Linda Gordon

Pitied but not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare 1890- 1935.

With three-fourths of all poor families headed by women and about 54 percent of single-mother families living below the poverty line, a rethinking of the fundamental assumptions of our much-reviled welfare program is clearly necessary. Here, Linda Gordon unearths the tangled roots of AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children). Competing visions of how and to whom public aid should be distributed were advanced by male bureaucrats, black womens organizations, and white progressive feminists. From their policy debates emerged a two-track system of public aid, in which single mothers got highly stigmatized welfare while other groups, such as the aged and the unemployed, received entitlements. Gordon strips todays welfare debates of decades of irrelevant and irrational accretion, revealing that what appeared progressive in the 1930s is antiquated in the 1990s. She shows that only by shedding false assumptions, and rethinking the nature of poverty, can we advance a truly effective welfare reform.

Liberating Women's History: Theoretical and Critical Essays

Papers furnishing a review and critique of past work in womens history are combined with selections delineating new approaches to the study of women in history and empirical studies considering ideological and class factors.

Who Deserves Help? Who Must Provide?

Human societies have always provided help for the needy, and this provision has frequently been calibrated according to notions of deservingness and obligation. These notions have been shaped by gendered double standards, including measures of sexual morality, personal demeanor, housekeeping, and self-sacrifice, that are applied to women but not to men. Most fundamental, the fact that women are the primary child raisers has given many of them, in modern societies, two jobs--working for wages and working without wages to raise children. The modern welfare system arose from campaigns to help mothers who try to perform these two jobs without male help. Focusing first on deserted women, then on widows, and more recently on never-married mothers, U.S. welfare policy in the twentieth century was self-defeating because it tried to provide for poor children while avoiding giving aid or encouragement to lone mothers.

The Politics of Birth Control, 1920–1940: The Impact of Professionals

Before the 1920s, a birth control movement arose in the United States out of socialist, feminist, and other radical groups concerned with womens rights and sexual freedom. After 1920 the birth control movement became gradually transformed into a respectable, nonradical reform cause, the recipient of large grants from big business, with womens rights secondary to an overriding concern with medical health and population control. This transformation was achieved through the professionalization of the birth control movement—that is, its takeover by professional experts, almost all male, in place of the radical amateur women, fighting for their own interests, who initiated it. The article examines two groups of professionals who were particularly influential in this transformation: doctors and academic eugenists. The former made birth control a medical issue, held back the development of popular sex education, and stifled a previously developing feminist approach to womens birth control needs. The latter contributed racism to the birth control movement, helping to transform it into a population control movement with racist and anti-feminist overtones. Both groups, while they made contributions to the technology of contraception, simultaneously held back the spread of birth control by transforming the campaign for it from a popular, participatory cause to a professional staff lobbying operation.

The Working Class Has Two Sexes

From a feminist perspective, Harry Bravermans focus in Labor and Monopoly Capital on the way industrial capitalism reorganizes and continually splits up the labor process has special importance. This focus provides the basis for a renewed revolutionary view of peoples labor, an insistence that socialism cannot be created by a mere transfer of ownership of products but must transform the processes of work and daily life. The powerlessness of women and all working-class people is not based solely on material deprivation but on the stunting of our human capacities by an oppressive division of labor.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Boston Working Women Protest, 1869

In Boston the Civil War had produced a sharp increase in the number of employed women, particularly in garment manufacturing. This development had both a demand and a supply aspect: the demand for military uniforms particularly stimulated production, while the absence of many men forced manufacturers to draw even more heavily upon the female population for a labor force. By 1869, however, the return of men and the end of war production brought harder times to women breadwinners. At the same time Civil War casualties increased the