Through recent decades, America's social welfare policies have oscillated between two contradictory impulses. The 1960s were marked by a campaign against poverty; in the 1980s, welfare policy was increasingly concerned with fighting dependency. By the early 1990s, when welfare rolls hit an all-time high, the fear of unintended consequences--that welfare was discouraging work and marriage, and encouraging out-of-wedlock childbearing--led to reforms that limited how long someone could receive welfare benefits, the incorporation of strict work requirements, and, thus, the end of welfare as we knew it.