Abstract
Regulating the lives of women is an essential read for anyone who wants to not only explore a detailed history of the social safety net in the United States, but also to place welfare policies into the larger context of institutionalized patriarchy through a socialist feminist lens. The book is well written and organized in a way that is accessible to a general audience, although the detail and length might be daunting for someone with limited time. As an alternative to reading the book all at once, individual chapters can stand alone for those interested in a specific historical time period or those wishing to consume the information at a slower pace.
The author, Mimi Abramovitz, is the Bertha Capen Reynolds Professor of Social Policy Emerita at Hunter College. She opens the book with a preface explaining how this fourth edition, completed shortly after the 2024 election that put Donald Trump back in the White House, has evolved since the first edition published in 1988. Cultural and political shifts in the United States necessitated many of the revisions, but the author also demonstrates vulnerability as she explains that some of the revisions stem from her personal growth in understanding the targeted American welfare policies used to constrain women's opportunities.
A primary overarching theme throughout the book is a concept the author calls the “family ethic”. It has long been understood that throughout America's history, our provision of financial assistance has been designed to maintain the American work ethic, meaning that men unwilling to work were undeserving of aid. The author distinguishes the male-centered work ethic from the family ethic applied to women. She explains that women unwilling to adhere to traditional patriarchal family structures are deemed undeserving of aid, while those who find themselves without male support through no fault of their own (for example, by being widowed or having a husband who has become disabled) are the only women considered deserving of aid.
Another theme woven through the history of social welfare is the importance of women for “social reproduction”. In using this term, the author refers not only to procreation of future generations, but also to women's expected role in nurturing children who will accept the traditional social structure of patriarchy and work. The expectation falls on mothers, but also on persons in traditionally female-dominated, low-wage professions, such as teaching and social work.
Before turning to a chapter-by-chapter chronological exploration of how the welfare state has been used to control the opportunities open to women and to extract the costs for women who do not adhere to the “family ethic”, the author begins with a chapter on theory. She first presents traditional political theories along with more progressive theoretical lenses. In the second part of the chapter, Abramovitz stresses the importance of examining welfare through a socialist feminist perspective to understand how welfare has been used by the government to “mediate the conflicting demands for women's unpaid labor in the home and her low-paid labor in the market, encourage reproduction by ‘proper families’, and otherwise meet the needs of patriarchal capitalism” (p. 38). This powerful chapter could be an excellent stand-alone reading assignment for educators in a variety of disciplines.
The book then turns to a meticulously detailed and elegantly written critique of how the welfare state has been used to perpetuate systemic discrimination based on both race and gender. The depth of discussion and extensive research cited would make this an excellent resource for scholars and a potential textbook for social welfare history courses.
As the book outlines the history of the US welfare state and its use in maintaining women's reproductive roles, each chapter connects to the author's stark conclusion that there is a current political trend toward weaponizing poverty to justify social control through policing and punishment to avoid an uprising that would demand reform. The author sprinkles in references to the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 throughout the book, which leads to the concluding chapter with the message that perhaps welfare state benefits are so limited because, if they were more robust, they could “embolden marginalized groups to demand better wages and working conditions, women to challenge male domination, persons of color to resist white supremacy, and social movements to demand the government address common human needs” (p. 407). Although the intricacies and heft of this book may relegate it to an academic audience, I would recommend it to anyone trying to make sense of the current political climate. We have seen many of the author's concluding predictions come to pass in the last year, demonstrating the significance of her argument that women's rights and democracy are necessarily interlinked.
