Includes bibliographical references and index.

The new feminist scholarship on the welfare state / Linda Gordon -- The gender basis of American social policy / Virginia Sapiro -- The domestication of politics : women and American political society, 1780-1920 / Paula Baker -- The lady and the tramp : gender, race, and the origins of the American welfare state / Gwendolyn Mink -- The origins of the two-channel welfare state : workmen's compensation and mothers' aid / Barbara J. Nelson -- Representations of gender : policies to "protect" women workers and infants in France and the United States before 1914 / Jane Jenson -- Family violence, feminism, and social control / Linda Gordon -- Struggle over needs : outline of a socialist-feminist critical theory of late-capitalist political culture / Nancy Fraser.

The dialectic of rights and politics: perspectives from the women's movement / Elizabeth M. Schneider -- Ideology and the state : women, power, and the welfare state / Frances Fox Piven -- Welfare is not for women : why the war on poverty cannot conquer the feminization of poverty / Diana Pearce -- Black women and AFDC : making entitlement out of necessity / Teresa L. Amott.

Also issued online.