Regulating the Lives of Women

Regulating the Lives of Women is a key milestone in the efforts to apply a 'gender-lens' to welfare and explores the history of womens' relationship to the welfare state.

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