
from father to husband required of women.
9. Serge Doubrovsky, Corneille et la dialectique du htros
(Paris:
Gallimard, 1963).
10. Recent articles by William Goode ("Me'de'e and Jason:
Hero and
Nonhero in Corneille's Me'de' French Review, 51 [1978], 804-
15) and
Andre de Leyssac (Introduction, Me'd6e [Gen'eve: Droz, 1978])
examine
Medea as the prototype of the Cornelian hero.
11. Pierre Corneille, Theatre complet, ed. Maurice Rat, 3 vols.
(Paris:
Garnier, 1966). All quotations from Medea are from Volume 1
of this
edition; all quotations from The Golden Fleece are from
Volume 3.
Translations are my own.
12. Ian MacClean, Woman Triumphant (Oxford: Clarendon
Press,

1977), p. viii.
13. One is reminded of Ellen Harold's criticism of Emma Peel,
heroine
of the British television series "The Avengers": "What is truly
sad is
that, though she is equal to a man and superior to most men,
the measure
of her competence is a strictly macho one-her capacity for
violence"
(cited in Donovan, p. 21).
14. Euripides also makes of the infanticide a conscious,
intentional
act: "I know indeed what evil I intend to do" (1078).
15. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the
Attic
(New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), p. 97.
16. See, for example, Julia A. Sherman and Evelyn Torton
Beck:
"Women constitute an enormous, historically submerged group
of peo-
ple, deprived of the power to conceptualize, to name, and to
categorize
reality" (The Prism of Sex [Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press,
1979],
p. 4); and Mary Daly: "It is necessary to grasp the fundamental
fact
that women have had the power of naming stolen from us. We
have
not been free to use our own power to name ourselves, the
world, or
God" (Beyond God the Father [Boston: Beacon Press, 1973], p.
8).

17. Gilbert and Gubar, p. 58.
18. For Gilbert and Gubar, this is the most often repressed of
literary
plots (p. 76).
19. Judith Fetterly, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach
to
American Fiction (Bloomington: Univ. of Indiana Press, 1978),
p. xii.
20. Gilbert and Gubar, p. 17.
2018 05:05:56 UTC
Contents[54]5556575859Issue Table of ContentsFrontiers: A
Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 8, No. 1 (1984), pp. i-iv+1-
75Front Matter [pp. i-iii]To Our Readers [p. iv]Women,
Disability, and Feminism: Notes toward a New Theory [pp. 1-
5]Japanese American Women during World War II [pp. 6-
14]Keeping My Name [p. 15]The Journal as Source and Model
for Feminist Art: The Example of Kathleen Fraser [pp. 16-
20]The Impact of "Sun Belt Industrialization" on Chicanas [pp.
21-27]Upstairs [p. 28]A Letter to Matthew [pp. 29-31]The
Establishment and Preservation of Female Power in Shirley
Jackson's "We Have Always Lived in the Castle" [pp. 32-
38]Olympia in the Four Poster [p. 39]Lotus Will Bloom in
Summer [pp. 40-44]The Limits of Sisterhood: The Woman's
Building in Seattle, 1908-1921 [pp. 45-52]Near Kent Falls [p.
53]Medea: Hero or Heroine? [pp. 54-59]Feminist Aesthetics in
Jazz: An Interview with Susanne Vincenza of Alive! [pp. 60-
63]The Killing [p. 64]Self-Defense for Women: Translating
Theory into Practice [pp. 65-70]Of Note [p. 70]Reviews and
ResponsesReview: untitled [pp. 71-73]Back Matter [pp. 74-75]

Reading:
Page #
Text Passage/Description of Text
Your reactions, thoughts, meditations

38 I AUTOMATING INEQ!!AUTY
during times of economic crisis. Poor and working-c
lass people
resist restrictions of their rights, dismantle discriminatory in
sti-
tutions, and join together for survival and mutual aid. But ti
me
and again they face middle-class backlash. Social assistan
ce is re-
cast as charity, mutual aid is reconstructed as dependency,

and
new techniques to turn back the progress of the poor prolifera
te .
A well-funded, widely supported, and wildly successful
counter-
movement to deny basic human rights to poor and working-clas
s
people has grown steadily since the 1970s. The movement man
u-
factures and circulates misleading stories about the poor: t
hat
they are an undeserving, fraudulent, dependent, and immo
ral
minority. Conservative critics of the welfare state continue to ru
n -
a very effective propaganda campaign to convince Americans t
hat __
-
the working class and the poor must battle each other in a z
ero-_
sum game over limited resources. More quietly, program
ministrators and data scientists push high-tech tools
promise to help more people, more humanely, while un_,,,.,_,.,,

efficiency, identifying fraud, and containing costs. The
poorhouse is framed as a way to rationalize and streamline
fits, but the real goal is what it has always been: to profile,
vuJ«�
--,- -
and punish the poor.
2
AUTOMATING HIGIBIUTY IN
THE HEARTLAND
A little white donkey is chewing on a fencepost where we turn
coward the Stipes house on a narrow utility road paralleling
the train tracks in Tipton, Indiana. Michael "Dan" Skinner,
65-year-old ex-newspaper man and my guide to central Indiana,
heaves his mom's 19-year-old sedan across the tracks and imo
the Stipes family's driveway a mile or so later. Their big white
house is marooned in a sea of cornfields, but on this sunny day
.-. in March 2015, the stalks are cut back low and softened by
snow
•-•· melting to mud. Kim and Kevin Stipes joke that they've had
to
grow tall children: come July, the smaller ones disappear into
the
corn. I'm here to talk to Kim and Kevin about their daughter
So-
/phie, who lost her Medicaid benefits during Indiana's
experiment
with welfare eligibility automation.

In 2012, I delivered a lecture at Indiana University Blooming-
••••- ton about how new data-based technologies were impacting
pub-
lie services. When I was finished, a well-dressed man raised
his hand
and asked the question that would launch this book. "You
know,"
he asked, "what's going on here in Indiana, right?" I looked at
40 I AUTOMAUN_G INE~ALITY
him blankly and shook my head, He gave me a quick synopsis:
a $L3 billion contract to privatize and automate the state's
welfare eligibility processes, thousands losing benefits, a high-
profile breach-of-contract case for the Indiana Supreme Court,
He handed me his card, In gold letters it identified him as Matt
Pierce, Democratic member of the Indiana House of Represen-
tatives.
Two and a half years later, the welfare automation story brought
me to the home of Sophie Stipes, a lively, sunny, stubborn girl
with dark brown hair, wide chocolate eyes, and the deep brow
characteristic of people with cerebral palsy, Shortly after she
was
born in 2002, she was diagnosed with failure to thrive, global
de-

velopmental delays, and periventricular leukomalacia, a white-
matter brain injury that affects newborns and fernses, She was
also diagnosed with lp36 deletion syndrome, which is believed
to
affect between l in 5,000 and 1 in 10,000 newborns, She has
sig-
nificant hearing loss in both ears, Kim and Kevin were told that
she might never sit up, walk, or speak, For her first two years,
all
she did was lie on her back She barely moved,
Her parents contacted representatives of First Steps, a pro-
gram of the Indiana Division of Disability and Rehabilitative
Services that helps young children with developmental delays,
Through the program, Sophie received therapy and nutrition ser-
vices, and her family received counseling and support, Most
important: she had a gastronomy tube implanted to deliver
nutri-
tion directly to her stomach; for the first two years of her life,
she
had not been eating very much at alL Shortly afi:er they started
feeding her directly through the G-tube, Sophie began to sit up,

