PROTECTING SOLDIERS AND MOTHERS IN ITS MOMENT

Skocpol described Protecting Soldiers and Mothers as a happy accident. She had planned to write about New Deal-era economic and welfare policy and began researching a prelude explaining why the United States had not developed a European-style social insurance system in the first decades of the twentieth century. What she discovered convinced her that the American welfare state began—if abortively—long before the New Deal. The vast reach of the federal Civil War pension system in the late nineteenth century and a collection of state and federal Progressive Era policies aimed at protecting women as mothers and potential mothers, she argued, added up to a welfare state. These early welfare state policies aimed first to protect former soldiers (and their families) and then to protect mothers and children. As she turned her attention to these programs, her book project became something new: an explanation of how and why the United States had become a policy innovator and of the peculiar character and shape of its nascent welfare state.

Why, Skocpol asked, had the Civil War pension system become so extensive in the late nineteenth century? And why, given that (she argued) it served as a de facto old age pension system, had it failed to become an “opening wedge” to a comprehensive federal pension system and other social insurance programs targeting male workers? Why, instead, did Progressive Era women reformers win social protections and provisions aimed at women as mothers and potential mothers, and this even before women had secured the vote nationwide? By analyzing how reformers’ rhetoric and organizational strategies “fit” with the structures, capacities, and timing of American political institutions, Skocpol assembled a “huge, complex jigsaw puzzle,” a case study for her evolving theory of historical institutionalism.

In the 1980s, Skocpol and a handful of other social scientists had revolutionized policy history. They rejected what they viewed as a tendency to see policy making as a straightforward reflection of societal arrangements and dynamics, particularly Marxist approaches. They called on scholars to “bring the state back in,” to understand the state as a semiautonomous actor, with its own interests and capacities.Footnote ⁸ The “state-centered” approach swept the social sciences and profoundly influenced historians. In Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, Skocpol refined her state-centered framework into what she called a “structured polity approach.” She argued that scholars could explain policy development—which policies get enacted and which don't—by examining (1) state structures and administrative capacities; (2) the “fit” between these structures and capacities and those of non-state actors; and (3) the ways existing policies reshape capacities and political identities, what she called “policy feedback.”Footnote ⁹

State-centered scholars identified several features of the U.S. state as crucial in determining policy responses to the problems of industrialization. Federalism's dispersal of power, early mass electoral democratization, and late and fragmentary bureaucratization, they argued, all constrained social policy development.Footnote ¹⁰ Early universal white manhood suffrage incorporated working-class white men into cross-class political parties, diminishing potential for the development and politicization of working-class identities and class-conscious political formations like labor parties. An independent judiciary strongly committed to property rights limited organized labor's faith in state policy as a tool for worker empowerment. The absence of a professional civil service limited state capacity while fierce partisan competition encouraged distributive patronage politics. To these factors, Skocpol added another: women's exclusion from suffrage, in the context of a “separate spheres” gender ideology, “stimulated collective consciousness and counter-organization outside of the parties and regular electoral politics.”Footnote ¹¹ These features, Skocpol argued, determined the shape of the early U.S. welfare state.

In Part I, “A Precocious Social Spending Regime,” Skocpol explored the Civil War pension system. Initially, pensions for elderly and disabled Union veterans honored military service, hardly surprising given that military service had long served as a quintessential claim to American citizenship.Footnote ¹² In the context of intense partisan competition and a patronage-oriented political system, the pension system expanded significantly in cost and reach by the end of the nineteenth century. By the 1890s, Skocpol argued, eligibility had expanded to virtually anybody who could claim status as a veteran or a veteran's dependent, and pensions ate up a substantial portion of federal spending. “Through Civil War benefits,” therefore, “the federal government—long before the New Deal—became the source of generous and honorable social provision for a major portion of the American citizenry.”Footnote ¹³ In Skocpol's analysis, this de facto old age pension system might, even ought to, have served as an “entering wedge” for a more comprehensive federal pension policy.

In Part II, “The Failure of a Paternalist Welfare State,” Skocpol explained why it did not. “Reformist (male) professionals” centered in the American Association for Labor Legislation (AALL), like their counterparts in Europe, advocated social insurance policies in the early twentieth century. They viewed policy making as a “set of rational discussions among experts, officials, and organizational leaders” and therefore failed to build grassroots support for old age pensions, unemployment insurance, and labor regulation. Organized labor—represented in Skocpol's analysis by the American Federation of Labor (AFL)—opposed most social insurance proposals anyway; given the judiciary's hostility to labor's interests, the AFL hardly trusted the state to promote working-class security. Above all, Skocpol argued that the negative “policy feedback” imposed by the Civil War pension system doomed the chances for social insurance. Elite and middle-class reformers viewed patronage politics as corrupt and irrational and, given the lack of a professionalized civil service, feared that social insurance policies would fall prey to similar problems. Ultimately, Skocpol concluded, “elite and middle-class determination to change the political practices and distributive policies of patronage democracy discouraged the United States from joining other Western nations on the road to more universal social provisions for workers and their dependents.”Footnote ¹⁴

In Part III, “Foundations for a Maternalist Welfare State?,” Skocpol explained the relative success of policies aimed at women and children in the Progressive Era. She identified a particularly good “fit” between American political institutions and women's organizational capacities. While early white manhood suffrage incorporated working-class men into cross-class political parties and undermined working-class consciousness, women's exclusion from full political citizenship reinforced nineteenth-century “separate spheres” ideology to produce a strong (and, Skocpol argued, cross-class) gender consciousness among women. Without the vote, women reformers developed a unique political approach, waging nonpartisan campaigns and relying on public education and lobbying. They thereby avoided negative association with the corrupt, patronage-oriented system that distributed Civil War pensions. At the same time, expansion of access to higher education produced a network of women reformers centered in settlement houses, schools of social work, advocacy organizations like the National Consumers League, and labor organizations like the Women's Trade Union League. It also produced a broad cohort of energetic and mobilized laywomen across the country that organized into a vast federated club movement, creating sources of grassroots support effectively structured by political unit and active at local, state, and national levels. Mobilizing around the moral value of motherhood, reformers and clubwomen won mothers’ pension and protective labor laws, a federal agency (the Children's Bureau), and a federal maternal and infant health program (the Sheppard-Towner Act). But these successes were short lived. Skocpol argued that ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment undermined women's politicized gender consciousness. A new feminist sensibility rejected gender-targeted policies, and the anticipated electoral “woman's bloc” failed to emerge. Conservative political interests and professional rivals (like the American Medical Association and federal public health officials) opposed maternalist state-building and won the upper hand in the 1920s. When the opportunity for policy innovation reemerged during the Great Depression, Skocpol argued, federal policy makers turned to social insurance advocates’ “paternalist” model rather than a maternalist welfare state that honored and valued women's caregiving labor.

