Women, Gender, Race, and the Welfare State

Abstract

This chapter examines the modern US welfare state, social welfare, and social citizenship. It focuses on four broad and interconnected themes: (1) The origins of the US welfare state, with an emphasis on race, the roles of women, and gender as an analytical framework; (2) the fissures of democracy made visible through social struggles, such as the antipoverty, black liberation, and welfare rights movements; (3) the relationship between the historical roots and late twentieth-century political battles that gave rise to the dismantling of federal social entitlement programs; and (4) the relationship between notions of the public welfare state and the hidden welfare state, which have served to reinforce the stigmatization of poor people by obscuring the ways in which the middle class and the very wealthy also have benefited from the US welfare state.