The National Welfare Rights Organization and welfare rights

In California she found work as a union shop steward in a Compton laundry.^[3] In 1963, she became ill, causing her to miss work. She then began to worry about her children growing up without proper supervision as a result of her job.^[3] Instead of returning to work, she left her job and went on welfare.

After seeking public assistance, Tillmon became subject to harassment by welfare officials, including invasive "midnight raids," wherein officials would inspect residences looking for evidence of a hidden windfall, proof of a man in residence, or evidence of secret profits.^[3] Seeing how people on welfare were treated, she organized mothers and welfare recipients in the Nickerson Garden housing project where she lived through the Nickerson Gardens Planning Organization.^[1]

Within months, she and her friends had founded Aid to Needy Children-Mothers Anonymous, one of the first grassroots welfare mothers' organizations.^[1] ANC Mothers Anonymous later became part of the National Welfare Rights Organization.^[1] George Wiley, a chemist and civil rights activist, became the latter's first executive director while Tillmon served as its first chairman.^[7] At its peak in the late 1960s, the organization had nearly 25,000 dues-paying members.^[8]

In 1972, Wiley resigned and Tillmon moved to Washington to become the organization's executive director.^[1] Though the organization was financially strained at that point, the role was a paying position which allowed her to go off welfare.^[9] She served in this role until 1974, when the organization shut down due to lack of funds. She then returned to California where she worked as a legislative aid and served on welfare committees at both the state and local levels.^[9]

Women's rights

While Wiley and his advisers tried to mobilize the working poor, especially white blue-collar workers, into the welfare rights movement, welfare mothers, led by Tillmon, sought to align with a women's movement and gain support from feminist organizations such as the National Organization for Women (NOW).^[1] The National Welfare Rights Organization was made up primarily of women, the group's members members were among the civil rights movement’s few women leaders, and the organization was one of the first to articulate the view that poverty was feminized. Tillmon herself attempted to broaden the horizons of the feminist movement by redefining poverty as a "women's issue," delivering speeches to mostly-female audiences in which she frequently compared the bureaucracy of welfare to a sexist marriage.^[9]

Whereas the mainstream women's liberation movement was made up of younger, middle-class white women organizing around their right to join the workforce, the women of the welfare rights movement—consisting mostly of black women with organizers in Puerto Rican neighborhoods and on Native American reservations^[8]—prioritized motherhood and making welfare a guaranteed right. At the time welfare programs could cancel or alter benefits if the recipients had more children or if a male partner moved in, and some welfare mothers were forcibly sterilized to prevent them from having more children.^[10] Welfare rights activists fought for reproductive and sexual freedom for welfare mothers, arguing that the rules must be changed to allow women to make their own reproductive decisions.

In her landmark 1972 essay, "Welfare Is a Woman's Issue^[11]," which was published in Ms.,^[1] she emphasized women's right to adequate income, regardless of whether they worked in a factory or at home raising children.^[12]