There was a lot here with which historians could engage. Historical institutionalist accounts like Skocpol's proved more amenable to historians than social science approaches that sought general laws and overarching theoretical models and therefore risked eliding or ignoring specific historical contexts. Skocpol's “structured polity” approach avoided excessive abstraction and allowed for historical specificity and contingency.Footnote ¹⁵ In her introduction, Skocpol effectively criticized a number of theories of welfare state development that historians found problematic: those that viewed the welfare state as an automatic outcome of industrialism or a reflection of some broadly generalized national values, and accounts that portrayed the welfare state as a tool for one overarching goal such as regulating labor or enforcing patriarchy. None of these explanations accounted enough for specific historical contexts, Skocpol argued, or accounted for the important role of political institutions and processes.Footnote ¹⁶

Skocpol's so-called polity-centered approach cracked the state open in useful ways. Policy making was not a natural process or the reflection of one overarching goal; it was the result of a multitude of sometimes competing objectives, profoundly shaped by political and state structures and by the impact of previous policies. Skocpol's analysis would push historians and historically minded social scientists to explore how political structures and capacities shaped political identities, interests, and goals and helped to determine the nature and outcome of policy-making processes. Several reviewers correctly predicted it would profoundly influence the fields of political and policy history.Footnote ¹⁷

Women's and gender historians were the book's sharpest critics. Their reactions may, in part, have reflected some peevishness about Skocpol's “discovery” that gender played a central role in welfare state politics. In the book's preface, Skocpol described her epiphany that “gender relations and identities were not just a footnote to my overall story” but were “centrally intertwined with the structural and cultural patterns of American politics from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century.”Footnote ¹⁸ This insight was hardly news to women's historians or to social scientists writing about gender and politics. Many of them had been making this case for at least a decade. The sociologist Rhonda F. Levine wrote that the book “lacks a certain sense of familiarity with women's history,” while for the historian Anne Firor Scott, Skocpol's “discovery” that women played a central role in reform ignored two decades of women's history documenting women's experimentation with political strategies in temperance, moral reform, and antislavery campaigns.Footnote ¹⁹ Since Paula Baker's pioneering 1984 article, “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780–1920,” a host of scholars had explored the complexities of women's political work and culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Collectively, these works chronicled a long history of women mobilizing claims of female morality and benevolence to engage in community and political reform and state-building.Footnote ²⁰ Just a year before Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, in fact, Robyn Muncy chronicled the state-building efforts of a “female dominion” of reformers in Progressive Era settlement houses, schools of social work, and the federal Children's Bureau.Footnote ²¹ “Many of us have long argued that it is impossible to understand the development of the American state without taking account of its gender basis,” noted the political scientist Virginia Sapiro in a generally positive review of Skocpol's book; “perhaps our colleagues who have ignored scholars more persistently identified with feminist scholarship will listen to Skocpol now.”Footnote ²² Indeed, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers was more widely reviewed in academic journals than were books by scholars like Gwendolyn Mink and Molly Ladd-Taylor, who focused more directly and from a feminist perspective on the centrality of gender to Progressive Era state-building.Footnote ²³

Much of the criticism from feminist scholars and women's historians centered specifically on what some historians viewed as Skocpol's celebratory characterization of maternalist reformers.Footnote ²⁴ Drawing on the rhetoric of Progressive Era reformers and clubwomen, Skocpol wrote admiringly of a “nascent maternal welfare state” of protective labor laws and state aid distributed directly to women, arguing that such policies emerged from cross-class gender solidarity that honored and valued women's caregiving labor. Writing in the early 1990s, when Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) faced widespread public and political opprobrium, Skocpol portrayed this early maternalist welfare state as progressive in relation to “paternalistic” social insurance proposals that directed aid to male wage earners. She wrote admiringly of the vast voluntary army of clubwomen across the country that pressed legislators to create mothers’ pensions and other social welfare measures for women. In fact, Skocpol viewed these maternalist policies as a potential foundation for a comprehensive system of social protection for women and children, one that recognized and rewarded caregiving labor. No such system emerged, she argued, because of unintended consequences and the waning of women's political leverage, as it became clear that there would be no “women's bloc” holding male officials accountable.

This portrayal of maternalist reformers drew criticism from women's historians, who pointed to a more complex set of motivations and legacies. Gwendolyn Mink turned Skocpol's portrayal on its head: “the roots of women's inequality in the welfare state,” she wrote “can be found in maternalist social policy.”Footnote ²⁵ In a 1990 article and later in The Wages of Motherhood: Inequality in the Welfare State, 1917–1942—a book Skocpol dismissed as “new-fangled feminist welfare history”—Mink argued that maternalist reformers were motivated less by cross-class gender solidarity than by racial anxiety.Footnote ²⁶ In Mink's view, mothers’ pensions and maternalist health and educational programs were part of a broader Americanization campaign designed to impose the cultural standards of “Anglo-Americanized domestic motherhood” on working-class Southern and Eastern European immigrants.Footnote ²⁷ Even as they rejected the eugenic and restrictionist policies proffered by many of their contemporaries, maternalist reformers reinforced racial and gender inequality by mandating a particular model of middle-class Americanized domesticity. As damaging, in Mink's analysis, was maternalists’ underlying assumption that cultural regulation could overcome women's poverty. Here, Mink located the origins of later “culture of poverty” arguments. Where Skocpol saw a progressive campaign, cross-class alliances, and policies that constructively acknowledged the value of reproductive labor, Mink saw social control and a missed opportunity to seek women's independence through policies that would integrate mothers into the labor market.Footnote ²⁸

