Blackwell Reference Online

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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 ... log in or subscribe to read full text