JOYA MISRA AND FRANCES AKINS

The Welfare State and Women: Structure, Agency, and Diversity

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Abstract Feminist scholarship has provided interpretations of power and politics suggesting that welfare policies reflect the social inequalities between groups. We review the literature in this field, discussing the discriminatory and structural critiques of welfare, efforts to highlight the importance of women's agency in the origins of the welfare state, and the recent scholarship that analyzes differences betwen women in terms of class, race, and ethnicity. We conclude with a call for greater sensitivity in future research to the diversity of women's experience and to the importance of local conditions in determining the status and needs of individual women.
For most of its history discussion of the welfare state has privileged the relationship between state and class. It is only in the last decade that feminists have forced recognition that the welfare state is also deeply implicated in a politics of gender . . . Feminist theory and politics have nevertheless remained undeservedly marginal to mainstream debate about the welfare state and its contemporary restructuring. No doubt this is partly attributable to plain intellectual sexism: not all urriters want to face the fundamental questions raised by feminist social scientists. But perhaps feminist theory must also take responsibility, both for inadequacies in the analyses offered to date and for abandoning public politics for the more exotic enticements of subjectivity, sexuality, and semiotics. Sheila Shaver (1989, 90)

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In recent years, feminist scholarship on the welfare state has exploded, as researchers heed Shaver's call to make feminist work more central to debates on the welfare state and its restructuring, and as the number of feminist researchers increases. Traditional welfare state studies often neglect to identify the ways in which women and gender ideologies have affected welfare policymaking or to examine the gendered impact of those policies (Pampel and Williamson 1988; Hicks and Misra 1993). Feminist theorists have focused on exactly these overlooked issuesin particular, the ways that welfare policies have impacted women, and the effect of women's movements and gender role ideologies on welfare policy formation and maintenance (Mclntosh 1978; Land 1980; Waerness 1984, 1987; Abramowitz 1988; Baker 1990; Gordon 1990; Jenson 1990; Bock and Thane 1991). Through their scholarship, feminist researchers have provided an interpretation of power and politics suggesting that welfare policies reflect the social inequalities between groups, and the strength of certain groups, in shaping welfare policy (Wilson 1977; West 1981; Dale and Foster 1986; Gordon 1990; Koven and Michel 1993; Orloff 1993; Fraser and Gordon 1994). Feminist scholarship on the welfare state is, however, varied. Some scholars have focused on the welfare state as a patriarchal structure constraining women's choices and perpetuating their dependence. Others have challenged the assumptions and implications of such arguments, emphasizing the role of women's agency in the construction of the system itself. On one side of this debate, the state is perceived as limiting women's roles in society; on another side, the state is perceived as empowering to women. We argue that this literature needs to advance past this debate by focusing on the diversity of women's experiences and interests. Generalizing about the constraints the state places on women as a group, or generalizing about the ways in which women as a group have created, interpreted, or challenged the state, oversimplify our analyses unnecessarily. Women have inhabited more complex positions in welfare politicswomen may be both agents in welfare state transformation and be limited by demeaning welfare policies. Women may also be involved in creating policies that constrain the lives of other groups of women. The research on the welfare state which includes an emphasis on the diversity of women's experience helps resolve this debate by showing that structure is a complex phenomenon that has had varying effects on women and their agency based on a variety of statuses, including class and race/ ethnicity.

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By "feminist research," we refer to scholarship that is grounded in the experience of women and which seeks in some way to advance the position of women in society and history (Ostrander 1989). We explore feminist theorizing of the state in terms of the conceptual relationship between structure and agency because we believe that this relationship helps shed light on the divisions in this literature. The debate between structure and agency is central to social theory (Bourdieu 1977; Giddens 1979, 1984; Fine 1992; Sewell 1992; Hays 1994). Although "structure" is a basic concept in social science, it is also undertheorized and variously defined.1 Most theorists refer to structure to mean patterns of social lifefor example, the economic, political, and cultural institutions that make up society. Social structure often suggests something that transcends individuals, determining the thoughts and actions of those individuals (Hays 1994). Many of the greatest sociological insights have been drawn from understanding the ways in which social structures affect human livesfor example, Durkheim's (1897 [1951]) exploration of the social forces impacting suicide rates, or Marx's (1844 [1964]) interpretations of the effects of capitalism on the alienation of workers. Human "agency" usually refers to action, and reflects the possibility for change in social structure. Agency can be seen as the foundation of society, which is created through the interaction of human agents. Many sociologists have explored the importance of agency; for example, Simmel (1902 [1950], 10) explains that society "is merely the name for a number of individuals connected by interaction." However, social explanations often stress structure, creating a deterministic approach to social life that ignores the effects of human agency. Agency is almost always set against structure, with agency seen as a contradiction of the very nature of structure. Hays (1994, 57) states One of the most prevalent forms of contrast is between structure and agency. In this formulation the interconnections between structure and agency are lost. Further this contrast is often mapped onto another set of dichotomies common in social theorizing and interpreted to mean, for instance, that structure is systematic and patterned, while agency is contingent and random; that structure is constraint, while agency is freedom; that structure is static, while agency is active; that structure is collective, while agency is individual. Yet, this dichotomy is clearly problematic: by contrasting structure and agency, theorists neglect the interrelations between the two (Hays