Studies of implementation illuminated maternalism's class and racial biases. Skocpol largely relied on reformers’ official rhetoric; in practice, maternalist victories seemed less progressive. While mothers’ pension laws passed in most states, they did not mandate that localities provide aid. In the few communities that did provide pensions, funding was miserly, and administrators largely excluded African American women as well as deserted, divorced, and unmarried mothers.Footnote ²⁹ Only some women, it seemed, were deserving of honorable mothering. Analyzing the administration of mothers’ pensions and infant and maternal health programs in her 1994 book Mother-Work, Molly Ladd-Taylor concluded that “maternalist politics were necessarily racial politics,” as administrators “celebrated healthy and virtuous (white) women as mothers of the nation's citizen-soldiers and censured those whose heredity, homes, and family lives did not fit the ideal.”Footnote ³⁰ Joanne Goodwin's 1997 study of mothers’ pension administration in Chicago revealed the exclusion of noncitizens and African Americans, discovered that persistent fiscal restrictions kept the program from meeting need, and found that recipients were expected to supplement their pensions with wage labor.Footnote ³¹ Studies of local implementation in other communities told similar stories.Footnote ³²

The gap between reformers’ soaring rhetoric and miserly and discriminatory implementation raised questions about reformers’ intentions. Important interventions from Kathryn Kish Sklar and Linda Gordon suggested that at least some maternalist reformers promoted the kind of progressive ideal that Skocpol described. Kathryn Kish Sklar's 1995 biography of Florence Kelley portrayed this pivotal figure in shaping the progressive state as a socialist committed to working-class empowerment. Like Skocpol, Sklar argued that weaknesses in male political culture in the United States left a political vacuum that gender politics filled. But in her telling, Florence Kelley and her ilk settled for woman-specific protective labor legislation as merely an “entering wedge” for more expansive worker protections.Footnote ³³ In her 1994 book Pitied But Not Entitled, Gordon offered a portrait of maternalist reformers as pragmatic politicians working within a set of ideological and structural constraints. To accomplish anything, they had to compromise sometimes progressive and robust visions of state social protection and provision.Footnote ³⁴ Vivien Hart's analysis of the legal terrain likewise characterizes progressive women reformers as “reluctant and conflicted maternalists” who settled for half a loaf rather than no loaf at all.Footnote ³⁵ It seems clear that some middle-class and affluent Progressive Era women reformers mobilized maternalist rhetoric in service of a broadly progressive political agenda: a robust public sector and various forms of state protection for the working class.

Historical attention to a broader range of maternalist state-building revealed a more coercive side. Reformers promoted age-of-consent laws and juvenile courts that, in the name of protection, policed women and enforced Protestant elites’ visions of social order. As several historians have detailed, these policies caused significant harm to individual women and reinforced existing inequalities. In her 1995 book Delinquent Daughters, for example, Mary Odem traced state-building campaigns, rooted in a middle-class Protestant ideology of domestic womanhood, among both lay reformers and social work professionals. Reformers succeeded in raising states’ age of consent, creating juvenile court systems, and building reformatories for female “delinquents.” As a result, young working-class women experienced broad policing of their public and private behavior; incarceration or lesser forms of state supervision violated their bodily integrity and often restricted their freedom. Odem acknowledged that some of these outcomes resulted from reformers’ inability to control the very systems they created. At the same time, she illuminated contradictory impulses among the reformers themselves, including mistrust of working-class women and a desire to impose their own notions of social propriety and social order.Footnote ³⁶

Whatever reformers’ intentions, several historians joined Mink in contesting Skocpol's characterization of maternalism as potentially liberatory for women.Footnote ³⁷ By grounding women's citizenship in motherhood, they argued, maternalist rhetoric and policy played a role in reinforcing and reproducing women's economic dependence. Ladd-Taylor's division of reformers into sentimental, progressive, and feminist maternalists and Gordon's attention to the few reformers who called for motherhood endowments illuminated competing approaches to the problems of women's economic dependence that complicated Skocpol's somewhat monolithic portrayal of maternalism. Moreover, in Alice Kessler-Harris's assessment, the white, middle-class maternalist reformers that Skocpol highlighted “made no serious effort to provide what in most European countries was the heart of a ‘maternalist’ program: maternity leaves or benefits for working women.”Footnote ³⁸ Sonya Michel cited maternalists’ explicit censure of wage-earning motherhood as “maternalism's [unfortunate] legacy to the American welfare state.”Footnote ³⁹ The articles in Linda Gordon's 1990 collection, Women, the State, and Welfare, illustrated many aspects of this complex and problematic legacy.Footnote ⁴⁰

Historians also questioned Skocpol's distinction between paternalist and maternalist policies, instead identifying a racialized family wage model at the center of American state-building. Barbara Nelson traced what she viewed as two gendered channels in the American welfare state as part of a unified system.Footnote ⁴¹ Kessler-Harris also argued compellingly that these policy impulses—social insurance for working men and maternalist protections for women and children—were two sides of the same coin: both aimed to shore up a family wage system designed to enable white men and women to maintain male-breadwinner, female-homemaker families.Footnote ⁴² Linda Gordon's exploration of New Deal architects’ gendered division of labor likewise demonstrated the compatibility of these two approaches and the sharp limits to the maternalist vision. As Gordon convincingly argued, mothers’ pensions, and then Aid to Dependent Children, were hardly designed to reward and dignify caregiving labor or promote women's economic independence; instead, policy makers viewed these as residual programs that would compensate temporarily for the loss of a male breadwinner.Footnote ⁴³

