The Welfare State and Women: Structure, Agency, and Diversity

Feminist scholarship has provided interpretations of power and politics suggesting that welfare policies reflect the social inequalities between groups. We review the literature in this field, discussing the discriminatory and structural critiques of welfare, efforts to highlight the importance of women's agency in the origins of the welfare state, and the recent scholarship that analyzes differences betwen women in terms of class, race, and ethnicity. We conclude with a call for greater sensitivity in future research to the diversity of women's experience and to the importance of local conditions in determining the status and needs of individual women.