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1994). Recent theorists have attempted to explore the distinction between structure and agency, arguing that even as agents support the structures that exist, they also create structures, and that agents are empowered as well as limited by structures (Giddens 1979; Sewell 1992; Hays 1994). Sewell (1992, 27) convincingly argues that structures "are not reified categories we can invoke to explain the inevitable shape of social life. To invoke structures as I have defined them here is to call for a critical analysis of the dialectical interactions through which humans shape history." We argue that most of the feminist welfare state literature reflects this debate, rather than examining the interrelationship between structure and agency. This conceptual divide is similarly reflected in the mainstream welfare state literature: class approaches often conceptualize the state as either a tool of domination used by capital to regulate workers or a structure won through working-class mobilization to protect workers from the vicissitudes of capitalism. This "either/or" approach limits our conceptualizations of the statea "both/and" approach is ultimately more accurate (as noted by Collins [1990]). Yet, we suggest that much of the feminist research on the welfare state has taken an "either/or" approach: while some researchers stress the ways welfare negatively impacts the status of women, other researchers focus on women's impact on welfare policy-making.2 Linda Gordon (1990) similarly argues that feminist literature on the welfare state has shifted from a focus on structure to agency. Feminist research on the welfare state initially developed critiques of the discriminatory nature of particular programs and structural critiques of the entire system of welfare as reproducing and reinforcing gender discrimination. For example, in her review of the literature, Orloff (1996, 52) defines gender relations as "the set of mutually constitutive structures and practices that produce gender differentiation, gender inequalities, and gender hierarchy in a given society," and notes that gender relations shape the character of welfare states, while the institution of the welfare state also affects gender relations. Yet as Gordon (1990) notes, recent feminist scholarship has extended to works documenting women's political activism and influence in the making of the welfare system. In this review, we focus on "women" rather than on gender relations in order to emphasize the many roles of women as actors. In her definition of gender relations, Orloff (1996) primarily addresses the structural limitations placed on women (although she also attends to women as agents). We believe that centering analyses on gender relations may privilege the structural constraints facing women and undermine important insights about women's agency. In this paper, we bring the debate between structure and agency to the forefront and show how this debate has been played

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out in current feminist theorizing of the state. We suggest that women need to be brought back into our conceptualizations of the state, even as we agree that women's agency must be contextualized in terms of the gender relations that structure society. Beyond the structure/agency debate, we argue that a new focus has now emerged which details the efforts of working-class and ethnic minority women/groups and the effects of these policies on those groups. By examining the different groups mobilizing around welfare policy and their conflicting interests, researchers are better able to address the contradictions that have emerged, strengthening the explanatory power of this research. As Barbara Hobson (1998) remarks, "Studies of race, ethnicity, gender and citizenship status have underscored the need for multidimensional analyses of social rights, both to recapture the past complexity in welfare state formation and to develop frameworks for multicultural societies." Just as feminist researchers have suggested that welfare policies reflect gender inequalities and the strength of women's agency in shaping welfare policy, this new literature emphasizing diversity has shown that welfare policies reflect racial/ethnic/class inequalities and the strength of these disadvantaged groups in shaping welfare policies. In the next section, we summarize and critique the thrust of feminist research on the welfare state, addressing the research in groups characterized as stressing structure, agency, and diversity. Feminist Conceptions of the Welfare State Feminist scholars begin with an original conception of the welfare state by suggesting that "the welfare state is not just a set of services, it is also a set of ideas about society, about the family, andnot least importantlyabout women who have a centrally important role within the family, as its linch pin" (Wilson 1977, 9). These researchers draw attention to the gender ideologies that underpin society, while also approaching the state in terms of its relationship with women both in the ways it acts upon women and is acted upon by women. Most of this research is historical in nature, focusing upon the development of welfare policy and the effects of welfare policy over time. In the following subsections, we review this literature to highlight the arguments that shape the current concerns of feminist scholars of the welfare state. We first summarize works that stress the structural limitations the state imposes on women. Second, we discuss efforts to highlight the importance of women's agency in the origins of the welfare state. Third, we present literature that attends to the importance of class, race, and ethnic diversity in welfare state-building and the experience of the welfare state. Finally, we conclude with an