By comparing white and black women's reform efforts, Linda Gordon and Eileen Boris brought maternalists’ commitment to what would later be called “stay-at-home motherhood” into sharp relief. African American women in clubs, churches, and settlement houses recognized the necessity of maternal wage earning; they also lacked the influence that white maternalists wielded in the political and policy-making arena. With no hope of claiming citizenship on the basis of motherhood, black women mobilized their communities’ meager resources to wage health and sanitation campaigns; build schools and day nurseries to assist working mothers; and provide social services to neglected communities.Footnote ⁴⁴ In Gender and Jim Crow, Glenda Gilmore detailed black women's state-building efforts: they employed creative strategies to extract resources from local governments and forge cross-racial cooperation with white women.Footnote ⁴⁵ But for black women reformers, the purpose of such efforts and their stakes differed dramatically from those of white maternalists. Like white maternalists, African American clubwomen sought to promote middle-class standards of behavior among poor women. But given the power of white supremacy, they had much more in common with those they sought to reform than did white reformers. The respectability politics they advanced were a means of negotiating within a repressive racial caste system, and their efforts to reform poorer women's behavior served as a strategy for countering vicious racial stereotypes that denigrated black womanhood. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Deborah Gray White, Patricia Schechter, Paula Giddings, Elsa Barkley Brown, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, and Michele Mitchell, among others, detailed black women's extensive engagement in social reform, campaigns inextricable from the broad project of race progress.Footnote ⁴⁶

Skocpol's inattention to maternalism's racial contours raised a broader limitation: Protecting Soldiers and Mothers largely ignored racial politics altogether. Gwendolyn Mink and Molly Ladd-Taylor detailed white maternalists’ preoccupation with assimilating Southern and Eastern European immigrants and argued that maternalism itself was a racial project. George Sanchez described similar state-sponsored assimilation campaigns among Mexican and Mexican American mothers in the Southwest.Footnote ⁴⁷ More recently, the sociologist Cybelle Fox traced the Progressive Era welfare state's “three worlds of relief”: incorporation of European immigrants, exclusion of African Americans, and expulsion of Mexicans and Mexican Americans, while Jessica Pliley illuminated the racialized nativism at the center of campaigns to “protect women” from sex trafficking.Footnote ⁴⁸ Skocpol noted that Progressive Era pension systems and labor regulations largely excluded African Americans, but she did not grapple with the central and determinative role that white supremacy and racial politics played in shaping American social policy. In fact, a substantial body of scholarship suggests that many of the institutional variables in Skocpol's causal argument were themselves a result of white supremacist politics and racial capitalism. The nation's federal structure and the courts’ commitment to a particular interpretation of property rights, for example, emerged as tools to protect the interests and power of slaveholders, while the gender ideology that produced maternalist politics, as Kathleen Brown argued, originated as one of slavery's constitutive elements.Footnote ⁴⁹

Not all of this was so clear to me twenty years ago. What I remember most about reading Protecting Soldiers and Mothers—alongside works by Gordon, Sklar, Ladd-Taylor, and other scholars discussed above—is a feeling of intellectual excitement and possibility. These works opened up new ways of seeing women as historical and political actors and of exploring the state as a powerful site for the construction of (racialized) gender and of other axes of inequality. In this sense of possibility, I was not alone. Both the insights and limitations in Skocpol's explanatory model helped to set an ambitious research agenda for the next two-and-a-half decades. Scholars took up Skocpol's call to bring the state back in and recognize the peculiar shape of American social provision even as they centered causal factors that Skocpol omitted or dismissed.

AMERICAN WELFARE STATE HISTORY SINCE PROTECTING SOLDIERS AND MOTHERS

By the late 1990s, scholars were moving their analysis of the welfare state forward in time, to the construction, administration, and evolution of the New Deal state. Yet even those who do not specifically refer to Skocpol have been influenced by her approach. Historians took seriously state-centered theorists’ attention to the structures and timing of political institutions, the semiautonomous role of state actors, and especially policy feedback effects. These approaches have greatly enriched our understanding of American political history in the twentieth century. In the last two decades historians have applied Skocpol's insights while centering three elements that are less developed in Skocpol's analysis: white supremacy and racial politics, the power of business, and the role of clients and recipients. The remainder of this essay will discuss these developments and what they tell us about Protecting Soldiers and Mothers twenty-five years later.

CONSTRUCTING A RACIALIZED GENDERED STATE

If Skocpol overlooked racial politics, scholars of the New Deal welfare state have placed it front and center. In countless ways, they have argued, white supremacist ideology structured government policies and citizenship across the twentieth century. Historians of the twentieth century state have illuminated the racial dimensions of federal housing and urban renewal policies and metropolitan economic development strategies, as well as more obvious welfare state policies such as Social Security. Other historians—especially those writing about ADC/AFDC—have demonstrated the intersecting politics of race and gender in shaping state policy and social citizenship. In taking seriously Skocpol's call to account for state structures, political processes, and policy feedback, scholars in the last quarter century have explored the complexities of what Eileen Boris called the “racialized gendered state.”Footnote ⁵⁰

Scholarship on the New Deal itself is a good example. Moving beyond earlier debates about the relative role of business elites or grassroots social movements in producing New Deal legislation, scholars in the late twentieth century turned their attention to the structure and effects of New Deal policies. Here, state structures clearly intersected with white supremacy and industrial capitalism to produce a fragmented and unequal social citizenship. The structures of Congress, which granted committee chairmanships based on seniority, gave Southerners inordinate power to shape the nascent welfare state. Their seniority depended upon the wholesale disenfranchisement of Southern African Americans, which generations of federal policy makers allowed in the name of federalism's separation of powers. As Robert Lieberman, Michael Brown, Jill Quadagno, and Ira Katznelson argued, Southern legislators were able to protect their region's racial caste system and their own economic interests by excluding black workers from the New Deal state's most robust social protections. Domestic and agricultural laborers, among other categories of workers, did not gain access to Old Age Insurance, Unemployment Insurance, or the wage and hours protections of the Fair Labor Standards Act, nor were they guaranteed a right to organize under the National Labor Relations Act.Footnote ⁵¹ In the end, a majority of African American workers and 85 percent of black women workers were left out as most white workers won crucial new social rights.Footnote ⁵²

Following Skocpol's “policy feedback” approach, scholars have traced the multiple consequences of this fragmented welfare state. Building on Barbara Nelson's and others’ accounts of a gendered “two channel” welfare state, political scientists in the late 1990s detailed the unequal social citizenship that resulted from the Social Security Act.Footnote ⁵³ Financed and administered mostly at the federal level and tied to labor market participation, social insurance proffered a robust national citizenship; reliant on state funding and local administration, needs-based public assistance did not.Footnote ⁵⁴ Most white men were incorporated into the welfare state as workers who earned their benefits. Most white women, who did not have steady, long-term work histories, or didn't earn enough to qualify for social insurance, were incorporated as dependents. Black and Latino workers—male and female—concentrated in low-wage and seasonal employment and excluded job categories were incorporated as relief recipients.Footnote ⁵⁵