At the time of my 2015 visit, Sophie is 13, She gets around on
her own and goes to schooL She knows all the letters of the al-
phabec Though doctors originally told Kim that it wouldn't
do any good to sign to her, Sophie understands 300 or 400
words
in the family's pidgin sign language and communicates with her
AUTOMATING ELIGIEIUTY IN TH.E HEARTLAND I 41
parents and friends, Sophie has been at school all day, so she is
relaxing in her room watching Elmo's World, wearing orange-
and-pink-striped pajamas, Kim Stipes introduces us, and we
wave
hello at each other,
I ask Kim to tell Sophie that I like her pink TV, and she laughs,
signing the message, "Kudos to Sophie," says her mom, a blond
with faded blue eyes, a gold thumb ring, and the slide-on Croes
worn by folks who spend a lot of time on their feet, "If other
kids worked half as hard, they'd all be geniuses making
millions,
That's how hard Sophie has worked,"
The Stipeses aren't strangers to hard work In a greenhouse

made of metal tubes and plastic sheeting, Kevin cultivates heir-
loom tomatoes, broccoli, lettuce, peppers, green beans, squash,
and
even peaches, They can and freeze produce to use throughout
the
winter, But 2008 was a rough year, Kevin lost his job, and with
it,
the family's health insurance, He and Kim were trying to
support
seven kids on what they could make selling auto parts on rhe
inter-
net, Their son Max had recently been diagnosed with type I
diabe-
tes, And Sophie had been very sick, throwing up all the time,
Without Medicaid Sophie's care would have been financially
overwhelming, Her formula was incredibly expensive, She
needed
specialized diapers for older children with developmental
delays,
It cost $1,700 every time Sophie had a G-tube implanted, The
cost of her care exceeded $6,000 a month,
Trouble really started in late 2007, when Kim applied for the

Healthy Indiana Plan, which provides catastrophic health insur-
ance for low-income adults, Though five of their children were
covered by Medicaid, she and Kevin had no health insurance,
Im-
mediately afi:er Kim started the application process, four
members
of the household became ill, Kim knew that she would not be
able
to fill out all the required paperwork while caring for them,
So she went to her local Family and Social Services Adminis-
tration (FSSA) office in Tipton, spoke to a caseworker, and
asked
42 AUTOMATING INEQ.::!ALITY
to have the application put on hold. The Tipton caseworker
told her that, because of recent changes at FSSA, application
decisions were no longer made at the local level. She would
have
to speak with a call center operator in Marion, 40 miles away.
Kim called the Marion office and was told that her application

"would be taken care of." Neither the Tipton caseworker nor the
Marion call center operator told Kim that she had to sign pa-
perwork declaring that she was stopping the application pro-
cess. Nor did they tell her that her failed attempt to get health
insurance for herself and her husband might impact her
children's
coverage.
Then, rhe family received a letter from the FSSA. It was ad-
dressed to six-year-old Sophie, and it informed her that she
would
be kicked off Medicaid in less than a month because she had
"failed to cooperate" in establishing her eligibility for the pro-
gram. The notice somehow managed to be both terrifyingly brief
and densely bureaucratic. Ir read:
Mailing Date: 3/26/08
Dear SOPHIE STIPES 1
MA D 01 (MI]
Your MEDICAID beilefits will be discontinued
effective APRIL 30, 2008 due to the following
reason(s}:

-FAILURE TO COOPERATE IN ESTABLISHING ELIGI-
BILITY
-FAILURE TO COOPERATE IN VERIFYING INCOME
SUPPORTING LAW(S) OR REGULATION(S) :
470IAC2,l-l-2
Iffiportant : If you believe you may be eligi-
ble for Medicaid benefits under another cat-
egory and have more information about your
AUTOlvIATING ELIGIBILITY IN THE HEARTLAND I 43
case, please contact us at the number listed
at the top of this notice within ten days (13
days if this notice is received by mail) of
the date of this notice.
. The nouce arrived on April 5, 2008. It had been ten days since
it was mailed. The family had three days lefi: to contact FSSA
and correct the mistake.
Kim sprang into action, composing a lengthy letter that
explained her situation and faxing it to the Marion office on
Sun-

day, April 6. In it, she stressed that Medicaid kept Sophie alive,
that she had no other insurance, and that her medical supplies
alone cost thousands of dollars a month. Sophie's medicines
were
due to run out in five days. Kim phoned the call center in
Marion
and was told that Sophie was being cut off because Kim had
failed
to sign the paperwork declaring that she was stopping her
earlier
applications for the Healthy Indiana Plan. Kim protested that no
one had ever told her about the paperwork.
But it was too late.
According to the state oflndiana, the Stipes family had failed
to cooperate with the eligibility determination process and,
under
state law, the punishment was total denial of medical benefits.
The sanction would impact both Kim and Kevin, who were try-
mg to get health insurance for themselves, and Sophie would be
demed the Medicaid she was already receiving. When Kim
asked

why their other children were not being cut off, she was
informed
that they were. She should expect four more letters.
. The Stipes family contacted Dan Skinner, who was spending
his retirement as a volunteer with United Senior Action,
working
on behalf of elderly Hoosiers. In early 2007, United Senior Ac-
tion started getting calls from individuals and organizations all
over central Indiana: the shelves at food pantries were empty
and
1,,
I
I
44 I AUTOMATING INE~LITY
the United Way was overrun by requem for emergency medical
help. Skinner began an independent investigation in Howard
County, visiting the mayor's office, the area agency on aging,
Catholic social services, the senior center, and Mental Health
America. He found that people were losing their benefits for
"failure to cooperate" in alarming numbers.

Sophie's case stood out to him as particularly appalling. "She
was six years old, and she was recovering. She learned how to
sign.
She was starting to walk!" Skinner said. "She was starting to be
able to eat a little bit, and they said when she could rake 3,000
calories, they would take the feeding tube out. She was right at
that stage, and her Medicaid was cut off for failure to
cooperate."
By the time the Stipes family reached him, Skinner
remembered,
they were in a desperate situation and needed immediate action.
Dan called John Cardwell, founder and director of The Gen-
erations Project, an organization dedicared to addressing long-
term health-care issues in the state oflndiana. The two gathered
their colleagues from the AARP and the Alliance for Retired
Americans, lobbied their contacts, worked the media, and called
an emergency press conference. Dan took Sophie and her
parents
to the Indianapolis State House in a van. "She had a little dress
on," Kim Stipes remembers. "She was not a happy camper then.