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overview of past scholarship and a call for greater sensitivity in future research to the diversity of women's experience and to the importance of local conditions in determining the status and interests of individual women. Discriminatory Welfare Policies and the Structural Critique of Welfare: Patriarchy, Dependence, and Disempowerment Specific welfare programs reinforce sexist arrangements and gender constructions in both domestic and public life (Burkhauser 1979; Campbell 1979; Hartmann 1979; King 1982; Pearce 1985). For example, one study of old-age benefits in the United States illustrates the ways that one-earner married couples collect higher benefits than either two-earner married couples or single individuals (Burkhauser 1979). These studies lead to more structural critiques of welfare, which take the basic assumption that individual welfare programs function to reinforce sexist arrangements in both domestic and public life, and show how, as a whole, "welfare policy functions to reinforce the entire social system of women's subordination, particularly their constriction within the family and dependence on men" (Gordon 1990, 19). Welfare programs support a social system that rests on the assumption that families are composed of a father/breadwinner who works for a wage and a mother/wife who provides unpaid domestic work (Wilson 1977; Mclntosh 1978; Thane 1978; Land 1980; Pierce 1980; Boris and Bardaglio 1983; Lewis 1983; Folbre 1984; Holter 1984a; Sarvasy and Van Allen 1984; Abramowitz 1988; Gordon 1988; Hyman 1989). Moreover, the welfare state supports this social system to the virtual exclusion of all alternatives. For example, welfare policy often assumes that men earn a "family wage" capable of supporting their entire family (Land 1980). The ideology of the family wage embedded in the welfare state suggests that women's poverty will be alleviated if only they are married to men (with jobs), justifying inequalities between men and women and devaluing women, as well as limiting alternative means of independence for women, including the development of programs that would provide education and job training, day care, and better jobs for women (Sarvasy and Van Allen 1984). The ideology of motherhood has also been a crucial factor in the development of social policies. For example, Lewis (1980, 224) found that in early-twentieth-century England, the ideology of motherhood "persuaded married women that their role in the home was of national importance and that motherhood was their primary duty." Where social policies were founded on the ideology of motherhood, crucial social conditions often received less attention than the promotion of "good" mothering skills; programs offered advice on feeding

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and hygiene, but did not provide food, housing, or birth control. The result was a gap between what women needed and what social welfare provided (Lewis 1980). Jane Jenson (1986, 1987, 1990) argues that the representation of gender dominant in the development of welfare policy determines the effects of that policy. Jenson combines ideologies of family wage and motherhood to show that welfare policies can facilitate women's roles as either mothers or both workers and mothers. Where the family wage remains central, women are less likely to be seen as both mothers and workers because the family wage suggests that fathers are present as contributing and well-earning members of families with children. Where the family wage is more marginal, women are not necessarily expected to rely upon men as family providers, and women are more likely to be supported in their roles as workers as well as mothers. Gordon (1988) describes how entitlement and job insurance programs, based on wage labor outside the home, have been established for men to ensure their independence and the value of their work, while means-tested, noncontributory programs have been established for women to enable them to remain within the home, caring for family and children. In Regulating the Lives of Women, Abramowitz (1988) argues that social security programs in the United States throughout history have favored married over single parents, homemakers over working wives, and one-earner over two-earner families. Even where women were freed from direct dependence on men through welfare state policies, they were made dependent on a system that reproduced and reinforced gender inequalities. Boris and Bardaglio (1983, 85) note the welfare state institutionalized the power of men over women even as it helped to free women from the confines of the nuclear family. The state maintainedeven extendedmen's superior control over material resources by providing unequal benefits to male and female recipients of entitlement programs. Zillah Eisenstein (1983, 1984) similarly suggests that the state was constructed with a distinction between private (female) and public (male) as society. Although the welfare state may take a measure of control over women away from men, the nature of this social control, now exercised by the state instead of men, remains fundamentally the same. With "public patriarchy" (as opposed to "private patriarchy"), the power of individual men has been replaced by the power of men who use the state to dictate policies and laws that preserve patriarchal privilege. In its attempt to reinforce the private family, the state has reinforced a gender division of labor that allows men to be wage earners and makes women dependent on men (Zaretsky 1982). Un-

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married women, separated, and divorced women and women who have been abandoned have no place in the society envisioned by the welfare state (Leader 1984). And despite their intentions, laws aimed at protecting the family ultimately protected and preserved much elsepatriarchal authority; women's economic dependence on men; the ideological elevation of motherhood; pronatalist sentiments; and the normative conception of the "family" as an ahistorical social unit transcending class divisions. (Moeller 1989, 139)
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Structural critiques of the welfare state also call attention to the way in which welfare policies function to alienate women by usurping the power that they once controlled in their homes and as parents (Ehrenreich and English 1978; Rowbatham 1981; Boris and Bardaglio 1983). For example, Christopher Lasch (1980, 27) argues that women accepted state intervention because it undermined traditional patriarchal authority, without realizing that in the long run the state expanded its control "not only at the expense of patriarchal authority but also at the expense of the authority formerly exercised by women over childbirth, child rearing, and domestic economy." Rather than empowering women, welfare policies have acted to maintain standards of "femininity" among modern-day welfare recipients. Elizabeth Wilson (1977, 7-8) recounts: The "feminine" client of the social services waits patiently at clinics, social security offices, and housing departments, to be ministered to sometimes by the paternal authority figure, doctor or civil servant, sometimes by the nurturant yet firm model of femininity provided by nurse or social worker; in either case she goes away to do as she has been told-to take the pills, to love the baby. In addition to rendering women powerless in their roles as wives and mothers, social policy also serves to make women dependent upon those roles. Sapiro (1990) outlines the ways that welfare policies have promoted the dependence of women: women are dependent on their husbands to receive social security, they are dependent on their roles as mothers to receive benefits, and they are dependent on the state because they lack the support to pursue work or education. Men, in contrast, benefit from programs aimed at promoting "independence." The result is "individualism, independence, and self-reliance for some people (primarily men) and dependence and reliance on paternalism for others (primarily women)" (Sapiro 1990, 42). Sapiro claims that welfare provided to women is not truly for women, but to enable them to care for their families. The result is social policy

