Book Review

As its subtitle suggests, Gender and the Politics of Welfare Reform excavates the local politics of income support for Chicago's poor single mothers. Based on unstinting research, it constructs a history of mothers' pensions in Chicago that is attentive to ideas and rhetoric, to variations among women's political thinking, to strategic constraints on progressive political action, and to the institutional consequences of social policy decisions. The book's attentions are multivalent (sometimes distractingly so, given its organization) and its insights speak to a wide array of issues (also sometimes distracting, when not followed through). Its core concern is to demonstrate the restrictive effects of fiscal politics on mothers' pension policy. The most important story line in Gender and the Politics of Welfare Reform is about how conflict among policy visionaries, organized women, and politicians over cost and responsibility transformed a policy initially imagined as an income alternative to wage earning for poor single mothers into one that at best subsidized solo mothers' wages, and only certain solo mothers' wages, at that.	1
According to author Joanne L. Goodwin, "the politics of welfare reform" was played out primarily in struggles over implementing and funding Illinois's 1911 Funds to Parents law. It was in the politics of implementation that middle-class women of varied intellectual and political persuasions contributed most significantly to welfare policy development. (Goodwin provides a particularly useful profile of the different rationales offered by reform-minded women for income support for poor single mothers.) Contra Theda Skocpol, whose Protecting Soldiers and Mothers (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1992) celebrates the decisive role of organized Anglo-American women in winning mothers' pension policies from legislatures in the first place, Goodwin reports that in Chicago, at least, there is little evidence of agitation for enactment of the policy either by clubwomen or women reformers. But women's groups and a network of women reformers had contributed important philosophical justifications for the policy and, with its enactment, worked to see that the policy met its promise. This brought them into conflict with budget cutters over spending levels and with patronage politicians over centralizing and bureaucratizing the funding and distribution of benefits.	2
Goodwin observes that women defenders of Chicago's mothers' pension program did accede both to the eligibility restrictions that limited access to benefits and to the behavioral stipulations that compromised recipients' independence. Her larger point, though, is that such concessions not only saved the program (159) but also permitted the program to grow somewhat. So, too, did the integration of wage-work and welfare defend against opponents who believed that self-support was integral to personal responsibility or who wished to limit spending. The growing expectation that mothers' pensioners should earn wages was formalized in legislation authorizing wage earning by able-bodied mothers and in benefits so far below the standard of need that single mothers "practically always [had] to work at least part time" (169, quoting Annette Marie Garrett, "The Administration of the Aid to Mothers Law in Illinois 1917 to 1925" [M.A. thesis, School of Social Service Administration, University of Chicago, 1925], 77). Goodwin sees "the political decision to refuse a guarantee of support for single mothers" (181) as a retreat from the early promise of mothers' pensions to enable the home care of children by single mothers and to provide for such mothers because it is their due.	3
Goodwin's detailed account of the politics of Chicago's mothers' pension program adds to the now extensive literature on women and welfare history in three main ways. Her attention to fiscal politics and to the relationship between pensions and wages gives us a fresh way to think about how we got welfare. Her emphasis on the promise of mothers' pensions, especially in the hands of women reformers, reminds us to consider the political context into which the mothers' pension program was born: patronage politics, decentralized government, a weak bureaucratic tradition, discretionary administration, taxation anxieties, not to mention rival interests and views of good public policy. However, what sometimes gets lost in Goodwin's account are the ways in which the women she spotlights as advocates of more generous and more available mothers' pensions themselves undermined its promise of independence for poor single mothers. While Goodwin takes great pains to mention that many of the women prominent in her study linked benefits to a standard of behavior, she does not explore how behavioral criteria, like wage requirements, "refuse[d] a guarantee of support for single mothers" (181). Likewise, while Goodwin provides important discussions and data on the exclusion of African-American mothers from the pension program, she under-analyzes the racialized cultural dynamics affecting non-Anglo-American women who did receive mothers' pensions.	4
At a time when many middle-class feminists have accepted the terms of the 1996 welfare law (work requirements and time limits) while fighting to protect benefit levels, improve labor standards, and widen job opportunities for recipients, Gender and the Politics of Welfare Reform tells an eerily familiar story of how the politics of spending and personal responsibility erased the value of solo mothers' (or fathers') care-giving work for their own children. Gender and the Politics of Welfare Reform takes us to the eve of the New Deal, when the Social Security Act nationalized mothers' pensions into a program (however problematic) with the makings of an entitlement. I can only hope that history repeats itself, only better: that from the ruins of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program will arise a welfare right strong enough to guarantee all single care-givers an income to support their families.	5
Gwendolyn Mink University of California at Santa Cruz

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