Her little life was rough." They walked into the governor's
office
with Sophie in her wheelchair and "TV cameras in tow," said
Skinner. "They didn't expect that."
At one point, Governor Mitch Daniels walked right by the
group. "He did have an opportunity, quite frankly, to walk right
over to us," Skinner recalled. "He just walked by. Mitch Roob
[Secretary of the FSSA] was with him. They just stared at us
and
kept on going." Kevin Stipes yelled across the room to Daniels,
inviting him to come talk with his family. But the governor and
FSSA secretary failed to acknowledge them. "They get to that
AUTOMATING ELIGIBILITY 1N TH.E HEARTLAND I 45
position they don't want to deal with chat stuff They want lay-
ers," Kevin theorized later, "They want people in between." The
group asked for Lawren Mills, Governor Daniels' policy direc-
tor for human services, who agreed to meet with them. The next
day at four o'clock in the afternoon, Sophie had her Medicaid
back.
Sophie's family was not alone. In 2006, Republican governor

Mitch Daniels instituted a welfare reform program that relied on
multinational corporations to streamline benefits applications,
privatize casework, and identify fraud. Daniels had long been a
foe
of public assistance. In 1987, while serving as President Ronald
Reagan's assistant for Political and Intergovernmental Affairs,
he
had been a high-profile supporter of a failed attempt to
eliminate
AFDC. Nearly 20 years later, he tried to eliminate TANF in
Indi-
ana. But this time he did it through high-tech tools, not policy-
making.
Governor Daniels famously applied a Yellow Pages test to
government services. If a product or service is listed in the
Yellow
Pages, he insisted, the government shouldn't provide it. So it
was
not surprising when, shortly after his election in 2004, Daniels
began an aggressive campaign to privatize many of the state's
public services, including the Indiana Toll Road, the Bureau of
Motor Vehicles, and the state's public assistance programs.

Daniels appointed Mitch Roob as FSSA secretary. In The
Indianapolis Stat, Daniels praised Raab, then a vice president at
Affiliated Computer Services (ACS), as being" deeply
committed
to_ the interests of the least fortunate among us and equally
com-
mitted to getting the most service from every tax dollar." As
their
first order of business, Roob and his boss commissioned an
audit
of what Daniels called in a 2007 South Bend Tribune editorial
"the monstrous bureaucracy known as the Family and Social
46 I AUTOMATING INEQYALITY
Service Administration." As agency's audit report was released
in June 2005, two FSSA employees were arrested and charged
with theft, welfare fraud, and a panoply of other offenses. One
of
the employees was accused of collaborating with church leaders
of the Greater Faith Missionary Baptist Church in Indianapolis
to collect $62,497 in food stamps and other welfare benefits

by creating dummy accounts for herself and fellow church
parishioners. Between them, the two caseworkers had 45 years
of
experience at the FSSA.
Daniels seized the political moment, In public speeches, press
releases, and reports, the governor repeatedly characterized
Indi-
ana's welfare system as "irretrievably broken," wasteful, fraudu-
lent, and "America's worst welfare system." Citing the system's
high error rate and poor customer service, Mitch Roob criss-
crossed the state arguing that the system was broken beyond
the ability of state employees to fix. In early 2006, the Daniels
administration released a request for proposal (RFP) to out-
source and automate eligibility processes for T ANF, food
stamps, and Medicaid. In the request, the state set very clear
goals: reduce fraud, curtail spending, and move clients off the
welfare rolls.
"The State is aware that poor policy and operations have con-
tributed to a culture of welfare dependency among some of its
cli-
ents," the RFP read. "Respondent will help address this issue by
agreeing to use welfare eligibility and other programs to help

cli-
ents reduce dependency on welfare assistance and transition
into a
paid work setting." While the state provided no incentives or
sup-
port for matching applicants to available jobs, the RFP
suggested
that the FSSA would be willing to provide extra financial incen-
tives for finding and denying ineligible cases. The state offered
to
"pay the Respondent for superior performance," for example, if
the company can "reduce ineligible cases" by identifying "client
misrepresentations."
AUTOMATING ELIGIBILITY .iiN THE HEARTLAND I 47
At the time, the Indiana FSSA was helping about a million
people access health care, social services, mental health
counsel-
ing, and other forms of support. The 2006 agency was sizable: it
had a budget of $6.55 billion and a staff of approximately
6,500.
But it was much smaller than it had been 15 years earlier. In
1991,

the Indiana General Assembly consolidated the departments of
Mental Health, Public Welfare, and Human Services, and out-
sourced many of its functions. By the time of the automation,
the
FSSA had halved its public workforce and was spending 92
percent
of its budget buying setvices from outside vendors.
Everyone-advocares, applicants, administrators, and legisla-
tors alike-agreed that the existing system faced serious chal-
lenges, FSSA offices were using an extremely out-of-date
system
called the Indiana Client Eligibility System (ICES) for daily ad-
minisrrative functions such as calculating eligibiliry and verify-
ing income. Customer service was uneven at best. A 2005
survey
found that applicants faced a slow intake process, a telephone
sys-
tem that rarely worked, and caseworkers who were difficult to
reach. A US. Department of Agriculture (USDA) smdy found
that food stamp applicants made up to four visits to county of
fices before receiving program benefits. Overstretched staff

couldn't handle demand or keep up with towering piles of paper
case files. 1
The Daniels administration insisted that moving away from
face-to-face casework and toward electronic communication
would make offices more organized and more efficient. Even
bet-
ter, they argued, moving paper shuflling and data collection to a
private contractor would free remaining state caseworkers to
work more closely with clients. Daniels and Roob built a
compel-
lmg case. And people listened.
However, many ofDaniels's other assertions about the failures
of FSSA have been contested, His claim that Indiana's welfare
system was the worst in the country, for example, was based
only
48 AUTOMATING INEQ!:!AUTY
on the state's record for moving Hoosiers off welfare. It is true
that Indiana reduced the number of people on public assistance
more slowly than other states in the decade after the 1996
welfare
reforms. But Indiana had seen a significant drop in the welfare

rolls years earlier. In the three years between the installation of
ICES and the implementation of federal welfare reform, Indi-
ana's caseload fell 23 percent. As Daniels began his term, only a
tiny proportion of poor Hoosiers-38 percent-were receiving
benefits from TANF, and only 74 percent of qualified individu-
als were receiving food stamps. Despite the administration's
insis-
tence that eligibility errors were spiraling out of control, the
FSSA
reported food stamp error rates consistent with national
averages.
The positive error rate-which measures those who receive bene-
fits for which they are not actually eligible-was 4.4 percent. The
negative error rate-which describes those who apply for benefits
and are incorrectly denied them-was 1.5 percent.
Only two bids were submitted for the contract, one from
Accenture LLC and the other from a coalition of companies
called the Hoosier Coalition for Self-Sufficiency. The coalition
was led by IBM and ACS, Roob's former employer. Accenture
dropped out of the bidding process. On December 27, 2006,
after holding a single public hearing on the topic, the governor

signed a ten-year, $1.16 billion contract with the IBM/ACS
coalition.
In a press release celebrating the plan, Daniels announced,
"Today, we act to clean up welfare waste, and to provide
Indiana's
neediest people a better chance to escape welfare for the world
of
work and dignity. We will make America's worst welfare system
better for the people it serves, a much fairer deal for taxpayers,
and for its own employees."2 According to the Daniels adminis-
tration, the modernization project would improve access to
services for needy, elderly, and disabled people while saving
taxc
AUTOMATING .EHGrn1uTY IN THE HEARTLAND I 49
payers' money. It would do this by automating welfare
eligibility
processes: substituting online applications for face-to-face
inter-
actions, building centralized call centers throughout the state,
and "transitioning" 1,500 state employees to private telephone
call centers run by ACS.
Daniels lauded his privatization plan and the automated

