The historian of the Massachusetts Welfare Rights Organization traces its origins to the founding in 1965 of Mothers for Adequate Welfare (MAW), an informal organization based in the Boston neighborhood of Roxbury. MAW sponsored a number of marches and sit-ins, produced a manual for welfare recipients, and succeeded in negotiating some of its demands with public officials. Its first conference in June 1968 had representatives from nine towns and cities in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine.
MAW participated in the 1967 convention that founded the National Welfare Rights Organization, but close ties began in June 1968, with the arrival in Boston of organizer William Pastreich, privately funded but sponsored by NWRO Executive Director George Wiley. Using techniques that became a model for welfare rights supporters nationwide, he and others quickly established nine new MAW chapters in the Boston area, and these combined to form the MWRO in October 1968.
The MWRO had its greatest success in the eighteen months following Pastreich's arrival. The favorite activity was mass action by members of a chapter to pressure the local welfare office for additional aid under the program of special grants for special needs. The most frequent demands were for household furnishings and seasonal clothing. There were also demonstrations to persuade major retailers to grant credit to welfare recipients.
These mass participation activities were part of a continuing membership drive. There were 16 chapters by February 1969, 32 by August, and 45 (with more than 4000 members) by the end of the year. Thereafter the pace slackened, owing partly to division within the leadership and partly to the Governor's proposal to replace the system of special grants with a “flat grant” meant to cover all extraordinary needs. The internal problems were resolved by the middle of 1970, but the organizing drive did not recover its momentum. Group activities by chapters became less common than efforts of the staff and the lay leadership to join with other social action groups in publicizing their recommendations on welfare legislation and policy. There was a precedent for this in the widespread opposition to the state welfare measure H5453B, which became Chapter 885 of the General Laws in 1969. In 1970 and 1971 the national focus was on President Nixon's Family Assistance Plan and various alternatives to it, and in Massachusetts the MWRO and other organizations supported a parallel effort to pass an adequate income law for the state. The MWRO outlived these campaigns, but the lay leaders found themselves increasingly deprived of staff assistance and membership support, and the organization may have ceased to exist by summer 1973.