Political scientists emphasized structures; historians illuminated the ideological context that produced and resulted from fragmented citizenship. In a series of powerful interventions, some of the giants of the field—Linda Gordon, Alice Kessler-Harris, Eileen Boris, and Sonya Michel—made visible the male-breadwinner family wage model at the very foundation of the welfare state.Footnote ⁵⁶ Mimi Abramovitz's 1988 book Regulating the Lives of Women and Gordon's 1990 collection, Women, the State, and Welfare, had set the stage.Footnote ⁵⁷ Gordon's 1994 book Pitied But Not Entitled showed maternalist reformers working on a mutually agreed-upon parallel track to male social insurance advocates; both envisioned what Skocpol called “maternalist” and “paternalist” policies as complementary, providing economic security for male-breadwinner families and needs-based residual aid to the few families lacking a male breadwinner.Footnote ⁵⁸ Alice Kessler-Harris's 2001 book In Pursuit of Equity followed the influence of policy makers’ “gendered imagination” both backward to 1920s welfare capitalism and forward into postwar tax, social, and labor policies, illuminating the centrality of particular notions of masculinity to American state-building and social provision.Footnote ⁵⁹ In her 2009 book The Straight State, Margot Canaday exposed the postwar welfare state's heteronormative assumptions and effects. Deeply influenced by Skocpol and the field of American Political Development that her work helped to launch, Canaday argued that governmental immigration, welfare, and military policies played a central role in constructing and imposing heterosexuality and homosexuality as binary categories and in enforcing a heterosexual model of citizenship.Footnote ⁶⁰

Both administrative structures and widely held racial and gender ideologies ensured that this family model was reserved for white Americans. As Kessler-Harris illuminated, New Deal policy makers intentionally framed social insurance as a means to uphold, rather than diminish, male independence and status as family provider.Footnote ⁶¹ But the welfare state and the labor market excluded black men from the social insurance coverage, labor protections, and union membership necessary to achieve a family wage, thus denying them breadwinner status. Some New Dealers hoped that the gradual demise of plantation agriculture would incorporate black men into the industrial labor force and thereby enable them the same status. As Daryl Michael Scott showed in his 1997 book Contempt and Pity, African American social scientists, too, saw breadwinner status as crucial to black mobility and equality.Footnote ⁶² By the 1960s, white racial liberals and civil rights activists largely agreed. As I argued in my 2010 book The War on Welfare, this commitment to male breadwinning limited policy makers’ imaginations in the 1960s just as it did in the 1930s, and it played a key role in undermining even liberal commitment to income support for poor single mothers.Footnote ⁶³

For many policy makers and administrators, however, black exclusion from the benefits of the family wage represented the legitimate and desired social order. State and local welfare administrators viewed black women as laborers first and mothers second, if at all. As Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein illustrated, policy makers failed to recognize the necessary caregiving labor of working-class women, whether they were caring for their own families or serving the state's rehabilitative goals by caring for welfare state clients.Footnote ⁶⁴ And when black women who migrated to urban centers during the postwar decades turned to public services and benefits as a survival strategy, they faced significant resistance. This assertion of their social citizenship—what Lisa Levenstein called a “movement without marches”—provoked administrative anxiety and political backlash.Footnote ⁶⁵ As Jennifer Mittlestadt detailed, the growing presence of black women on AFDC rolls in the postwar era played a key role in changing the very nature of the program; liberal federal policy makers began to reject maternalist ideals and to push poor single mothers into the labor market.Footnote ⁶⁶

The racial politics that produced a fragmented social citizenship, then, sowed the seeds of welfare state destruction. In her 1995 book The Color of Welfare, sociologist Jill Quadagno argued that the War on Poverty faltered because it became publicly and politically associated with the Black Freedom Movement and its goals of racial equality.Footnote ⁶⁷ Social scientists Martin Gilens, Kenneth Neubeck, and Noel Cazenave documented the racialization of public assistance in popular and political discourse and argued that this racialization—that is, perceptions of welfare as a program for (supposedly undeserving) black people—accounted for growing public antipathy toward AFDC and other income support programs.Footnote ⁶⁸ Political constructions of “welfare” from the 1960s through the 1990s targeted poor single mothers who relied on AFDC with a collection of negative stereotypes. Combining deep-rooted archetypes with contemporary social science—from the liberal social science establishment, largely blind to questions of structure—the “welfare queen” and other tropes about a supposedly pathological “underclass” eroded already tenuous political support for AFDC and set the stage for the “end of welfare as we knew it” in 1996.Footnote ⁶⁹

Scholars of American geopolitics have also illuminated the connections among racial politics, white supremacy, and American imperial projects and state-building and social provision. For the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Rebecca Edwards uncovered the antidemocratic impact of white women's engagement in Gilded Age electoral politics; Louise Newman identified the racial and imperialist foundations of white women's political and reform work; Margaret Jacobs uncovered maternalism's central role in settler colonialism in the Progressive Era American West; and Evelyn Nakano Glenn identified the state's increased role in enforcing patriarchal control of women's caring labor and its connection to “civilizing” campaigns among immigrants and Native Americans. Indeed, these and many other works have made it impossible not to understand racial politics as foundational to state-building in this era.Footnote ⁷⁰ Recent scholarship from Talitha LeFlouria and Sarah Haley illustrate how much maternalism's vision of womanhood relied on another important state-building project: the construction of a carceral regime that constructed white womanhood by criminalizing black womanhood.Footnote ⁷¹ Innovative studies from Alyosha Goldstein and the scholars who contributed to the 2015 volume Territories of Poverty highlighted social provision and American antipoverty policy as a mechanism for Cold War modernization and pacification among people of color both at home and globally.Footnote ⁷² And in her 2015 book, Jennifer Mittlestadt put welfare state history at the very center of American empire by charting the use of public benefits to build the post-Vietnam conflict all-volunteer army. As Mittlestadt revealed, a broader anti-welfare politics reverberated in ways that profoundly affected even this most favored federal institution. Long-standing charges that government benefits reduce self-reliance and promote dependency fueled fears of a weak (feminized) military and abetted privatization of military services and growing insecurity for service members and veterans alike.Footnote ⁷³ A quarter century of scholarship has demonstrated that racial politics and American global projects have played a foundational role in American welfare state development.