The Welfare State and Women o 267 not "aimed primarily at women, but rather, in many senses, through them" to men, children, relatives, and the traditional family structure (Sapiro 1990, 39). In Scandinavian countries, where welfare policies oriented toward women are generally less stigmatized and provide higher benefits, researchers argue that structural inequalities are still reproduced, particularly as the welfare state has resulted in a shift from women's dependence on men to women's dependence on the state (Hernes 1987a,b; Holter 1984). Hernes (1987b) sees the "transition from private to public dependence," as upholding and even strengthening the unequal distribution of power. Patricia Spakes (1989) and Kari Waerness (1984) argue that social benefits in Scandinavian countries have indirect negative consequences, particularly due to the continued assumption that women engage in care-giving work. Spakes (1989, 614) states that "current Scandinavian family policies/welfare programs have helped women in the performance of their reproductive and care-giving functions in the home, but they have served to maintain many of the structural deficiencies that promote inequalities in the economy." Wendy Sarvasy and Judith Van Allen (1984) also suggest that the welfare state, by providing social welfare jobs for women, has reinforced the gender segregation of the labor market, and "ghettoized" women into nurturing/care-centered jobs. Hernes (1987b) argues that the roles that women fulfill as consumers and clients of welfare services and as employees of the welfare state, renders them unable to organize for change. Harriet Holter (1984) points to women's continued role in the family as caretakers and their refusal to relinquish their concern for others as obstacles in their fight for independence. Therefore, structural critiques show that, in many ways, the welfare state has reinforced gender inequalities. Thane (1991, 93) summarizes We have come to learn how social policies (of official or unofficial agencies) are often shaped by, among many other influences, normative assumptions about gender roles, in particular about the sexual division of labor and of social responsibility, with its primary assumption of female dependency on male earning power. Also about how, reciprocally, sometimes explicitly and intentionally, sometimes not, social welfare policies shape, reinforce, and perpetuate such roles. Indeed, such work has served to highlight gender biases in a system that was long assumed to be gender neutral. Feminist analysis has been central to uncovering the specific experiences of women in the welfare state, as Wilson (1977, 7) claims, "only feminism has made it possible for us to see how the state defines femininity and that this

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definition is not marginal but is central to the purposes of welfarism." However, beyond highlighting structural constraints, this body of work offers little insight into the ways in which women have reacted, fought, interpreted, and even contributed to these structural constraints. Hobson (1993, 396) offers a critique: Feminists who have cast the welfare state as patriarchalreorganizing patriarchy from the family to the state, from dependent wife to the client or recipient of social welfare serviceshave made similar assumptions to the marginal role of women's agency in the construction of the welfare state. Most welfare policies were won only after political struggles, in which the influence of organized women cannot be ignored. Women were often on the front lines of debate about the family wage, not only accepting it but agitating for it (Tulloch 1984). Many women also benefited from the welfare state, including both welfare workers and welfare recipients (Piven 1990). Although the welfare state was based upon assumptions that do not hold true for all women, the women who did fit the pattern were rewarded. Women reformers fought for welfare policies in hopes of such rewards (although their agency did not guarantee women-friendly policy [Pedersen 1989; Lewis 1992; Misra 1998]). Examining this story is also important for an understanding of such policies. In the next section, we examine the literature that looks beyond structure to the actions of women, as individuals and as members of groups, as volunteers, and as paid professionals, to create a policy focused on improving their lives and the community as a whole. Beyond Structure: Women as Agents in the Welfare State After specifying the structural constraints women face, feminist scholars have more recently turned to discussions of women's agency. Current research has focused on the influence that women have had on the formation and perpetuation of the welfare state. In most countries, long before women received the right to vote, they were engaged in political work, active in charitable foundations and working toward eliminating poverty even before the state began taking over welfarerelated duties (Wilson 1977; Brenner and Laslett 1991; Skocpol 1992). As the state addressed the welfare of its citizens, women's experience in charity work propelled them into policy-oriented discussions. Women concerned about the plight of the poor and the needy influenced Progressive Era reforms. Dissatisfied with the progress of private charities, women petitioned the state to intervene, requesting protective policies for workers, mother's pensions, and equal pay legislation. These women, from a range of backgrounds (upper and

