As a teen welfare mother who dreamed of writing novels instead of holding a 9-to-5 job, Ariel Gore qualified as conservative America’s worst nightmare.
Gore is 26 now, and she’s not on welfare. Not since launching her own magazine, Hip Mama. Not since signing an $80,000 book deal with Hyperion to write “The Hip Mama Survival Guide,” which Gore says could saddle her with the label “The Gen-X Dr. Spock.”
But she still may be a nightmare to supporters of Gov. Pete Wilson’s welfare reform, because Gore–through her work and reputation–is fast becoming a leading voice for welfare moms and young feminists.
Gore went on welfare at 19 after giving birth to a daughter fathered by a man she met when they squatted in the same abandoned building in Amsterdam. She stayed on the dole for six years while she raised Maia and got a bachelor’s degree at Mills College and a master’s in journalism at the University of California at Berkeley.
It was for her senior project that Gore, a high school dropout, started Hip Mama, a way-liberal, way-feminist, in-your-face parenting magazine that offers a potpourri of articles, poetry, recipes and essays such as “Stripper Mom” (in which the writer mused that welfare reform might force her back to stripping before she earned her teaching certificate).
Gore’s message is an outgrowth of her life experiences: Welfare reform should invest in mothers, not penalize them.
“When I was on welfare, I worked a million times harder than I do now,” said Gore, who relied on a combination of student loans, campus jobs and welfare assistance to get by. “Most people will get off welfare and work if you give them the chance.”
Wilson’s welfare proposal would cut cash benefits, give welfare mothers less time at home after the birth of a child and require more hours of work. Gore said that if that plan had been in effect when she had Maia, 7, “I’d be homeless and working in a minimum-wage job.”
Instead, Gore is becoming nationally known through media interviews. She is the darling of activist, feminist and writing circles impressed with her politics, her product or, at least, her chutzpah.
“Our image of the welfare mom is shattered when we read Hip Mama,” said Mary Kay Blakely, the New York feminist author of “American Mom.” “Ariel speaks honestly about the issues of motherhood.”
Not everyone is charmed by Gore’s alternative approach to families. Jomary Hilliard, a parent educator at the Children’s Health Council in Palo Alto, Calif., read two issues of Hip Mama and concluded that while she applauds efforts to break stereotypes, she’s concerned it may send some incorrect messages.
“People in this situation need dignity and support,” Hilliard said of single welfare mothers. “But I wouldn’t want anyone to be encouraged to become welfare families. In supporting single mothers, you don’t want to denigrate fathers.”
Gore said her generation of parents is different from Boomer-era parents in that they are more flexible in defining family. And unlike Boomer moms, she said, Gen-X moms seem to feel less guilty about their choices.
“There are a million ways to raise good kids,” Gore said. “And none of them are perfect.”
Gore said the focus of her quarterly is not so much parenting advice as attitude.
“It’s not really service-y, it’s a support-group-type thing,” she said. “I try to balance political stuff, solid parenting information, and literature, so that it’s another voice.”
It’s a voice that quickly moved beyond the expected market of the 500-copy first edition printed with a $1,000 student loan three years ago.
“I realized I meant to speak to not just young, poor, single moms, but non-Republican, progressive families,” explained Gore, who said circulation is about 5,000. “It has to do with an attitude of parenting–feminist parenting.”
For example: One installment of Yo Mama’s day book, a calendar that runs on the inside cover of each issue, included such entries as, “Buy expensive Aveda hair (expletive), trip on hair (expletive) as internalized oppression.” Another issue featured an article on the medical, ethical and legal quagmire of reproductive technology.
Gore, barefoot and dressed in a bulky sweater and faded jeans, sat in the cluttered kitchen of her rented four-plex, smoking as she talked about her past, her politics and parenting. Maia was home sick that morning. She is the same age Gore was when her mother, a single welfare mom with two daughters, married Gore’s step-father.
It was a marriage that made headlines.
Gore’s step-father is John Duryea, 79, a Roman Catholic priest who was excommunicated 20 years ago after marrying Eve DeBona, now 56 and founder of Helias Foundation for Arts and Human Rights in Palo Alto.
Gore and her older sister, Leslie, grew up in a family “with a leftist bias and Christian perspective,” DeBona said.
DeBona and Duryea described Gore as an introverted child who didn’t speak much. They knew she was bright, but they didn’t realize how bright, even when, at about age 6, she asked to study Chinese.
At 15, Gore dropped out of Palo Alto High School and announced she was going to study at the Chinese Language Institute in Beijing. Her parents gave her maps and a backpack, and with $3,000 from a grandmother, Gore set off. The study program lasted three months, but Gore stayed in China for two years, teaching English and working in bars.
In one issue of Hip Mama, Gore writes about her brief time with her daughter’s father: “Our life together was not pure hell, but as I sat crouched in the dimly lit waiting room . . . I knew that regardless of whatever fleeting fantasies might cross my mind over the next eight months, I was going to be a single mother.”
Gore came home to live with her parents after giving birth to Maia in Italy, where she received free health care. (Maia’s father soon followed and lives in Berkeley.) She quickly discovered life as a parent would be trickier than she had thought.
“I thought I could just get a job and put my kid in day care and make ends meet,” Gore said with a laugh, combing her black-polished fingernails through her thick, black hair. “As a high school dropout? It didn’t work.”
Gore went on welfare and back to school, but stints at local weeklies convinced her that she wasn’t cut out for traditional journalism, which required objectivity on issues she didn’t want to write about objectively.
Hip Mama started out as a joke.
“A bunch of friends were over and we were making spaghetti and I said, `I wonder if we have a peer group,’ ” said Gore, whose friends were single, married, poor, parents and non-parents.
But when Gore started writing a business plan, she realized there was a wider audience and Hip Mama gained a following.
Gore said she hopes Hip Mama will continue to grow to the point where someone–not herself–can make a living off it. The publication recently appeared on-line (http://www.hipmama.com).
But for someone who has risen to such prominence at such a young age, Gore seems reluctant to map out a plan.
“All of this has been a total outgrowth of what’s happened in my life,” Gore said. “I’m realizing how little my plans have to do with what happens, and how much more cool what happens is! Now I see that a goal is almost limiting. I’ll just have to see where my life takes me.”