system in the 2007 South Bend Tribune editorial. "Today's wel-
fare system ... is totally indefensible," he wrote. "For Hoosier
taxpayers, reform means enormous savings: a half billion
dollars
over the next 10 years, and that's only on the administrative
side.
When today's high rates of errors and fraud are brought down,
savings will probably exceed $1 billion."3 By March, 70 percent
of
the FSSA workforce had moved to positions with private con-
tractors. In October the Indiana automation project rolled om
to 12 pilot counties in north central Indiana.
In the first nine weeks of the pilot, 143,899 people called the
toll-
free number and 2,858 applied online. System failures were
immediate. "The telephone appointment system was a disaster,"
remembered_Jamie Andree of Indiana Legal Services, an organ-
1zat10n providing legal assistance to low-income Hoosiers. "An
interview would be scheduled from 10 to 12 in the morning.
People would have to find a phone, sit by it, and wait to be
called.

Then the call wouldn't come, or they'd call at II:45 saying [the
mterv1ew] 1s being rescheduled for tomorrow."
Applicants who had taken time off work were often unable to
wait by the phone the next day for a new appointment. Others
received notices that required them to participate in phone inter-
views scheduled for dares that had already passed. According to
a
2010 USDA report, a food stamp (called the Supplemental
Nutri-
tion Assistance Program, or SNAP, after 2008) recipient added
the
call center number to her cell phone plan's "friends and family"
i:J
so I AUTOMATING INEQ.gALITY
because she spent so much time on phone with them. Ap-
plicants who failed to successfully complete their phone
intervkw
were terminated for failing to cooperate in eligibility determma-
tion. Says Andree, "It was a terrible, terrible, terrible system."

Private call center workers were not adequately trained to deal
with the severity of challenges faced by callers, nor were they
pro-
vided with sufficient information about applicable regulations.
Advocates report call center operators bursting into tears on
the phone. "The first person I called under modernization, I re-
member it vividly," reported Terry West, a patient advocate
with
15 years' experience in central Indiana. "She was young, and· · ,
did not have any experience whatsoever. ... There was a
problem,
a denial of a case. I talked to this young lady for about an hour.
I
kept citing [ the appropriate regulations]. After about a half an
hour, she just started crying. She said, 'I don't know what I'm
doing.' That's exactly what she told me. I said, 'Look, it's okay.
I
was a caseworker. I'm reading right out of your policy manual
what has to be done.' She just cried."
Millions of copies of drivers' licenses, social security cards,
and other supporting documents were faxed to a centralized

document processing center in Grant County; so many of them
disappeared that advocates started calling it "the black hole in
Marion." Each month the number of verification documents that
vanished-were not attached properly ro digital case files in a
pro-
cess called "indexing" -rose exponentially. According to court
documents, in December 2007 just over 11,000 documents were
unindexed. By February 2009, nearly 283,000 documents had
disappeared, an increase of 2,473 percent. The rise in technical
errors far outpaced increased system use. The consequences are
staggering if you consider chat any single missing document
could
cause an applicant robe denied benefits.
Performance metrics designed to speed eligibility determina-
tions created perverse incentives for call center workers to close
AUTOMATING ELIGIBILITY IN nm HEARTLAND I 51
cases prematurely. Timeliness could be improved by denying
ap-
plications and then advising applicants ro reapply, which
required
that they wait an additional 30 or 60 days for a new

determination.
Some administrative snafus were simple mistakes, integration
problems, and technical glitches. But many errors were the
result
of inflexible rules that interpreted any deviation from the newly
rigid application process, no matter how inconsequential or
inad-
vertent, as an active refusal to cooperate.
The automation's impacts were devastating for poor and
working-class Hoosiers. Between 2006 and 2008, the state ofln-
diana denied more than a million applications for food stamps,
Medicaid, and cash benefits, a 54 percent increase compared to
the three years prior to automation.
Michelle "Shelli" Birden, a soft-spoken and serious young
woman
from Kokomo, lost her benefits during the automation experi-
ment. Shelli was diagnosed with epilepsy at six months of age;
by the time she reached adulthood, she was suffering as many as
five grand ma! seizures a day. Despite having surgery to
implant a
vagus nerve stimulator-something like a pacemaker for the

brain-she was still, in her own words, "violently ill" when the
modernization hit. In late April 2008 she received a recertifica-
tion notice from the FSSA. She faxed her response, a pile of
forms,
and other documentation eight days later. On June 25, Shelli re-
ceived a letter dated June 12 informing her that her Medicaid
benefits would be discontinued in five days for "failure to
cooper-
ate m establishing eligibility."
The failure to cooperate notice had originally been sent to an
outdated address, which delayed its delivery. Now Shelli, in a
panic, phoned the call center. An ACS worker told her to try to
correct her application online. When that failed, she and her
boyfriend Jeff Stewart phoned the call center several more
times,
trying to identify the problem. "I started reading her letters to
52 I AUTOMATING INEQ:g.ALITY
figure our what to do, and where to go, and who to call," Jeff
re-
membered, "but you couldn't get anywhere on the phone. It was

like you were talking to a computer instead of a person:" .
On July 11, call center operators connected Shelli with one
of the few remaining state caseworkers in Marion, who told her
that she had neglected to sign a required form but did not tell
her which one. By this point, she was starting to run out of
her anticonvulsant medications. She would have to find a free
source for her drugs, which cost close to $800 a month, or risk
violent seizures, panic attacks, dizziness, insomnia, blurred vi-
sion, and an increased risk of death from going off them cold
turkey. .
Shelli contacted the United Way, which ptovided her with a
few days of emergency medication. The staff also advised her to
immediately file an appeal of the "failure to cooperate" determi-
nation. She reached out to the Marion office again, on July 14,
and asked to lodge an appeal. But she was informed that the 30-
day deadline to contest the June 12 decision had passed. It was
too late to appeal the FSSA'.s decision. She'd have to reapply.
A new determination would take 45 days. She had three days
of medication left.
The governor and the FSSA promised that an autom~ted

eligibil-
ity system would offer increased client control, a fairer applica-
tion process, and more timely decisions. The problem with the
existing caseworker-centered system, as they saw it, was
twofold.
First, caseworkers spent more time manually processing papers
and collecting data than "using their social work expertise to
help
clients." Second, rhe outdated data system allowed caseworkers
to
collude with outside co-conspirators to illegally obtain benefits
and defraud taxpayers. The old system involved caseworkers_
de-
veloping one-on-one relationships with individuals and families
and following cases through to completion. The new system was
AUTOMATING ELIGIBILITY rn THE HEARTLAND I 53
"self-serve," technology-focused, and presented call center
ers with a list of tasks to complete rather than a docker of
families
to serve. No one worker had oversight of a case from beginning
to

