Can feminists count on welfare states—or at least some aspects of these complex systems—as resources in the struggle for gender equality? Gender analysts of "welfare states" investigate this question and the broader set of issues around the mutually constitutive relationship between systems of social provision and regulation and gender. Feminist scholars have moved to bring the contingent practice of politics back into grounded fields of action and social change and away from the reification and abstractions that had come to dominate (...) models of politics focused on "big" structures and systems, including those focused on "welfare states." Conceptual innovations and reconceptualizations of foundational terms have been especially prominent in the comparative scholarship on welfare states, starting with gender, and including care, autonomy, citizenship, dependence, political agency, and equality. In contrast to other subfields of political science and sociology, gendered insights have to some extent been incorporated into mainstream comparative scholarship on welfare states. The arguments between feminists and mainstream scholars over the course of the last two decades have been productive, powering the development of key themes and concepts pioneered by gender scholars, including "defamilialization," the significance of unpaid care work in families and the difficulties of work-family "reconciliation," gendered welfare state institutions, the relation between fertility and women's employment, and the partisan correlates of different family and gender policy models. Yet the mainstream still resists the deeper implications of feminist work, and has difficulties assimilating concepts of care, gendered power, dependency, and interdependency. Thus, the agenda of gendering comparative welfare state studies remains unfinished. To develop an understanding of what might be needed to finish that agenda, I assess the gendered contributions to the analysis of modern systems of social provision, starting with the concept of gender itself then moving to studies of the gendered division of labor and of gendered political power. (shrink)

Contemporary social policy toward low-income women in the United States, as evidenced both by Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) and by the AFDC programme that preceded it, is in part an artefact of long-standing conceptions of the nature of citizenship. This view sees citizenship as resting primarily on civil and political rights, not on rights with respect to economic, social, and cultural matters. Drawing on scholarly literature on the development of international human rights regimes, the feminist literature (...) that analyses social policy both comparatively and in terms of US domestic policy, and literature regarding contemporary movements among low-income persons, this paper analyses the efforts of one organization, the Kensington Welfare Rights Union (KWRU), to challenge US policy via international human rights law and international enforcement mechanisms. We will suggest that, despite some of the flaws of the KWRU, their approach is a promising one for low-income women. In particular, we wish to suggest that a broader conception of citizenship that takes into account economic, cultural, and social rights is necessary to create a more equitable and democratic polity for women. (shrink)

This article demonstrates how class and racial dynamics generate different styles of activism among women's movement organizations. Based on a comparative study of two feminist organizations—one composed of lower-class women of color and another of upper-class white women—it charts the formation of divergent types of gender politics. First, it explores how differences in the class and racial backgrounds of the memberships create distinct organizational needs; second, how these divergent political interests motivate contrasting organizational ideologies, activities, and structures; and finally how (...) they motivate different approaches to the wider women's movement. At the conclusion, implications are drawn for cross-class/race alliances among grassroots women's organizations. (shrink)

This article offers a reconceptualization of “the political” from the standpoint of women working in and for low-income neighborhoods, with special emphasis on the contradictions between their actions as community workers and their understandings of the political aspects of their work. The author also examines how their gender and race identity influenced their political consciousness and practice. The date are drawn from in-depth interviews with forty-two perdominantly African American and Puerto Rican women from New York City and Philadelphia who were (...) hired in community action programs established by the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. (shrink)