AMERICA'S HIDDEN WELFARE STATE

In her determination to reject Marxist accounts of state-building, Skocpol insisted that business elites and their interests played little or no causal role in the development of the American welfare state. Her protagonists are policy makers and professional and lay reformers who operated within constraints set by political institutions and the effects of previous policies. Business opposition to social rights is assumed and appears as a background element, and Skocpol does not analyze corporate efforts to block, limit, or shape welfare state development.Footnote ⁷⁴ In contrast, scholarship on the postwar welfare state has illuminated the powerful role of business elites and their political allies not only in limiting welfare state expansion but also in manipulating the nature and shape of state social provision. Building on Skocpol's crucial insight that American social provision took unique form, historians uncovered a vast “welfare state” beyond the Social Security Act, one whose “policy feedback” effects created the economic and political environment in which the United States finds itself today.

A substantial body of scholarship, pioneered by political scientists, revealed the development in the post-World War II era of a vast “hidden welfare state” that existed, and continues to exist, largely outside of public view. Delivered via tax expenditures or private entities, these government goodies largely benefited middle-income Americans but escaped the opprobrium attached to income transfers and other direct aid to low-income families. Federal tax incentives underwrote company-provided health and pension benefits; federal mortgage insurance opened the door to mass homeownership; and countless federal, municipal, and state policies bolstered suburban development. Because policy makers obscured or erased government's role in providing these benefits, these programs failed to bolster a sense of social connection or shared citizenship. Instead they deepened the racial and job sector divisions already present in the New Deal's social insurance and labor policies. As Marie Gottschalk argued in her 2000 book The Shadow Welfare State, for example, unionized workers receiving tax-subsidized employer benefits packages had less incentive to fight for universal health care.Footnote ⁷⁵ In another example, historians have detailed homeowners’ efforts to protect their neighborhoods from public housing development.Footnote ⁷⁶ By erasing the role of the state, these policies contributed to the development of a politics of colorblind meritocracy in the postwar era that naturalized white mobility and fostered hostility to more visible “welfare” programs.Footnote ⁷⁷

By illuminating the power of business elites in shaping the scale and structure of social provision, historians and social scientists revealed intentionality behind this “hidden welfare state.” While earlier scholars characterized the postwar decades as an era of “capital-labor accord,” historians in the past two decades have documented pitched political battles over social citizenship. After World War II, a coalition of civil rights, labor, and New Deal forces hoped to build onto the Social Security Act to create a universal system of social provision.Footnote ⁷⁸ Business elites mobilized in opposition. They helped elect an increasingly conservative Congress, which employed Red Scare tactics to scuttle President Truman's Fair Deal package and stifle the power of organized labor.Footnote ⁷⁹ Only veterans won a robust package of benefits via the Serviceman's Readjustment Act, or GI Bill.Footnote ⁸⁰

Postwar American business elites were hardly averse to publicly funded goods, though, so long as they increased corporate wealth and power. As Jennifer Klein showed in her 2003 book, For All These Rights, the private insurance industry effectively engaged New Deal rhetoric of Social Security to expand its reach and appeal. The industry, which had a stake in directing any public provision through private insurers, became a powerful force in shaping subsequent public policies.Footnote ⁸¹ Business elites also revived welfare capitalism, with the financial assistance of government. In his 1995 book Modern Manors, the political scientist Sanford Jacoby explored how mid-century companies combined generous (and tax-subsidized) insurance and pension programs with virulently anti-union efforts.Footnote ⁸² More broadly, corporations promoted social spending in their own interests. As Elizabeth Tandy Shermer argued in her 2013 book Sunbelt Capitalism, for example, business elites and their political allies in postwar Phoenix, Arizona, harnessed public funding and authority in the interest of building a pro-growth, business-friendly environment while opposing redistributive measures to benefit the working class.Footnote ⁸³

Postwar federal housing policies are perhaps the most significant example of the hidden welfare state. Urban and suburban historians did not and do not self-identify as welfare state historians, but their work has illuminated the profound impact of the real estate lobby's successful state-building crusade. Thomas Sugrue's pathbreaking 1996 book, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, and the host of urban case studies that followed contributed significantly to our understanding of fragmented social citizenship and political battles over public provision.Footnote ⁸⁴ In the postwar decades, a powerful “real estate lobby” made up of the real estate, homebuilder, apartment owner, and banking industries, effectively sidelined proposals for large-scale public housing for working- and middle-class urbanites. Instead, a substantially whittled-down public housing program would serve only the very poor.Footnote ⁸⁵ White working-class and middle-class residents virulently opposed public housing in “their” neighborhoods; most public housing was confined to areas already overcrowded with low-income residents.Footnote ⁸⁶ Buildings deteriorated as a result of cheap construction and miserly maintenance budgets. By the 1970s, high-rise public housing developments like Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis and Cabrini Green in Chicago became visible symbols of the futility, even malevolence, of the welfare state.

Meanwhile, vast public subsidies created a broad, white, home-owning middle class. Federal policies and agencies—the Home Owners Loan Corporation, Federal Housing Authority, Veterans Administration, and Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae)—insured and purchased mortgages on a discriminatory basis. Federal policies favored single-family houses and new development and deemed neighborhoods with non-white residents unsafe for investment. These policies set the standard for private lending. White families built intergenerational wealth through homeownership; African American families relied on exploitative contract lending that drained wealth. The tax-funded interstate highway system eased suburban commutes while cutting through minority urban neighborhoods and destroying black homes, businesses, and communities. The Home Mortgage Interest Deduction—a subsidy to homeowners delivered via federal tax policy—grew into a sacrosanct middle-class benefit, in no way associated with “welfare.” In sum, a robust historical literature has traced how federal subsidies promoted suburban development and enabled white homeownership, incentivized urban disinvestment, and locked African Americans out of the postwar American Dream.Footnote ⁸⁷ As David Freund revealed in his 2007 book, Colored Property, policy makers quite purposefully obscured state action in these outcomes, instead advancing the myth of a housing market that operated free of state intervention.Footnote ⁸⁸