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middle class feminists to working class social Catholics), used the skills and knowledge they had developed in administering charity funds to approach the state in a "professional" manner, providing statistics and policy outlines, and united around specific welfare issues. Lobbying campaigns, directed at legislators and state administrators, and oriented toward specific issues, were first developed by women, and this technique was soon appropriated by other groups. Through these issue-oriented campaigns, Paula Baker (1990) argues that women fundamentally changed the nature of the state. Various books and articles, including Koven and Michel's (1993) Mothers of a New World and Bock and Thane's (1991) Maternity and Gender Policies present studies that examine the ways in which women activists sought to create a welfare state based on the "qualities of mothering"compassion and care givingand aimed at meeting the needs of women. Koven and Michel (1993) claim that since modern feminists have distanced themselves from "motherhood" and "maternalism," historians have downplayed women's influence on maternalist policies, yet women not only participated as care givers and recipients, but also "played active roles as electors, policy-makers, bureaucrats, and workers, within and outside the home" (Koven and Michel 1993, 3). Bock and Thane (1991, 2) also highlight the importance of maternalist politics which "prepared the way for future social policies at large, for women's role in them and for a new vision of the relationship between the public and private spheres." Kathryn Kish Sklar (1993) argues that women activists in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century United States "championed more than motherhood" in their fight for the cause of women and children in a new welfare state. Using the rhetoric of gender, these women all but succeeded in creating policies that addressed the needs of workers as well as mothers during this period of industrialization. Theda Skocpol (1992) argues that welfare policies in the early-twentieth-century United States, particularly widow's pensions and national health clinics for women and children, were the result of lobbying by federated women's groups. Skocpol and her co-authors (1993) further conclude that women's voluntary associations were responsible for the spread of mother's pensions throughout the United States before women had the right to vote. Women had similar effects on maternalist policies in other countries. Several of Britain's largely female private organizations were responsible for funding and managing juvenile reformatories, schools for invalid children, and school health clinicsall precursors to a more expansive welfare state (Koven 1993). Buttafuoco (1991) shows that, in prefascist Italy, feminists successfully lobbied for protective legislation for workers and gained legitimacy for the role of women

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as social claimants. After instituting local charitable programs to help cover maternity expenses of working women, feminists lobbied the government and, in 1912, won a "National Maternity Fund" which provided allowances for both married and unmarried women to receive compensatory pay for leaves for both pregnancy and miscarriage after the third month. These women then used this legislation to introduce various other measures.3 Through working to establish the welfare state, women directed their energies not only toward helping the needy, but also toward building their own careers in the emerging welfare state. Sachsse (1993, 137) points to the efforts of the German bourgeois women's movement, whose members shaped social work into a "female profession," contributing to their own careers, as well as to the specific structure and nature of the German welfare state. Muncy (1991) offers an in-depth analysis of the "female dominion" in the United States, tracing the rise of professional women in organizations such as Hull House and the Children's Bureau. The professional ethos these women developed, stressing self-sacrifice, service, cooperation, and the popularization of scientific knowledge, helped them build professions for themselves, while accepting the "cultural constructions of femininity" (Muncy 1991, 21). Women became important state actors in some cases. In the United Kingdom, Eleanor Rathbone spent more than thirty years campaigning for family allowances, first as founder of the Family Endowment Committee, next as president of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, then as a vice-president of the Family Endowment Society (with William Beveridge as president), then as founder of the Children's Minimum Council, and finally as independent member of Parliament (Land 1980; Watts 1987; Lewis 1991). In the United States, Julia Lathrop and Grace Abbot were primarily accountable for bringing the Aid to Dependent Children program into the Social Security Act (Gordon 1994; Ladd-Taylor 1994). Emerging from an "old-girls network" of women from prosperous backgrounds and excellent educations, these women had a strong impact on maternalist policymaking at the beginning of the twentieth century. Yet more than middle- and upper-class women were involved in the fight for maternalist policies. Seip and Ibsen (1991) show the impact of women in the labor movement on Parliament in the adoption of child welfare policies in Norway. Lewis (1991) and Thane (1991) also note the importance of women in unions in pushing for family allowances in Britain in the twentieth century. Even in the United States, a country with a notable lack of strong unions and labor parties, poor and working-class women pressured the state for the

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maternal and child health-oriented Sheppard-Towner Act (Ladd-Taylor 1993, 1994). Women's groups did face limitations, in part due to their emphasis on "maternalist" policies. Maternalist rhetoric was too limited for aims supporting women as workers, and in the end, the "bourgeois proved ineffective spokespersons for working class women" (Michel 1993, 8). Lake (1993, 393) argues that Australian women also used maternalist policies to help ease the effects of patriarchy, but were unsuccessful in using motherhood to attain a radical system of new entitlements, concluding "within the confines of a patriarchal state, in which citizen and worker are defined in masculine terms, neither 'sameness as' nor 'difference from' men will produce a genuine democracy for women." At times, women activists faced other limitations when they paired maternalist politics with nationalist sentiments. For example, in France, the early twentieth-century feminist movement pushed the government to protect motherhood by playing to fears about the declining birth rate and population concerns (Cova 1991; Offen 1991), and women were some of the most vehement supporters of the pronatalist movement. Yet, after World War I, despite the fact that women had long been entrenched in the French labor force, pronatalists argued that women should be forcibly evicted from the work force as a solution to the crisis in birth rates and male unemployment (Offen 1991). The feminist response strategically encouraged pronatalists to petition the state for allowances to alleviate the financial need that forced women into the workplace, while also retaining women's right to make a "choice" about participating in the labor market (Pedersen 1993a,b). In other countries, women were less successful. Nash (1991) and Saraceno (1991) observe that women in Spain and Italy were able to acquire extensive benefits for mothers but were met with hostility when attempting to gain greater access to birth control information and abortions for all women. By focusing on the ways that women have shaped welfare policies, this theorizing has brought women back into political analyses. Powerful women and women's organizations pushed for change and succeeded, actually impacting the development of the welfare state. Although the welfare state has posed many structural constraints on women, it also has acted as an arena in which women have effected change, at times improving individual women's lives and the conditions of society as a whole. While some of this research has highlighted the role of poor and working-class women in the adoption of welfare policy, most has focused on the efforts of the middle- and upper-class women in volun-