end; when clients called the 1-800 number, they always spoke to
a
new worker. Because the Daniels administration saw relation-
ships between caseworkers and clients as invitations to fraud,
the
system was designed to sever those links.
The FSSA packed up all its existing records and moved them
to a central storage facility in Indianapolis. These paper records
were set aside in case the state needed them for appeal hearings,
but were not scanned into the modernized system. All current
recipients of TANF, food stamps/SNAP, and Medicaid were re-
quired to turn in all their supporting documentation again, no
matter how long they had been receiving benefits. "All of the
doc-
uments that identified the members of the household-birth cer-
tificates and that sort of thing-were in the local office until the
modernization. And then they were gone," remembered Jamie
Andree. "It was as if they had never existed. So one of the
things
that happened with modernization is that people [were] asked to
turn in [obscure] stuff, like the tide to a vehicle that they hadn't

owned smce 1988. They were being asked to turn in things that
the agency already had."
When clients did manage to find decades-old documents, de-
lays between the document center receiving paperwork and the
contractors processing it were consistently interpreted as the
fault
of the applicant. Chris Holly, a Medicaid attorney in Blooming-
ton, estimated that 95 percent of the Medicaid applications he
handled during the automation resulted in eligibility determina-
tion errors. According to Holly, all the errors were generated by
the state and its contractors, not his clients. "We knew we had
submitted everything by the deadline," he said in December of
2014, "and we were still getting denials for failure to cooperate"
I l .
t wou d take three or four days for documentation to get
ii
ii
I' ,,'
54 j AUTOMATING INEQ:gALITY
Th Id deny it on the d b ,, h never waited. ey wou
processe , ut t ey . d . f l et denied, they assume

[d
di' ] r even before. An 1 peop e g , .
ea me , o . , . Th 'II accept that they re JUSt
the system knows what its domg. ey
ineligible and give up." h . their health insurance
1 · t foug t to retam
Still, many app ,can s f idable odds. Like Shelli, they
or food assistance against these orm c t out a single error in
. d · t yingto rerre
became tenacious etecnves, r f es Failure to cooper-
!. . · gdozens o pag · complex app ,canons runnm . l d that
some-
cc d 1· l uuidance They s1mp Y state
ate notices orrere itt e " . . . h t speciiftcally was
. h . h n apphcanon, not W a
thing was not ng twit a . d ·lleoible? Was
. sing lost unsigne , or l ,r
wrong. Was a document mis , , , "Failure to
. h FSSA or the contractor.
it the fault of the chent, t e h ' ,, · d Glenn Cardwell, a re-
h t've p rase, note cooperate was t e opera ' l' . in Vigo County,
k d administrator now ,vmg
tired casewor er an . , . bl m and not the city, ,not the
"because then it was the clients pro e

contractor." . k s or omissions in an ap-
Under the previous system, m1sta e . equiring case-
bl and nme-consummg, r
plication were trou esome d cuments like birth
workers and clients to collaborate tofsecfure ome social security
d . l ts proo o mco , certificates, me ,ca repor , d . t'on they had
some-
. ''B fi mo ern1za 1 ,
cards, and rental receipts.. e ore . d this notice. What do I
11 d 'Listen I receive one to ca up an say, ' . R "And the an-
d
, ,, 11 d ACLU attorney Gavm ose.
need to al reca e . . ht now I'll make sure
'R . d wn to me fax it over ng ·
swer was un it o , f h' , ,, Before the auroma-
. Iii d 'II take care o t is.
it gets m your e an we ,, h d been a last-ditch punishment
tion, "failure to cooperate a . h . ly re•used to par-
d . few clients w o acuve J'
caseworkers use agamst a Aft the automation, the
. h 1· 'b'l'ty process. er
ticipate m t e e ,g1 ' ! h !fare rolls, no
phrase became a chain saw that clearcut t e we
matter the collateral damage.
lk. bout what she remembers as

Shelli Birden was wary of ta mg a. . . of her life. Ulric
one of the most confusing and ternfymg times
AUTOMATING ELIGIB1UTY IN THE HEARTLAND I 55
mately she discovered the signature she had missed. "I had
to go back through my papers," she said. "l always copied my
pa-
pers. l missed one question, and boom, they shut me off." When
we spoke in 2015, she remembered feeling completely alone in
a life-threatening situation. "They didn't give us enough infor-
mation," she said. "They didn't send us in with our social work-
ers anymore. They made us do it on our own."
But Shelli, as smart and tenacious as she is, didn't do it entirely
on her own. She received help from advocate Dan Skinner,
whose
contacts with FSSA staff fast-tracked solutions. Her boyfriend
took on navigating the debacle like it was a second job. She re-
ceived help from the United Way, which provided advice and
support. Birden was reinstated to Medicaid on July 17. She re-
ceived her medication in time to save her life. Seven years later,
with her health stabilized, Shelli was holding a job at Wal-
Marc.
'Tm doing really good," she said. 'Tm actually able to get back

to
work, and I feel like my life matters."
But many orhers were not so lucky. "As attorneys, we had ac-
cess ro people that could fix things," noted Chris Holly. "But
average well-meaning people that needed help? They were the
ones that suffered the most." Jane Porter Gresham, a retired
caseworker with nearly 30 years' experience at FSSA, agreed.
"The most vulnerable of our population-the parents of children
who didn't have food to eat, who needed medical treatment, and
the disabled who were not able to speak for themselves-were
the ones who iook it on the chin, took it in the gut, and in the
heart."
Lindsay Kidwell of Windfall also lost public benefits during the
modernization experiment. Six months after giving birth to her
first child, Maddox, in December 2008, Lindsay was informed
that she was due to recertify for food stamps/SNAP and Hoosier
Healthwise, Indiana's Medicaid program for low-income
parents,

56 AUTOMATING 1NEQEAL1TY
and children. She participated in a phone inter-
pregnant women, k . n Marion, who
. December 10 with a call center wor er 1 h
view on d d rovide Among t e
told her what documentation she nee e to P . J k Wil-
b for her partner, ac
documents requested were pay stu s h Buck-
d b t $400 a week before taxes at t e l' who ma e a ou h'
,ams, d Lounge Lindsay faxed everyt mg except
horn Restaurant an . D b 19 because
h stubs to the document center on ecem er '
J
t ekpay 'd by bank check and didn't have any stubs. His boss at
ac got pa1 fi d h w to sup-
lled the document center to n out o
t~e Bucl17~i~~aaes. Following their directions, she wrote out a
P y proo o "d d faxed them to the document
list of paychecks an amounts an
center on December 23. . d d' al biH informing her
Januar 2 Lindsay receive a me lC On y ' b d . d d that she would
be re-
M d' 'dh d een en1e, an
that her e 1ca1 a f k t ror her recent postnatal
l f · $246 out o poc e r, sponsib e or paymg d grocery shopping
on

