[No Car, No Radio, No Liquor Permit: The Moral Regulations of Single Mothers in Ontario, 1920-1997] (1999)

No Car, No Radio, No Liquor Permit is both scholarly and compassionate. It systematically studies the development of the Ontario Mother's Allowance (OMA) from 1920 -1997, and it is sympathetic to single mothers as it traces the multiple forms of disruptive and destructive regulation that underpinned this policy. As a result, the book offers a comprehensive and compelling examination of the changing relationships between various women across different welfare state transitions. Margaret Little examines the origins of the OMA and then outlines and evaluates its administration over seven decades. She concludes by scrutinizing current trends and issues. Although her treatment is chronological and careful, this is by no means a dry academic survey of the dimensions and repercussions of a particular policy. To the contrary, the book is lively, interesting and quite insightful. For instance, it uncovers shocking historical details, contains evocative old photographs, and draws on the wrenching, albeit pithy, commentary of contemporary single mothers. While the book's spatial dimensions are narrow, the parameters being only Ontario, it provides a consequential subnational study. Moreover, the author is mindful of not just reflecting city specific biases. She draws on case files from the city of London as well as three counties (Elgin, Lincoln and Oxford), including both urban and rural examples, in addition to using province-wide sample cases. Through her multi-pronged research techniques, eye-opening and engaging material is unearthed. Little not only poured over case files in dusty archives, but also held unique workshop -- like group interviews with OMA recipients in the early 1990s, and questioned current administrators and case workers. This integration of both quantitative and qualitative data is used to admirable effect. The author's various experiences, as a former journalist, now an academic, as well as an anti-poverty feminist activist, inform and enliven her research and her final analyses. The book's main argument is that those who first framed the OMA and then those who later administered it, mostly privileged white women, were plainly involved in moral regulation: the intrusive and extensive scrutiny of the recipients of the program. Recipients were exclusively poor women and while the policy initially favoured white, Protestant, British subjects and naturalized citizens, it eventually included other women. As a result, unlike leading (non-feminist) welfare state theorists, Little highlights women's critical contributions to the welfare state, as initiators, administrators and recipients of policies. Furthermore, by tracing the contours of the terrain involved, the author is indebted to approaches like those of Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, and especially Mariana Valverde. But whereas the former priorizes class, and the latter gender, race and sexuality, Little, more akin to Lorna Weir's efforts, brings the interplay of class, gender, race, and sexuality into relief. In so doing, one of the aims of this study is to highlight the relationship between the regulators and the regulated over time. In Little's view, this helps to provide an account that is not only structurally determined, but one that underscores women's agency. Unfortunately, this latter point is precisely where the book falls short of its mark. Little painstakingly relates how maternal feminist ideology, combined with bourgeois women's sentiments of racial and class superiority, firmly planted the roots of a policy that was less meliorative for single mothers than restrictive and regulatory. In her view, this explains the growth of current punitive practices and continuing moralistic measures. Through organizations like the National Council of Women, Protestant, Euro-Canadian women reinforced the sexual norms, patriarchal premises and racist and classist proclivities of other social reformers. More than this, Little suggests that socio-structural and political changes that separated work from home, and emphasized the primacy of the male wage, meant that these bourgeois women, who would otherwise be privatized by dominant practices and discourses, used welfare state reforms like the OMA to carve out a space for themselves in the public realm. …