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tary association and on the professional track. Yet, it is clear from this research that women's strategies for lobbying differ based on their resources. Gordon (1990, 24) suggests that in the United States white women's strategies were often based on the substantial political influence, economic resources, and social mobility that many had, relying on wealth and connections to lobby for legislation and win administrative power through jobs and appointments to committees and commissions . . . Excluded from private and governmental white welfare programs, minority welfare activity was often indistinguishable from civil rights activity. More research, not only on the role of working-class and poor women, but also on the role of women of different races and ethnicities, is needed to explore how the differences between women might explain some of the confusion about the nature of welfare policy. Welfare policy is sometimes conceptualized as limiting to women and at other times is seen as a result of women's empowerment. We suggest that this difference in perspective between structural approaches and those that focus on agency can be explained by examining in more detail the women affected by and affecting welfare policy. Women cannot be simply conceptualized as belonging to one common group, sharing a common "woman's" experience (Young 1995). The next section of this paper explores the body of literature that draws out differences among women as individuals and groups and examines how those differences affect the lives and action of all women. Race, Class, Culture, and Ethnicity: Accounting for Differences in Women's Lives We have presented a picture of the ways in which white, mostly middle- and upper-class women have participated in the welfare state through state-building. As Boris (1993, 215) observes, these women were "able to use the statetransfer their programs to the state, becoming administrators of new state agencies dedicated to maternal and child welfare." But there are clear differences between women and between the contexts in which women organize. In addition, racism within the feminist movement, the interactions between women welfare workers and their clients, and the ways in which different groups of women experienced the welfare state are important factors that can help shed light on the operation of the welfare state. Focusing on the contexts of women's agency can help link structure with action. For example, Jenson (1987, 554) focuses on the context of women's movements to explain the different sorts of outcomes in welfare policies: "whether the state is friend or foe depends on the conditions of political conflict and the forms of struggle." Hobson

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(1998) shows that Swedish feminists strategically use dominant ideological discourses to create coalitions that further their goals. Misra (1998) similarly argues that the ideological context plays a key role in determining the kinds of strategies that French and British women's movements took in lobbying for expanded welfare states and in the resulting welfare policies. Lewis (1994, 55) further complicates analyses of the relationship between women's agency and welfare state structure when she suggests "the more institutional the welfare regime, the more it has an effect of increasing the possibility for female agency in the political institutions . . . In this analysis, state welfare provision becomes the cause rather than the effect of women's agency." In these works, structural factors are connected to the approaches of women activists. Mariana Valverde (1992) confronts the important issue of racism within early feminism and the way that this ideological context played a key role in determining the social policies that followed. Valverde argues that Canadian first-wave feminists not only accepted much of the racist thought popular at the beginning of the century, but used racism for their own purposes. By emphasizing women's roles as "mothers of the race," feminist theorizing did not ally women based on their role in reproduction, but instead emphasized women's role as "moral teachers of children," privileging "those women whose cultural and racial background marked them as more adult, more evolved, more moral and better 'mothers of the race'" (Valverde 1992, 20). If women's political action was influential on welfare state policymaking, the racism (and classism) within the movement was also an important factor. Gwendolyn Mink (1990, 1995) shows that the problems of the present-day U.S. welfare state lie with its origins in New Deal policies which attempted to use "motherhood" as a solution to what were actually racial problems. The welfare state entrenched gender and race discrimination in its entitlements, rewarding white women only as mothers and economic dependents, disregarding or seeing minority women as in need of "proper" training, and rewarding minority men only if their experiences were already the same as white men in terms of occupation, union membership, and income. Lori Ginzberg (1990) similarly argues that social policy was founded on the ideal of promoting morality and virtue in working-class and poor women. Class became a moral issue, to be resolved by the individual through education and transformation, rather than an economic, social, or racial issue to be dealt with by society. Middle- and upper-class women have benefited by separating themselves from working-class and poor women, particularly insofar as they have increased the possibility of professional careers in social welfare for themselves by defining

