When Jason DeParle described Angie Jobe’s life as a single parent on welfare, his friend who told him the story “got his inner Archie Bunker going.”

While living with Jobe and her cousins in Milwaukee for seven years, DeParle said he learned she did feel a sense of responsibility. Forced by pregnancy to quit high school at age 17, Jobe had written in her journal, “I’m going to have to change my life; I have new life within me.”

DeParle, a reporter for The New York Times and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, spoke about his new book, A Shot at the American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation’s Desire to End Welfare, at the Levis Faculty Center Monday as a part of the University’s School of Social Work’s 60th Anniversary celebration.

“The title came from (President Bill) Clinton’s first welfare speech,” DeParle said. Clinton had made a campaign promise to “end welfare as we know it” by forcing people off the welfare rolls.

“Clinton thought that shifting shirkers to workers, people would become more sympathetic to the poor,” DeParle said.

DeParle decided to examine the effects of the 1996 passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act by telling the personal stories of three women who moved from Chicago public housing to Milwaukee in an attempt to build better lives for their families.

“Research is important,” said Wynne Korr, dean of the School of Social Work, who invited DeParle to speak. “But journalists have a special role in making that story understandable and available to a wider audience.”

Despite his initial skepticism, DeParle found that Jobe was not only able to work, but she enjoyed it. Within six months, she had become a certified nursing assistant working with elderly patients in a nursing home.

“Angie loved it,” DeParle said.

She liked having a clean place to work every day, wearing a uniform and caring for other people, he said.

“Bill Clinton used to talk about work as social glue,” DeParle said.

Clinton often spoke of the non-economic rewards of work, such as building self-esteem.

Working did not provide Jobe with more income than welfare, however. Nursing assistants earn about $7.50 per hour, DeParle said. One in four have no health insurance, and one in five live below the poverty line.

“Although she was providing health care to other people all day, she had no health insurance,” DeParle said.

Jobe’s income increased about $3,400 by working, DeParle said, but that gain did not account for work expenses, such as transportation or childcare. Adding those costs would eliminate any increase.

What struck him most, DeParle said, was how much economic hardship there was in the women’s lives. They lost electricity three times, and there were frequent shortages of food, he said.

“A lot of the fights in the house were about food,” DeParle said.

From Newt Gingrich’s perspective, Jobe had “dug herself in a pretty deep hole,” DeParle said. That economic theory assumed the next generation would benefit from seeing their parents go to work.

“But what I saw in Milwaukee diverged from this expectation,” DeParle said. “Angie did not become a role model.”

The children rarely saw their mother anymore, and there was no stable father in the house, which the children saw as a “source of sadness.”

The one great redemption story, according to DeParle, was Reed’s boyfriend, a former drug dealer, who became a pizza deliveryman after his release from prison. Five years later, he is the one guy providing for the family, DeParle said.

DeParle credited University journalism professor and former Washington Post reporter Leon Dash as an inspiration and “one of the great men of journalism.” In When Children Want Children, Dash chronicled a year living among the poor in Washington, D.C.

“I think the only way for a journalist to get to the essence of these families’ lives is to embed themselves,” said Jan Carter-Black, a graduate student in social work. “Surveys are not going to capture that. An interview won’t capture that. Asking questions in a couple of hours won’t work.”