A growing literature (including works by Kenneth Neubeck, Noel Cazenave, Gwendolyn Mink, Jill Quadagno, Sanford Schram, Joe Soss, Richard Fording, and Martin Gilens) examines the racialization of welfare policies, welfare administration, and welfare politics. Deborah Ward's book contributes nicely to that literature. The contributors to this literature prove to be an interdisciplinary group and include scholars from history, policy studies, political science, and sociology. Ward's book offers insight to readers from all those fields, although policy-oriented readers may find they seek more analysis, or at least a broader discussion of the implications of the research.

Many recent writings on race and welfare treat legislation and ground-level policies neither as efforts to remedy racial divides nor as neutral platforms where existing disparities become manifest. Rather, these polices are perceived as vehicles for the maintenance of systemic racism. Ward's primary contribution to the literature is her effort to push the politically significant moments of racialization back to the creation of state mothers' pension programs, rather than viewing the New Deal as the point where racial divides first began to crystallize. By beginning with mothers' pensions, Ward is able to trace legislation from the early crystallization of racism-reinforcing policies at the local and state levels to the multifaceted, systemic racism that has become a part of both federal policies and national debates about welfare programs.

The first part of Ward's book provides a detailed history of the development of mothers' pensions in the states, one of the first broad government-based antipoverty efforts. Ward highlights how reformers played upon elitist and racist notions of motherhood to make their case that states should pass legislation to create mothers' pensions. Ward notes there was early recognition that discrimination would likely arise in mothers' pension programs. The goal of the pensions, according to Ward, was not to provide for poor children, but rather to protect white, middle-class women and white, middle-class values. The author also notes that many of the early critiques of mothers' pensions are echoed in today's debates about welfare. Contemporary critics argue that providing for the poor is the role of private charities, not the state; that providing for the poor makes them lazy and dependent; that public relief programs retard the development of social insurance programs and employer-based supports for workers; and that the poor cannot be trusted to use cash aid wisely and should be closely supervised.

Ward, in Chapter 4, undertakes a regression analysis of government statistics from the 1930s to correlate regional differences, state racial and age demographics, state wealth, and urbanization with the timing and designs of mothers' pension programs in the states. Her results are not surprising, but are likely to be widely cited for their empirical value. In a subsequent chapter, Ward maps the problems of localized discretion and rampant racial discrimination, and describes Congress's failure to remedy these problems when designing the Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) program.

The author highlights issues of federalism, explaining how Congress and state politicians, particularly in the South when the Social Security Act was drafted, fought against the imposition of federal standards and strong federal oversight. Once the act was passed, many states and localities maneuvered to circumvent the limited federal mandates that were created. For example, vaguely defined “suitable home” requirements imposed on recipients of ADC were selectively employed to exclude nonwhites. The success of politicians and ground-level officials in resisting federal power had momentous effects on race and poverty in the United States.

Notably, Ward argues that the exclusions of African Americans from welfare rolls in the 1930s and 1940s laid the groundwork for later resistance to welfare programs generally. She argues that the shift in power during the 1960s, when the federal government began enforcing minimal standards upon states and when participation of African Americans in welfare programs suddenly increased, led to an enduring white backlash against welfare programs. All in all, Ward writes, federal welfare programs “reproduced and deepened these existing social inequalities” (p. 107).

In Chapters 6 and 7, the author weaves together multiple threads about racial disparities into an intricate history of the ways local, state, and even the federal governments deepened the racial fault lines in the United States during the twentieth century. Ward does an impressive job documenting how racial disparities and discriminatory practices within the states were well known to federal program administrators from the passage of the Social Security Act onward. Ward's recurrent theme, that racism has shaped state and federal welfare programs, has two leitmotifs. First, notions of “race”—and particularly who is a racial minority—have been ever shifting rather than fixed, with early discrimination focused not only on African Americans and Native Americans, but also European immigrants and religious minorities. (This suggests that new targets may emerge in the future, though Ward does not elaborate.) Second, efforts to exclude or control the racial “other” consistently played a prominent role in private and public aid policies during the early twentieth century—and continue to play such a role.

Though Ward uses race as her sole lens of analysis, she touches on other axes of social differentiation, namely marital status and immigrant status. She might have explored these issues more deeply. Not only was exclusion of racial minorities built into welfare policies, but so also was exclusion of unmarried mothers. Ward points out that while most states had mothers' pensions by 1934, only three states and two territories authorized aid to unmarried mothers. Ward concludes with a discussion of the federal welfare reform legislation of 1996. Her study would have been improved had she brought her historical analysis, particularly her discussion of race and unfit motherhood, to bear on more recent debates over government programs. Historical disregard of unmarried mothers, most particularly among those who are racial minorities, echoes in twenty-first century policies and proposals. Whether current government targeting of nonmarital childbearing is simply a matter of race by proxy or whether it is a new form of differentiation is an important issue of social policy, and it would have been interesting if Ward had weighed in on this problem.