The “policy feedback” was profound. Not only did these policies produce a widening intergenerational wealth gap; they also became the very justification for that gap and produced a politics dedicated to maintaining it. White suburban homeowners attributed their good fortune to personal merit, not state policies, invoking what historian Becky Nicolaides called a “politics of independence.”Footnote ⁸⁹ And they fought hard to protect that good fortune from perceived threats. As middle-class and affluent white homeowners retreated to the suburbs, they renounced responsibility for the city and its inhabitants. As Matthew Lassiter's 2006 book The Silent Majority effectively recounts, white homeowners deemed state remedies for residential and school segregation, from two-way busing to affordable housing mandates, as unfair government encroachment.Footnote ⁹⁰ Lassiter pointed to grassroots suburbanites’ “colorblind” politics as a crucial inspiration for the Nixon administration's “Southern Strategy.” Kevin Kruse's 2006 book White Flight illuminated the broad political and social effects. “White flight,” he argued, meant much more than physical retreat; it entailed a politics that rejected redistributive taxation, celebrated a mythic “free market,” favored privatization, and promoted suburban secession.Footnote ⁹¹ As scholars today debate the causes, if not the consequences, of neoliberalism's advance by the twenty-first century, this policy feedback—the fragmented welfare state's construction of a self-interested, individualized model of citizenship that naturalizes inequality—is certainly part of the equation.

So, too, is the power of capitalist elites. A growing body of scholarship is tracing the increasingly effective political mobilization of corporate leaders and their allies in the late twentieth century. Kim Phillips-Fein, Benjamin C. Waterhouse, and, most recently, Nancy MacLean have traced the ideas and methods by which corporate elites cultivated ideas and acolytes in think tanks and university-affiliated institutes; wielded their formidable economic power to redirect both major political parties; and won policies favorable to shareholders and CEOs, including a dramatic erosion of social rights.Footnote ⁹² Skocpol and other state-centered theorists explicitly rejected what they viewed as simplistic and mistaken models that gave full explanatory weight to the interests of an undifferentiated capitalist class. Yet Protecting Soldiers and Mothers may have gone too far in dismissing the power of corporate class interests. If corporate elites and their political allies so effectively constrained the expansion of social citizenship after the 1930s and managed to harness the welfare state toward their own benefit in the postwar era, then surely in the early twentieth-century era of unregulated capitalism corporate power played a role in limiting welfare state development. Historians of business and those associated with the new subfield known as “history of capitalism” have largely ignored Progressive Era social policy, focusing instead on macroeconomic policy, labor relations, and the regulatory state.Footnote ⁹³ Moving forward, close attention to the role of corporate elites in shaping the parameters of social citizenship before the New Deal will move us beyond the limits of both state-centered and class-dominance models of policy making.

CLIENT/CITIZEN VOICES

In its close attention to state structures and elite policy making, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers ironically had little room for the voices and perspectives of either soldiers or mothers—that is, the presumed objects of welfare state policies. In the past two decades, historians have begun to pay close attention to the experiences and perspectives of potential and actual clients and recipients of welfare state policies. Attention to how ordinary people have imagined citizenship and government responsibility, have made claims on the state, and have responded to and negotiated state programs and policies has greatly expanded our understanding of the American welfare state.

Historians analyzing women's visions of postwar social citizenship, for example, have illuminated vigorous battles over the welfare state in the postwar decades. Undoubtedly, policy makers’ shift to Keynesian economic management combined with an effective conservative campaign to limit the state's regulatory and redistributive powers to reign in the New Deal reform impulse. On the ground, though, ordinary Americans continued to assert more robust notions of social rights. As Lizabeth Cohen and Meg Jacobs uncovered, women played a prominent role in the postwar consumer movement, which demanded state action to maintain working-class purchasing power; Felicia Kornbluh discovered that such democratizing impulses continued to shape consumer citizenship in the postwar movement for welfare rights.Footnote ⁹⁴ Emilie Stoltzfus and Natalie Fousekis discovered cross-class and interracial coalitions of postwar parents and educators who challenged the New Deal state's increasingly anachronistic breadwinner model by mobilizing to preserve state-funded childcare facilities. Yet, in a political environment largely hostile to women's economic independence, childcare activists framed state funding for childcare as a lesser evil than welfare expenditures. In the 1950s, middle-class women eventually won a federal tax deduction for childcare expenses; direct public funding for child care remained minimal, targeted to poor mothers as a welfare measure.Footnote ⁹⁵ In what Dorothy Sue Cobble called the “other women's movement,” postwar women also mobilized within their unions to address needs that the state failed to satisfy. In winning equal pay mandates and maternity leave in their union contracts, union women articulated a complex working-class feminism that asserted equal rights as well as the social value of, and social responsibility for, reproductive labor.Footnote ⁹⁶

Studies of grassroots antipoverty and welfare rights activism in the 1960s and 1970s have forced new assessments of the federal War on Poverty and greatly enriched our understanding of both the “long civil rights movement” and second-wave feminism. Political scientists have long argued that universal and visible social programs enhance civic efficacy and engagement, while means-tested and categorical programs have the opposite effect.Footnote ⁹⁷ Scholars are beginning to argue, though, that exclusion from those universal programs—whether visible or not—can and has provoked political activism and demands.Footnote ⁹⁸ And historical research demonstrates that under particular circumstances, relationships with the state have politicized low-income people in new ways—and that this politicization has had important political and policy effects. Lisa Levenstein's 2009 book A Movement without Marches was particularly compelling. Well before federal antipoverty planners mandated “maximum feasible participation,” Levenstein showed, working-class African American women in Philadelphia made claims on state institutions. In their interactions with welfare and public housing administrators, municipal court and public school officials, and public hospital staff, they articulated their own ideas about social responsibility and sought to shape public policies to better serve themselves and their families—what Felicia Kornbluh called a particular “vision of citizenship” that shaped welfare rights organizing during the postwar era.Footnote ⁹⁹ By the time black activism had pushed postwar liberalism to its limits and the Johnson administration declared a War on Poverty, low-income women were already mobilizing for labor rights, tenant rights, and welfare rights as central and constitutive elements of a broader “long civil rights movement.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ New histories illuminating the grassroots impact of federal War on Poverty programs have chronicled the centrality of the welfare state to the political dynamics of the 1960s and 1970s. The welfare state, these studies suggest, was a central mechanism fueling social movement activism through “policy feedback”: racial exclusions in the New Deal welfare state fueled struggles for racial justice and inclusion; these struggles prompted federal efforts to incorporate African Americans and other minorities into the New Deal Order, if only to quell social disorder; and the federal programs designed to accomplish that inclusion provided new resources with which to demand more robust civil and social rights.