Wh h went out to o some
check-up4 h e~~; card-the debit-like card holding her food
January , er . J ar 15 she received
/SNAP benefits-was denied. On anu y ' stamp
a letter from FSSA.
Mailing Date: 1/13/09
Dear LINDSAY K KIDWELL,
FSOl (XD)
D STAMPS dated DECEM-
Your application for FOO
BER 10, 2008 has been denied.
not eligible because: You are
To COOPERATE IN VERIFYING INCOME -FAILURE
SUPPORTING LAW(S) OR REGULATION(S)
7CFR273.2(d)
MA C 01 (MI)
HEALTHWISE benefits will be Your HOOSIER
AUTOMATING ELIGIBILITY IN THE HEARTLAND I 57
discontinued effective JANUARY 31, 2009 due to
the following reason(s):
-FAILURE TO COOPERATE IN VERIFYING INCOME

SUPPORTING LAW(S) OR REGULATION(S) : 470IAC2.
1-1-2
A week later, well within the 13-daywindow to submit the
"miss-
ing" documents, Lindsay went to her local Tipton County FSSA
office, submitting a more complete listing of wages and photo-
copies of Jack's last three paychecks.
Lindsay had the wage report and canceled paychecks stamped
"Received" and asked for a copy. She watched the employee
scan
her paperwork into the system and took a copy of the "Scan
Suc-
cessful" notice confirming it was received by the document cen-
ter. She also filed an appeal of the earlier "failure to cooperate"
determinations. If she began a fair hearing process, her food
stamps/SNAP and Medicaid would be reinstated until an ad-
ministrative law judge ruled whether or not the decision to
termi-
nate her benefits was correct.
The Tipton County worker told Lindsay that she should file a
new application for benefits rather than an appeal. It would be
faster and easier, she insisted. Lindsay refused. She didn't want

to
reapply; she wanted to appeal what she saw as an incorrect
FSSA
decision.
Three weeks later she received a phone call from a young man
who informed her that she would receive a notice in the mail
soon-a hearing on her Medicaid case had been scheduled. Then
he advised her to drop her appeal. He was looking in the com-
puter, he said, and because Lindsay had never submitted payroll
information for Jack, she would lose her case. But Lindsay had
copies of his payroll information stamped "Received." She had
the canceled checks and the scan confirmation. Ir must be some
58 AUTOMATING lNE~ALITY
kind of mistake, she insisted. It didn't matter. Lindsay recalls
that
the man on the phone simply said, "I found no documentation of
recent payroll information in the computer. The judge will
simply
look in the computer, see this, and deny you."
One of the great victories of the welfare rights movement of the

1960s and '70s was the redefinition of welfare benefits as the
per-
sonal property of the recipient, rather than as charity that can be
bestowed or denied on a whim. Activists successfully
challenged
inequitable access to public assistance by appealing decisions
and
demanding access to administrative law procedures known as
fair
hearings.
In 1968, eight individuals denied due process in New York
launched a class action lawsnit chat led to a Snpreme Court
deci-
sion in Goldberg v. Kelly. This landmark case found that all
wel·
fare recipients h.ave a right to an evidentiary hearing-a proc_ess
that includes timely and adequate notice, disclosure of opposmg
evidence, an impartial decision-maker, cross-examination of
wit-
nesses, and the right to retain legal representation-before their
benefits can be terminated.
By successfully reframing public benefits as property rather
than charity, the welfare rights movement established that

public
assistance recipients must be provided due process under the
Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. The case hinged on
the understanding, expressed by Justice William Brennan, that
abrupt termination of aid deprives poor people of both their
means of survival and their ability to mount an adequate chal-
lenge to government decisions. "From its founding, the Nation's
basic commitment has been to foster the dignity and well-bemg
of all persons within its borders," Brennan wrote. "Public assis-
tance, then, is not mere charity, but a means to 'promote the
gen-
eral Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves
and
P
. ,,,4
our ostenty.
AUTOMATING ELlGIBIUTY IN THE HEARTLAND 1 59
. 'Il;e far-reaching and fundamenral changes introduced by In-
diana s automated system put it on an inevitable collision
course
with the poor's right to due process guaranteed by Goldberg. A

class action lawsuit, Perdue v. Murphy, was filed by Gavin Rose
and Jacquelyn Bowie Suess, staff artorneys from the ACLU of
Indiana, on behalf of more than a dozen individuals in north
central Indiana who had lost their Medicaid, food stamps/
SNAP, or TANF assistance for failure to cooperate. The case
explicitly challenged the loss of due process under the
automated
system.
The ACLU alleged chat notices were incomplete, "failure to
cooperate" was being used too broadly, and the new
caseworkerless
system denied the disabled equal access to public programs.
They
also claimed that the last resort of wrongly denied applicants-a
fair heanng-was made increasingly difficult to access. Call cen-
ter workers defaulted to the decisions of the automated system
over the administrative law process, discouraging appeals in
favor
of reapplication, and failed to notify applicants of their rights.
Applicants felt that they had nowhere to turn for redress.
Ali:er successes for the ACLU in lower courts, Perdue v. Mur-
phy eventually went to che Indiana Supreme Court, which found

that the state's" failure to cooperate" notices were
unconstitutional
and did not provide adequate due process protections. But, re·
versing a lower court's decision, Indiana's highest court held
that the ',;ate does have a right to deny applicants for "failure to
cooperate because at some point "failing" and "refusing" to
coop-
erate converge. The case forced the FSSA to create more
complete
and specific notices, but did little to return the individualized
at-
tention of caseworkers to the Indiana eligibility process, or to
stop the use of"failure to cooperate" to clearcut the rolls.
"The judge will simply look in the computer ... and deny you,"
the call center operator said to Lindsay Kidwell in February
2009.
60 AUTOMATING INE~ALITY
The words were a nightmare. Despire rhe fact that she had
stamped proof that she submitted all the appropriate payroll
mfor-
mation, Lindsay wavered. Should she cancel her appeal? If she
lost,

she'd be responsible for repaying all the benefits she received
while
waiting for a decision-months of medical and food bills.
Even though Lindsay knew she was in the right, there was no
guarantee she would win the case. A loss would mean more debt
for her young family. She asked the man on the phone if she
could
talk to an advisor before deciding whether or not to contmue her
appeal. He said, "No. I need an answer now. Are you going or
not?" Gathering her courage, she re-affirmed that she wanted a
fair hearing.
He hung up on her.
Lindsay remembered that the appeal hearing was ~retry
straightforward. "I went to my appeal," she said in 2017. ,:'ey
said basically that rhey messed up. I didn't owe them money.
Her
family met all of the eligibility requirements of the program;
their Hoosier Healrhwise and food stamp benefits were
officially
reinstated.
But her experience with the FSSA still haunts her today. Her
family was self-supporting for nearly a decade after the
eligibility
automation. Then she went through a divorce. When I spoke

with her in 2017, she knew she was probably eligible for help
from
FSSA. 'Tm going through a tough time," she said. 'Tm a singk
mom. I work full rime, but it doesn't always cut it." Her expen-
ence during the automation makes Lindsay hesitant to apply for
benefits again. "They make it so difficult. Ifl applied now I
could
probably get it, but that experience with being dented · · · I
,mean,
I cried. I did everything that they asked me to do. I don t even
know if it's worth the stress."
Applicants for TANF, food stamps/SNAP, and Medicaid were
not the only Hoosiers impacted by the shift to automated
AUTOMATING ELIGIBILJTY IN THE HEARTLAND j 61
decision-making. That's why I traveled to Fort Wayne in
March 2015 to talk to caseworkers about their experience with
the Indiana experiment.
Fort Wayne, the second-largest city in Indiana, is in the
northeast, 18 miles west of Ohio and 50 miles south of
Michigan.
General Electric and International Harvester had factories there
that closed or scaled their workforces back significantly during

