Regulating the Lives of Women

Widely praised as an outstanding contribution to social welfare and feminist scholarship, Regulating the Lives of Women (1988, 1996) was one of the first books to apply a race and gender lens to the U.S. welfare state. The first two editions successfully exposed how myths and stereotypes built into welfare state rules and regulations define women as "deserving" or "undeserving" of aid depending on their race, class, gender, and marital status. Based on considerable new research, the preface to this third edition explains the rise of Neoliberal policies in the mid-1970s, the strategies deployed since then to dismantle the welfare state, and the impact of this sea change on women and the welfare state after 1996. Published upon the twentieth anniversary of "welfare reform," Regulating the Lives of Women offers a timely reminder that public policy continues to punish poor women, especially single mothers-of-color for departing from prescribed wife and mother roles.
The book will appeal to undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate students of social work, sociology, history, public policy, political science, and women, gender, and black studies - as well as today's researchers and activists.

Mimi Abramovitz, the Bertha Capen Reynolds Professor of Social Policy in the Silberman School of Social Work, Hunter College, City University of New York, USA, writes extensively about women, welfare, poverty and activism. From welfare caseworker to welfare rights organizer to welfare state scholar, Abramovitz has galvanized a generation of students explaining how public policy shapes the lives of white women and women of color and how they fight back.

Acknowledgments, Preface, Introduction 1. A Feminist Perspective on the Welfare State 2. The Colonial Family Ethic: The Development of Families, the Ideology of Women's Roles, and the Labor of Women 3. Women and the Poor Laws in Colonial America 4. "A Woman's Place is in the Home": The Rise of the Industrial Family Ethic 5. Women and the Nineteenth Century Relief 6. Poor Women and Progressivism: Protective Labor Law and Mothers' Pensions 7. The Great Depression and the Social Security Act: The Emergence of the Modern Welfare State 8. Old Age Insurance 9. Unemployment Insurance 10. Aid to Families with Dependent Children: Single Mothers in the Twentieth Century 11. Restoring the Family Ethic: The Assault on Women and the Welfare State in the 1980s and 1990s , Conclusion , Index