Welfare for whom? Class, gender, and race in social policy. (Review Essay / Note Critique).

Christie, Nancy. Engendering the State: Family, Work, and Welfare in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000)

Hoffman, Beatrix. The Wages of Sickness: The Politics of Health Insurance in Progressive America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001)

O'Connor, Alice. Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001)

BEFORE THE 1980s, scholarship on the welfare state, including left-wing scholarship that was mindful of class issues, was almost completely gender-blind. Works on the welfare state by such renowned leftist authors as Ramesh Mishra, John Saville, Ian Gough, Claus Offe, and Pierre Rosanvollon seemed to indicate that there was an international agreement among male scholars of the welfare state that gender did not matter. (1) Mainstream scholarship was no better and no worse, and the classic overviews of the welfare state in the United States, Britain, and Canada in the mid-eighties by respectively Walter Trattner, Derek Fraser, and Dennis Guest had remarkably few references to gender. (2)

In the 1980s and 1990s, by contrast, feminist scholars rewrote the canon and demonstrated that consideration of gender did not simply complement the existing story, but often, indeed, changed it completely. As in other fields, however, the acceptance of feminist analyses was uneven, and many male scholars and some female in the social welfare field continued blithely to discuss the emergence of various social policies and their implementation as if gender either did not count or could be dealt with in terms of supposedly immutable gender roles. Social histories of welfare that put race at their center often met a similar fate. On the whole, however, there is little doubt that academic writing on the welfare state is far more suffused with the language of gender and race today than ever before.

Almost from the beginning, feminist scholarship on the welfare state seemed to polarize between two camps. On the one hand, there were those like Elizabeth Wilson, writing about Britain; Mimi Abramovitz, writing about the United States; and Jane Ursel, writing about Canada, who regarded the welfare state as the successful effort of a patriarchal state to control women and insure the maintenance of patriarchal norms. On the other were scholars like Jane Lewis in Britain and Linda Gordon in the US who believed that state programs, including welfare programs, were contested terrain and argued that patriarchal aims and program implementation were often turned on their heads by program recipients. (3) So, for example, while social assistance was meant to provide only a bare minimum subsistence for a family, its availability to female-headed households allowed women with abusive husbands or boyfriends to break free from their partners without worrying about losing their children or starving. State employees spied o n these women, and the state incomes they received were poverty incomes. Nonetheless, many chose the limited opportunities provided by such programs to become independent of a male "breadwinner." Dependence on a patriarchal state was less oppressive than dependence on an individual abusive male. Individually and collectively, women struggled with the state's representatives to force revisions in programs designed to insure that traditional gender roles did not change.