Engendering the Welfare State. A Review Article

It has been nearly a decade since Linda Gordon published her influential review of the “new” feminist scholarship on the welfare state. Linda Gordon, “The New Feminist Scholarship on the Welfare State,” in L. Gordon, ed., Women, the State and Welfare (Wisconsin, 1990). In the essay, Gordon traced the contours of the then-blossoming feminist literature on the welfare state and encouraged feminists to move beyond a critique of gender-blind welfare analyses to construct their own, less deterministic historiographies of state formation. In the last ten years, feminists have not only heeded this call but have largely surpassed it, developing a voluminous literature that now addresses gender and the welfare state. Feminist historians have written new origin stories to reveal how female reformers, motivated by both maternalism and professionalism, participated in the building of Western welfare states. For an excellent review of feminist work on maternalism and motherhood, see Lisa Brush, “Love, Toil, and Trouble: Motherhood and Feminist Politics,” Signs (1996), 21:21. For feminist analyses of maternalism and the origins of the welfare state, see Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935 (Oxford, 1991); Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers (Harvard, 1992); Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (Cambridge, 1995); Molly Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890–1930 (University of Illinois, 1994); Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, eds., Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and Origins of Welfare States (Routledge, 1993); Gisella Bock and Pat Thane, eds., Maternity and Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of European Welfare States, 1880s–1950s (Routledge, 1991); Lori Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in Nineteenth- Century United States (Yale, 1990); and Regina Kunzel, Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890–1945 (Yale, 1993). They have also unearthed the gendered scripts adhered to by male politicians, policy makers, and class-based movements. In addition, feminist social scientists have explicated the re/distributive outcomes of welfare states to illuminate how states allocate resources in gendered and racialized ways. For feminist analyses of the gendered underpinnings of state re/distributive practices, see Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices (Minnesota, 1989); Linda Gordon and Nancy Fraser, “Dependency Demystified: Inscriptions of Power in a Keyword of the Welfare State,” Social Politics, 1:14–31; Virginia Sapiro, “The Gender Bias of American Social Policy,” Political Science Quarterly (1986), 101:221–38; Barbara Nelson, “The Origins of the Two-Channel Welfare State: Workman's Compensation and Mothers' Aid,” in L. Gordon, ed., Women, the State, and Welfare (Wisconsin, 1990); and L. Bryson, Welfare and the State (Macmillan, 1992). For studies of the racialized undercurrents of state re/distribution, see Gwendolyn Mink, Wages of Motherhood (Cornell, 1994); Jill Quadagno, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty (Oxford, 1994); and Eileen Boris, “The Racialized Gendered State: Constructions of Citizenship in the United States,” Social Politics, 2:16–80.