WELFARE IN THE SOCIETY

Welfare in the Society

Welfare in the Society

Introduction

Since the early 1990s, feminist research on the welfare state has become one of the most innovative subfields of political sociology. Among other things, gender scholars have established that welfare states not only ameliorate social inequalities, but also act to produce and reinforce them. As many gender scholars have shown, the US welfare system from its inception followed a two-tiered logic. Through its policies and practices, the welfare state positioned some citizens as rights-bearing individuals and others as needy family members (Fraser 1989; Nelson 1990). These positionings, then, led systematically to different tracking whereby some recipients were channeled into an entitlement sphere - often called “social insurance” - and others were processed through a needs-based sphere - often called “social assistance.” Those in the former track received bureaucratically defined benefits to support their roles as wage earners, while those in the latter track received services to bolster their roles as caretakers. The gendered connotations of this two-tiered system were clear, with rights bearers cast in masculine terms and needy family members in feminine terms.

In order to understand how this divide bred and enforced social inequalities, gender scholars relied heavily on the construct of in/dependence. In their historical accounts, this construct seemed to make sense of welfare-state development (Gordon 1994; Goodwin 1997). From its origins, the US welfare state was geared toward managing dependency and separating those deemed to be “independent” from those thought to be “dependent.” Yet, as Fraser and Gordon (1994) revealed, dependence was not always construed in negative terms. In fact, not until the progressive era was it linked to certain categories of people, thus taking on negative connotations and becoming equated with social pathology. From this point on, it hooked into the social policy apparatus to shape historical inequities in state redistribution.

The Uses and Abuses of In/Dependence

The storm of welfare reform in the 1990s not only restructured welfare systems; it also produced changes in the welfare state scholarship. In the United States, it led to a sizable increase in the number of analyses of the welfare state. Suddenly, there were 51 welfare systems in the United States, all ripe for investigation. The differences among those working in this crowded field were significant - some approached reform for empirically descriptive ends, others for politically prescriptive ends, and others still for critical scholarly ends. Despite these substantive divergences, most welfare researchers converged to interpret reform through the in/dependence lens, a focus that often obscured the complex patterns of social inequality characteristic of poor women's lives. This lens also has been extended beyond US borders to re-envision the welfare state on a more global scale.

In/Dependence as Description and Prescription

Of the many new actors involved in evaluating welfare policy, perhaps the most prolific and influential are researchers from nonprofit corporations and institutes. In the post-1996 United States, states were required to assess their reform efforts and, for a variety of reasons, many turned to agencies like the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC) and ...