Pitied but not entitled: single mothers and the history of welfare, 1890-1935

GORDON, Linda, PITIED BUT NOT ENTITLED: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890-1935. New York: Free Press, 1994, 433 pp. , 22. 95 hardcover Reviewed by: HEATHER JON MARONEY * Gordon's multifactor historical analysis of the development of policy on female-headed households in the United States of America starts with a contemporary question: why is (Aid to Dependent Children), designed by feminists, so bad for women and children? The study contributes to debates: first, about the nature, mode and timing of the US welfare state; and second, about the utility of neo-institutionalist as opposed to society-centred perspectives to explain its origins. Gordon argues that there is a gendered (or two channel) welfare state with origins in the nineteenth century, agrees with Barbara Nelson and Theda Skocpol that women activists helped shape it before they won political rights, but is critical of Skocpol's emphasis on the agency of state managers. She responds to the neo-institutionlist challenge with a detailed analysis of the influence of US state actors and political forms on the tortuous passage of legislation through the multi-layered Congressional committee structure, but still persuasively demonstrates that a whole range of actors in social movements and from class and race positions were crucial in its development. Gordon's work is engaged history. It asks readers to think critically about a tier system which sharpens existing inequalities. The US has a privileged stream that provides universal, higher, federally administered benefits understood as rights or earned benefits (like contributory old age pensions) for social groups who are already better off (workers wit stable jobs, men, middle and business classes, and whites). In addition, a range of provisions benefit the better off (tax deductions for education, interest on mortgages or children, corporate tax breaks) or everyone (parks, garbage collection or sewage collection and disposal). In contrast, the poorest groups, where single mothers, blacks and hispanics are over-represented, are part of a stigmatized stream of means and morals tested, state or locally administered, lower benefits that are seen to be unearned and undeserved and so easy targets for right wing cost-cutting and moralistic attack. Gordon pushes the issue of agency by inquiring about responsibility for historical actions. Mother's aid campaigns by white and to a lesser extent by black women were so influential that the 1935 Social Security Act, which still shapes provisions, simply added mothers' aid to new federal programmes. What, then, in the ideological stances, analysis and political position of welfare system designers led to its inadequacies? Most important was maternalist feminists' insistence on women's special qualities as mothers, in a breadwinner-dependent wife family, which bought into organized labour's demand for a family wage and sometimes conflicted with campaigns for better jobs and wages for women. …