the 1970s and 1980s. Driving to my first appointment of the
after-
noon, I pass the local headquarters of the National Association
of
Letter Carriers; George's International Market with its
incredible
selection of house-made salsas and bottled hot sauces; and
Uncle
Lou's Steel Mill Tavern, which sports a sign in the window that
reads "Honk if you like beer." I cross the railroad tracks and the
St. Marys River, swollen from recent Hooding, into a neighbor-
hood of modest two-story houses.
Jane Porter Gresham welcomes me into her tidy white home,
where we sit on a blue velveteen couch in het front parlor.
Gresham's wooden cross contrasts sharply with her matching
bluet-shirt and cardigan set. Gresham worked for the FSSA for
26 years, from 1985 to 2011, when she retired in the wake of
the
automation. Even four years later, rage and frustration Ricker
across her round face as we speak. "People who are [at FSSA]
for
the first time, you can see it in their eyes-fear. Fear of what I'm
going to do. People say to me, 'I never thought I'd have to be
here.' They're not trying to cheat the system; they don't know

where else to turn. Our responsibility as public employees is to
make certain that people who are eligible get the benefits
they're
entitled to."
With decades of experience and seniority, Gresham managed
to hold on to her state job when the automation rolled out to Al-
len County. But under the new system, she no longer carried a
caseload. Rather, she responded to tasks that were assigned by
the
new WorkRow Management System (WFMS). Tasks bounced
62 AUTOMATING INE~ALITY
between 1,500 new ACS employees and 682 remaining state em-
ployees, now known as "state eligibility consultants."
The governor promised that no state workers would lose their
jobs due to the automation and that salaries would stay the same
or rise. But the reality of the new ACS positions created a wave
of retirements and resignations. After reapplying for jobs they
al-
ready held, sometimes for decades, and submitting to criminal
background checks and drug tests, workers found their positions

moved from their home county office to a regional call center,
They were offered moving bonuses if their new job was more
than
50 miles from their current work site, but many declined to up-
root their lives for the insecure new positions.
Under the eligibility automation, no single employee "owned"
or oversaw a case; staff were responsible for responding to
tasks
that dropped into their queue in the WFMS, Cases were not
handled in the county where applicants lived. Now, any
employee
could take any call from any county using the new system, even
if they knew nothing about the caller's local context, "We got
calls from all over the state," says Gresham, "I had never heard
of
Floyds Knobs [in southeastern Indiana] until we started that
pro-
cess! I had no idea of services that were available in that area,"
Reducing casework to a task-based system is dehumanizing,
she suggests, for both worker and client, "Ifl wanted to work in
a
factory, I would have worked in a factory. , , , You were
expected
to produce, and you couldn't do that if you listened to the

client's
story," The majority of clients Gresham saw during her long
career
were traumatized-by flood or fire, illness or accident, domestic
violence or extended unemployment. "People who have gone
through a trauma want some hope that it's going to get better,
That somebody's paying attention, that they're not in this
alone,"
she says, "That's what I think we did [before the automation],
We
listened to what they had to say and acted on it so that things
could get better."
"W'I e oecame slaves to the task system," said Fred Gilbert o
year FSSA employee . J" , , a ~o-h . . spena tz.n.ng in refugee
assistance "L'k
ot er private call center, it's 'just the facts' B t , I e any
is very complicated, That's the , b f , u the welfare system
wade through the mess," JO o caseworkers, to help people
ThegovernorandtheIBM/'"CS al', , , n co monpromi d · 1
dec1s1ons, more efficient use of resources and b tt se more time
y
vice B t k ' e er customer ser-
1
, u casewor ers experienced cascading technical fail
exp osron of errors that slo d , ures, an

poorly trained private wor;:rs :;hr;r;,1s:::e~h3;!'plicbaltions,a
hnd
created on t h . pro ems t ey
ACS ·k o t e remaming public employees. Mistakes made by
wm ers were referred to state worke fi ,
an omsized workload on the handf l fl rs or correction, piling
remained, u O ong-terrn employees that
By summer 2009, there was a back! f and 6 500 J og O nearly
32,000 cases
' peop e were waiting for ap l h .
to their month! pea eanngs. According
y management reports th FSSA
incredibl hi h £ d ' e was reporting
B y g oo stamp eligibility error rates to the USDA
etween 2006 and 2008 h b' · 1 d f ' t e com med error rate more
than t ,
Pe ' rom 5.9 percent to 19 4 M n-
h
, , percent, ost of that growth ,
t e negative error rate: 12 2 P f h was m , ercent o t ose ap I , f,
f, d
stamps were being incorrectly denied The t t ' f ymg or oo
for food st d , . ' s a es ong wait times
penalties f:::h:~~~:~ttracted notice and threats of financial
sic The pressure to keep timeliness numbers high to fulfill the
ba-
reqmremenrs of the contract combined , h backlo f I ' wit an

ever-growing
habitu:I :d cases£ ed to mass application denials and the now-
vice rom call center workers to "·us ,,
Gilbert reflected "Th I b b J t reapply, Fred
send something ;n e rufeshecame rittle, If[applicants] didn't
, one o t lfty docum ,
the case for failure to comply y; ;dnt~, you simply closed
to help somebody," , , , , ou cou n t go out of your way
oom, ane orter Gresham turns ren . , necnve. Back in her living
r J p
64 I AUTOMATING INE~ALITY
he streer· If you want
"It didn't take long for word to get out on t b, h
, to the office [in person] ecause t ey
your benefits on nme, go ,, h "We were
have to give you a face-to-~:e :~~;i;~:~~:, ~ase ~:::~ing every-
inundated with people w d W didn't save
b d d
We didn't save space an rent, e
0 y own, , , , d,,
k W were inundated at the en , wor ers, , , , e d h wn health be-
G resham saw great workers burn out, an er o Id 't
11 , 1 w There cou n d , t "Morale was at an a -time o ,

gan to etenora e. ' e an camaraderie. It was just you
be reassurance, there couldn t b y d h d I realized this
" , f 11 "Towar s t e en '
out there, she says wist u y, , h'
1
one of the last
was affecting my health, my relations ips, was
holdouts,"
d l · ng class families
When failed by FSSA, Indiana's poor an wor G h- h F ed
! and eac ot er. ac 1· d on local governments, vo unteers, ,
re ie l , , f help recalcitrant state
with lines of desperate peop e wamng or ' k Hoosiers
ncies and dismissive private call center wor ers, .
;:: ht back One of the centers of their resistance was M~nte,
lnl:ana, the largest city in the automation experiments rst
pilot area, h h "Middletown, USN' pro-
Following State Route 32 t roug , Th ban-
vides a drive-by tour of the city's recent ind::~:~~:::he t::n as
doned million-square-foot BorgWarner,pla 1 d 5 000 people
Y
ou arrive from the west. In the 1950s, it emp oye 1 ' d , 2009
F d k but 1t c ose m , assembling transmissions for or true s,