Attention to poor women's antipoverty activism in the last third of the twentieth century—their visions of and demands for social rights—has constructively challenged stale narratives of second-wave feminism. Twentieth-century histories of second-wave feminism portrayed white, middle-class activists in the National Organization for Women and women's liberation groups as 1960s pioneers; women of color then adopted and adapted feminism in the 1970s.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In Premilla Nadasen's analysis of welfare rights organizing, poor black women's interactions with the welfare state and with middle-class and male leftists stimulated a unique black feminist vision responsive to the intersecting impact of sexism, racism, classism, heternormativity, and ableism on their lives. In demanding a right to mother independently and with dignity, to have sexual and reproductive autonomy, and to participate fully in the affluent society, welfare rights activists articulated a vision of liberation and citizenship that challenged limitations in both mainstream feminism and civil rights and Black Power activisms. In Nadasen's convincing telling, low-income black women were the originators of a robust construction of reproductive rights that attracted a broad-based feminist coalition.Footnote ¹⁰² By including low-income women's activism around welfare rights and other issues, Anne Valk's study of feminism and black liberation in Washington, DC, likewise demonstrated working-class women's pivotal role in shaping reproductive rights and anti-violence politics.Footnote ¹⁰³

Studies of working-class women's battles for social rights also played a crucial role in historians’ reassessment of the Black Freedom Struggle, captured in Jacquelyn Dowd Hall's seminal article “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Recovering a more robust, more diverse, and more radical movement than the popular “Civil Rights Movement” story, historians have traced the deep, leftist roots of the movement, the crucial de-radicalizing impact of postwar anticommunist politics, and the movement's long and broad reach into the late twentieth century. Historians of antipoverty, welfare rights, and tenants’ rights activism have placed poor women of color and the question of social citizenship at the center of this story. In a compelling history of public housing activism in Baltimore, for example, Rhonda Williams characterized working-class black women's struggles to secure “the right to adequate housing, income, medical care, food, and clothing” as “another phase of the black freedom struggle.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Crystal Sanders discovered that black women's access to employment as teachers, teachers’ aids, and support staff with the federally funded Child Development Group of Mississippi provided economic independence from white elites, a crucial precondition for challenging white supremacy in that state.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ In his detailed account of the politics of community action in New Orleans, Kent Germany demonstrated the pivotal role of federal antipoverty programs in that city's post-Voting Rights Act transformation. Black activists and their white allies “turned parts of the War on Poverty into a bureaucratic extension of the black freedom movement.” Community action programs provided the institutional structure that enabled continued activism. African Americans won jobs, political power, and resources—including a Food Stamp program run by and for working-class African American women—and provided the foundation for the development of an urban, biracial liberalism in New Orleans.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Working-class activists, politicized and empowered in part through federal antipoverty programming, won policy results that altered the welfare state in important ways—some temporary and others more durable. In her study of the Black Freedom Movement in Memphis, Tennessee, Laurie Green demonstrated that poor black women played a pivotal role in inspiring and designing the Women's, Infant, and Child nutrition program (WIC).Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The subjects of Annelise Orleck's collective biography of working-class women's economic justice work in Las Vegas, Nevada, worked with labor, civil rights, religious, and liberal allies to force Nevada legislators to implement crucial social programs such as Food Stamps, free school breakfast and lunch, WIC, and Early Periodic Screening and Diagnostic Testing.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Orleck's subjects not only became effective lobbyists, they also proved to be competent administrators of welfare state programs. In fact, a key theme in much of this new literature on working-class women's activism is the inextricable relationship between economic justice and redistribution, on the one hand; and democracy, representation, and political power on the other. Poor women demanded a new kind of welfare state—one shorn of paternalistic (or maternalistic) control and condescension. Like Orleck's subjects, many poor women in the 1960s and 1970s “got to dreaming” and sought to create and administer, or at the very least help to shape, state programs that served them.Footnote ¹¹⁰ In Caring for America, Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein showed even broader activism among welfare state clients and workers. Pressing the state to recognize and fund home care services, coalitions insisted on the legitimate claims of both disabled and aged clients and the working-class women who provided home care.Footnote ¹¹¹

Attention to the voices of the “soldiers and mothers” who were the targets of nascent welfare state policies, and to working-class perspectives more broadly, therefore offers a more complex picture of welfare state development than Skocpol's account. Historians of maternalist state-building who incorporated the perspectives of clients and targets of those efforts, for example, effectively challenged Skocpol's notions of a benign and liberatory maternalist state. On the one hand, Molly Ladd-Taylor uncovered working-class women eagerly seeking and gratefully accepting advice and assistance about infant and maternal health. On the other, historians of protective labor legislation and especially juvenile courts discovered more complicated experiences and perspectives; working-class women often articulated notions of womanhood, social rights, and social responsibility that differed in significant ways from those of elite and middle-class reformers.Footnote ¹¹² Lara Vapnek, for example, found working-class women who forthrightly challenged women's economic dependence and confinement to social reproduction; in calling for economic citizenship via wage labor and even land ownership, these reformers rejected maternalist ideology.Footnote ¹¹³ More broadly, in a review of several recent works about working-class social reproduction in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Rudi Batzell argued that Progressive Era reforms were rooted in a “politics of social solidarity” that “drew its strength … from the practices of community support that working-class women forged within their kitchens and neighborhoods as the workers of social reproduction.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Further attention to working-class perspectives—visions of citizenship and the state—will offer a more complex and nuanced understanding of Progressive Era state-building.