The Wages of Motherhood

Entering the vigorous debate about the nature of the American welfare state, The Wages of Motherhood illuminates ways in which a "maternalist" social policy emerged from the crucible of gender and racial politics between the world wars. Gwendolyn Mink here examines the cultural dynamics of maternalist social policy, which have often been overlooked by institutional and class analyses of the welfare state.

Mink maintains that the movement for welfare provisions, while resulting in important gains, reinforced existing patterns of gender and racial inequality. She explores how Anglo-American women reformers, as they gained increasing political recognition, promoted an ideology of domesticity that became the core of maternalist social policy. Focusing on reformers such as Jane Addams, Grace Abbott, Katherine Lenroot, and Frances Perkins, Mink shows how they helped shape a social policy premised on moral character and cultural conformity rather than universal entitlement.

According to Mink, commitments to a gendered and racialized ideology of virtuous citizenship led women's reform organizations in the United States to support welfare policies that were designed to uplift and regulate motherhood and thus to reform the cultural character of citizens. The upshot was a welfare agenda that linked maternity with dependency, poverty with cultural weakness, and need with moral failing. Relegating poor women and racial minorities to dependent status, maternalist policy had the effect of stengthening ideological and institutional forms of subordination. In Mink's view, the legacy of this benevolent—and invidious—policy contimies to inflect thinking about welfare reform today.

Gwendolyn Mink is Associate Professor of Politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Old Labor and New Immigrants in American Political Development: Union, Party, and State, 1875-1920, also from Cornell.

What happens to race and gender equality, and to the reach of the welfare state, when welfare programs are proposed as maternalist interventions to save the family and improve moral character rather than as class and universal entitlements of citizenship? Mink shows how debates and policy in the Progressive period cast their shadow over the fundamental issues of contemporary domestic politics.

The book's brevity and repetitiveness enhance the clarity of its argument, making it a quick and accessible read for policymakers and students alike. Its challenge to contemporary liberal thinking about poor women's work make it a provocative text for courses in public welfare policy, women's labor history, and recent feminism, as well as a needed reminder to activists for social justice.

Mink places racial and... 'cultural' differences among women at the forefront of her analysis. She underlines the chasm that lay between women who had the power to make policy and women who needed public funds and services to keep their families alive.... Mink's work suggests that, indeed, we do need to 'end welfare as we know it,' and to replace it with a generous, universal system of social protections—something we've never yet had.

In this fascinating book, Mink analyzes the development of early welfare policies and programs.... She sheds considerable light on the forces of racism and sexism as continuing influences on the structuring and restructuring of American social responsibility.

Linda Gordon, author of Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare:

Carefully researched and tightly argued, The Wages of Motherhood illuminates the source of today's social policy dilemmas.