sphalt
, h 11 by an enormous a
Two miles later on your ng t, you ro de the fa-
field site of the old General Motors plant, Wodrkers ma, , n for
' M , M-22 "Rock Crusher" four-spee transmissio
mous unc1e 1 d · 2006
h le cars of the 1960s there, but the plant c ose m .
t e muse h , b board in the Center
When I visited Muncie in 2015, t e JO ,r d ly a
T ' office ouere on
Township of Delaware County rustee s d' food
· · , gardener custo ian, handful of employment opportunities, '
service, Pepsi delivery,
The state of Indiana is broken up into l,008 six-square-mile
townships, each with a local government office funded by prop-
erty taxes and run by a township board and an elected trustee,
Though each township office works a little differently, one of
their
primary responsibilities is to manage local poverty relief
Almost
immediately afi:er its rollout in October 2007, the failures of
the

automated system overwhelmed the Delaware County Trustee's
office, "People were devastated," Lead Case Coordinator Kim
Murphy said, "I mean they were just lost, Lost, lost, lost," Al-
ready suffering through the rash of plant closures, Muncie fami-
lies were now getting kicked off food stamps, cash assistance,
and
Medicaid, "They were confused, and they didn't know where to
turn," said Marilyn "Kay" Walker, Center Township trustee,
"There
was no case management, no personal connection, no communi-
cation among agencies, It was just the biggest mess,"
According to the lvluncie Star Press, by February 2008, the
number of households receiving food stamps in Delaware
County
dropped 7.47 percent, though the number of households
receiving
food assistance had climbed 4 percent in Indiana overalL Calls
to
the LifeStream 211 telephone hotline requesting information
about food pantries doubled, The Second Harvest Food Bank of

East Central Indiana faced severe shortages, The municipal
grave-
yard complained it had not been paid for thousands of dollars
worth of funerals for poor and indigent people,
The public was encouraged to apply for services through the
new online syStem; but low-income families in Muncie, as else-
where, did not have regular access to the internet. The majority
of
applicants had to rely on a community partner such as a local li-
brary, food pantry, or health clinic to access the online applica-
tion, The FSSA aggressively recruited community organizations
to support the new system by becoming part of a Voluntary
Com-
munity Assistance Network (V-CAN),
Asked to use her office's existing computers and staff to help
66 j AUTOMATING INEQ~ALITY
Muncie citizens submit applications for public assistance,
Walker
resisted, "When it came out that this is what they were going to
do, I was like, 'Excuse me, but, hell! You are not!' They were
try-

ing to get all these other organizations involved to do their
work,"
she remembered, "We're already overloaded," Walker made her
office available to people who needed to fax documents and par-
ticipate in phone appointments, and her staff went out of their
way to help applicants, but she drew the line at becoming a V-
CAN partner. "I didn't think it was our responsibility to start
doing FSSA'.s work"
Public libraries were particularly hard-hit by the automation
project. "We had lines of desperate people waiting for help,"
said
Muncie Public Library director Ginny Nilles, now retired, V-
CAN
partners received little to no compensation, training, or
oversight
to do what amounted to volunteer casework Librarians trained
community volunteers to help patrons submit welfare applica-
tions, but the library was quickly overwhelmed, The situation
worsened when budget cuts required reducing hours and laying
off staff.
Library staff and volunteers did a great job, said Nilles, but
there were serious issues, "Confidentiality is very important to
li-

brarians, The forms ask very personal questions, If they couldn't
use the computer, it was incumbent on us to read the questions
out loud and get the answers: social security numbers, mental
and
physical health, Volunteers are great, but if you pay someone to
do a job, it's their responsibility, It's about accountability,"
"Local agencies were victimized," said John Cardwell from
the Generations Project, who worked closely with local non-
profits throughout the automation, "They were being dumped
on, serving thousands of people they shouldn't have been
serving,
scrambling ro help people get their benefits restored, They
knew
these people, They weren't going to leave them without medical
care or food,"
AUTOMATING EUGIBIUTY IN THE HEARTLAND I 67
Faced with system failmes, increasing need, and little help
from the state, public assistance recipients, community organ-
izations, and trustee's offices began to organize, A group called
Concerned Hoosiers set up a website where FSSA and ACS

workers could share their experiences with the modernized
system, The Indiana Home Care Task Force held press confer-
ences on the automation experiment's impacts and drafted
model legislation to reverse damage, A subcommittee of ser-
vice providers, advocates, and welfare recipients calling them-
selves the Committee on Welfare Privatization Issues provided
emergency interventions for recipients facing benefits termi-
nation, organized press tours highlighting impacts on Hoosier
families, and launched campaigns to increase pressure on
policy-makers to stop the auromarion rollout and terminate
the IBM/ACS contract, With typical Hoosier humor, their ac-
ronym, COWPI, made it clear what they thought about the
new system.
Town Hall meetings on the welfare modernization spread
across the state, Anderson was first in April 2008 then M · ,
unc1e,
Bloomington, Terre Haute, Kokomo, One of the most successful
was the Muncie People's Town Hall meeting, held on May 13,
2008, Walker and Murphy proved to be shrewd organizers,
They printed flyers for the meeting and delivered them to so-

cial service agencies, convenience stores, and libraries, They
convmced the Dollar Tree to put a flyer in every customer's bag,
They scheduled the meeting to coincide with a free food distri-
bution by the Second Harvest Food Bank, They invited local
lawmakers, including State Senator Sue Errington, State Sena-
tor Tim Lanane, and State Representative Dennis Tyler, who
listened to hours of testimony from impacted constituents,
They invited Mitch Roob, who at first demurred, As the town
hall date approached, he changed his mind and asked Walker to
make space for a small army of caseworkers, eight computers,
68 I AUTOMATING INE~ALITY
and a photocopier, rn help attendees solve their eligibility prob-
lems on-site.
More than 500 people attended. A room-spanning line of
public assistance recipients testified about unanswered phones,
lost documents, and benefits denied capriciously. Melinda Jones
of Muncie, the mother of a ten-month-old with cancer, was

fighting to keep her Medicaid and food stamps. "I have to beg
and borrow from my family to give my daughter her food," she
said, "and I think it's utterly ridiculous that we do our children
like this."
Christina King, a diabetic and working mother of three, lost
her Medicaid during the modernization. She was unable to
afford
insulin for seven months and her blood sugar was out of control,
putting her at risk of stroke or coma. "What good does it do
when
my seven-year-old walks in and I physically cannot get out
ofbed?"
she asked. "I spent two days in the ICU because I have no medi-
cine. My kidneys are now at risk. My eyes are at risk. But I get
up
every day and I go to work, because I think it's important for me
to show my kids, 'Don't be dependent on the system.' I need a
hand up, not a handout. I'm raising three kids by myself. I am
try-
ing to show my kids, 'Don't be like me-do better.'"
Deaf, blind, disabled, and mentally ill clients were particu-
larly hard-hit. 'Tm deaf. How can I do a telephone interview?"

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