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working-class and poor women as "needy." Marilyn Lake (1992) likewise shows that Australia used motherhood to deal with a racial question, supporting white mothers while punishing aboriginal mothers for their "difference." Distinctions between groups of women affect state policies in a variety of contexts. Saraceno (1994, 77) points out the ambivalences and contradictions in the Italian welfare state that mean that women experience the state differently based on their regional location (related to "local context and culture of social policy and citizenship rights") and participation in the labor market. Knijn (1994) and Hobson (1994) similarly point out differences in the experiences of solo mothers and other mothers. Knocke (1995) shows that in the European Community ethnic minority women immigrants are disadvantaged for example, with limited rights to settlement and work. In Israel, welfare policies that support many Jewish Israelis leave Palestinians structurally disadvantaged (Zureik 1993). Jo-Anne Fiske (1995) argues that in Canada "the paternalistic relationship between the state and Indian women is of particular salience in understanding their social position, for the Canadian Parliament has assigned Indian women fewer fundamental rights than their male peers and has subjected them to different definitions of their legal Indian status for more than a century." Fiske shows that First Nation women in Canada are ambivalently positioned due to the contradictions inherent in the practices of the welfare state. In the United States, the impact of racial politics on welfare policy making has been further elucidated. Klaus (1993, 190) suggests that the defeat of the "maternalist movement" in the 1930s had its roots in racism because the notion of "race betterment," which was crucial to the women's movement, undercut the movement as "it left reformers ill-equipped to challenge the racism and hostility to the poor that characterized U.S. social policymaking."4 Jill Quadagno (1994) has also shown the ways in which racism has limited welfare policymaking in the United States, although she has paid less attention to the ways in which racism has affected women's agency. Boris (1995, 170) supports Quadagno's assertion that racial politics assured that federal relief programs would be locally implemented, and this local implementation meant "racialized gendered differentials and exclusions. If the cotton crop needed pickers, African American women would be dropped from the relief rolls; the same was true in Colorado for Mexican American women when the beet crop was ready to harvest." Boris (1993, 217) examines black and white women activists in the early twentieth century, arguing that both groups "relied on motherhood as image and rhetoric to forge a new definition of 'political.' " For African American women, politics based on difference struc-

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tured a fight for a better life within the home. Because many black women had been forced to work outside the home, they envisioned liberation as the ability to move their work back into the home fulltime, while also hoping to establish greater respect for black women as mothers in the homewomen in "highest womanhood" (Boris 1993, 235). These convictions led them to fight for wages for homebased work. In contrast, white women were less concerned with justifying their roles as "mother" and "woman," since culture and society already saw them as such. They were more comfortable using the rhetoric of motherhood for benefits outside the home, including workplace protection, such as the eight-hour work day. Brenner and Laslett (1991) also explore the different sorts of struggles faced by white and minority women, showing how changes in the organization of social reproduction affected women's political organization. They remark (1991, 329) that "the differences in the politics of self-organized African American and white middle-class women reflected the different demands and possibilities African American women faced in carrying out their responsibilities for social reproduction." Linda Gordon (1991) compares black and white women activists in the early twentieth century in the United States, agreeing that race structured women's opportunities and paths to affect reform. The efforts of black and white women rarely overlapped due to the racism and the concentration of African Americans in the South. This segregation defined the focus of action for women. White women targeted workplace issues in the industries of the Northeast through government influence, while black women pursued rural concernsthose that confronted them on a daily basisthrough voluntarism based on action rather than on money. Additional research specifies the importance of a self-help tradition among black women (Hine 1990) and the impact of class on the philanthropy done by Latinas (Hewitt 1990). Nancy Naples (1994) finds in her ethnographic study of a small Midwestern town with a recent influx of Mexican Americans that the state intervenes in the lives of people in many different ways (for example, via the INS, the City Council, the police, the DMV, teachers, schools and the school board, the Farmers' Home Administration, HUD, and health and social service workers). Naples (1994, 2) argues that analyses of the state can be deepened by community-based approaches, finding that . . . first, the social regulatory role of the state is fluid and changes over time and across policy arenas; second, the dynamics of social regulation works differently in the lives of similar racialethnic groups depending on certain historical, economic, political

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and social factors; third, a socially embedded exploration can deepen our understanding of how the state interacts across evershifting and multiple arenas; and finally the "situated knowledge" of those affected by state interventions can help uncover dimensions of state activity often hidden from view. Naples' study shows the importance of examining the state from different perspectives and of understanding how different racial and ethnic groups not only affect the state in different ways but can experience the state in entirely different ways. Boris (1993, 215) supports this analysis with her discussion of black women activists: For black women activists, the state was hardly neutral. It often functioned as a negative force, blocking the advancement of the race. From municipal ordinances that hampered black artisans from pursuing their trades to explicit public segregation of public facilities and the underfunding of limited social services, southern black women confronted a state that did not act in the interest of mothers, their children, or family life as whole. These studies reflect an important shift in welfare state analyses. Rather than assuming a monolithic state, which treats the members of a state similarly, or at least treats all women in similar ways, this research has shown that there are many divisions, based on cultural context, class, gender, family structure, and race that impact the effect of the state, as well as impact the state. Furthermore, this research has shown that the state is a more "fluid" structure than previously envisioned. The state appears in many different guises, at time limiting some women's lives, while empowering other women's lives. Women's agency is affected by other positions they hold. This research is able to point out the ways that the state structures women's lives, while also addressing the agency women have and the way they have shaped and continue to shape the state. Conclusions The feminist literature on the welfare state is rapidly expanding, providing new insights into the interactions between welfare policy and the members of each state. The debate between structure and agency has been central in sociological theory, and this debate has also existed within feminist theory, as theorists try to understand the position of women in society by either emphasizing the structural limitations faced by women or women's power and agency.5 Feminists studying the welfare state have reflected this debate, arguing that the

