Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm and the Expansion of Food Assistance -- An Intersectional Analysis of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC)
Open AccessThe Special Supplemental Program for Women, Infants, and Children, also known as WIC, is one of the 16 food assistance programs administered by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). Codified permanently into law in 1974, WIC aims to support low-income pregnant, breastfeeding, and postpartum women and their children to prevent nutritional deficiencies and promote healthy living. WIC has been heralded as one of the USDA’s most successful nutrition assistance programs in the United States, and many credit the role medical and government professionals played in creating WIC in its respective legislative history. However, the legislative history of WIC, commonly referred to by the government and academia, left out a key player in its story: the late Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to serve in Congress. To reveal why Chisholm was left out of this story, I employ a comparative narrative analysis to examine two stories of WIC: the common story, which I cite as Story One, and the hidden story, which I cite as Story Two. Using critical race theory (CRT) as a method for document gathering, Story One uses sources that are well-known and substantiated by government sources. Story Two uses sources that are not well-known and substantiated by newspapers, biographies, and oral testimonies. The stories being compared are rooted in different sources of knowledge production and validation. To analyze the narratives of the stories, I applied tenets of agenda-setting theory, feminist standpoint theory, and Black Feminist Thought (BFT), relying heavily on controlling images and stereotyping to analyze the findings. The analysis revealed that Chisholm was washed out of the story of WIC due to the high political consequences of attaching a Black woman to a successful government program. My findings show that it is necessary to compare different sources of knowledge production and validation to create complete, accurate stories of legislative history that include the voices of the marginalized in the United States of America. It also reveals that controlling images and stereotyping are powerful enough to erase the most prominent figures from essential stories.
- All rights reserved
Notice to Authors
If you are the author of this work and you have any questions about the information on this page, please use the Contact form to get in touch with us.