Mothers of a New World

by Seth Koven (editor), Sonya Michel (Editor)

Historians of Australia, Germany, Great Britain, Sweden and the United States provide a sweeping view of the scope of women's work and make comparisons across societies and over time.

460 pages, Paperback

First published June 25, 1993

Reviews

[Meg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Collection of essays that provide a decent look at the gendered origins of welfare states. I mostly did a quick look-through of the ones focusing on the U.S., which reinforce what seems to be the consensus opinion among many historians of welfare and woman - namely, that focus on a 'family wage,' and changing connotations of welfare (to the often negative, dependency connotation of today) greatly undermined women's ability to make claims about labor or economic rights for themselves, and led to policies that tended to benefit men. (So, Social Security rather than broader social welfare programs, whether that be provision of health care/health insurance, mother's pensions, etc.)
The final essay, "Feminist Strategies and Gendered Discourses in Welfare States: Married Women's Right to Work in the United States and Sweden" is a good look at the discursive strategies that women's groups moved through in order to repeal the 1932 Economy Act's restrictions on married women's ability to work. Basic claims of economic rights and economic needs fail to move New Deal policy makers to address women's labor rights; an eventual appeal to a broader human rights-based discourse eventually helps to overturn the Act.

[Makeba · Rating 4 out of 5]

A somewhat long, but interesting discussion of the role of grassroots womens organizations and their impact on the development of welfare states. The book compares the development of welfare states throughout several different nations.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was required reading for a public policy graduate class. It added a new facet to understanding the differences in Matriarchal and Patriarchal governments, and effectively outlined the contributions made by maternalist politics within the current and historical US welfare system.