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state works to constrain women and maintain patriarchal domination and also that the state empowers women. Yet recent research moves beyond this debate to acknowledge that women's agency can be limited structurally, with different limitations being accorded to those with different resources, whether those resources be affected by race, class, region, or any other factor. The state is no longer simply good or bad for women, but a more flexible and varying construct, and women are no longer either acted upon or actors, but both. Sharon Hays (1994, 62) remarks Agency explains the creation, recreation, and transformation of social structures; agency is made possible by enabling features of social structures at the same time as it is limited within the bounds of structural constraint; and the capacity of agents to affect social structures varies with accessibility, power, and durability of the structure in question. To rephrase, we believe that by reframing the literature on women and the welfare state in this way, we are able to see women as creating, re-creating, and transforming the state, through the enabling features of the state, while also being limited by the state, and having their agency vary based on their access to and the power and durability of the state. Set in this context, any contradictions between agency and structure in the welfare state can be understood and explained. The earliest questions pursued in feminist studies of the welfare state focused on whether women's interests are achieved or harmed by welfare state policies. These questions were linked to a set of related questions that considered whether women should be seen as agents or victims of the state. Although these questions should not be conflated, a contradiction about (at least some) women working for welfare policy as agents, but creating welfare policy against many women's interests emerged. Making sense of this contradiction is the next challenge of welfare state research. We argue that this challenge is best confronted by contemplating the vast diversity among women. Because women are positioned differently in the overall structure of the welfare state and are afforded varying opportunities in pursuing interests as agents, policy necessarily affects women differently. Determining whether women's interests have been achieved has everything to do with how those interests are defined. Several scholars have pointed to the limitations of defining women's interests narrowly. For example, Molyneux (1985) clarifies the different types of gender interests available to women based on their position in the overall structure of gender relations, practical interests (those that improve women's material interests, but do not challenge the underlying structure), and strategic interests (those that
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do challenge the underlying structure). Jonasdottir (1994) points out that feminists have been biased in defining women's interests simply in terms of economic disadvantage or in the context of men's violence, ignoring the fundamental oppression of women: the exploitation of love and emotion. Poststructuralists, like Pringle and Watson (1992), have gone farther toward making sense of women's diversity. Pringle and Watson (1992, 62) claim that "a feminist orientation to the politics of difference means that we each recognize that any standpoint we take is necessarily partial and based on the way in which we are positioned in relation to class, race, education, background, and any number of other factors." We argue that an increasing understanding of the diversity of women can help us clarify what we mean by "women's interests," according to who pursues them, in what context, and what result their success may have on varying groups of women. By being sensitive to the experiences of different groups (in terms of class and race) within studies of welfare policy, we can address the contradictions that have arisen between agency and structure. Even more important, a richer understanding of the welfare state can emerge, leading to improved theorizing and more effective transformations of the welfare state. We believe that this new feminist literature of the welfare state promises to reveal those factors that have been most important and influential in the development of the welfare state, and which will, as Boris (1995, 172) has so eloquently argued, "advance our struggle for a more equitable welfare state in which welfare regains its positive meaning in terms of the welfare of the population."
NOTES We acknowledge the helpful comments of Irene Browne, Lisa Brush, Nancy Cauthen, Alexander Hicks, Sara McLanahan, Rick Rubinson, and Wendy Simonds, as well as a number of anonymous reviewers on earlier drafts of this paper. 1. William Sewell (1992,1) remarks: "'Structure'is one of the most important and most elusive terms in the vocabulary of social science . . . But if social scientists find it impossible to do without the term 'structure,' we also find it nearly impossible to define it adequately." Hays (1994, 57) similarly remarks "Although most sociologists recognize the concept as slippery and contested, it continues to be used in ways that are often ambiguous and misleading." 2. Those focused on women's impact can conflate two separate questions: Are women advantaged by the welfare state? and Do women act to shape the state? This scholarship often assumes that women would not mobilize for policies against their own best interest, but as our later focus on women's

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diversity will show, this is not necessarily true because women's interests may vary. 3. However, although they won many concessions during the ten years after the institution of the National Maternity Fund, Italian feminists were not powerful enough to continue their fight after the shift in government to fascism and had to wait until 1945 to achieve the right to vote. 4. Klaus (1993) shows how racism was particularly problematic in terms of black children in the South. White child-care advocates ignored the special problems black children faced, despite the fact that black children faced twice the risk of dying in their first year. Black women's organizations were important to improving health conditions in the South, but they never gained the political influence accorded white women's organizations. 5. In fact, the claims of those who see feminism as the politics of "victimization" are entering into this debate.
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