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Mimi Abramovitz, "Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present" (Routledge, 2025)
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Mimi Abramovitz
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Mimi Abramovitz
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Mimi Abramovitz
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Narrator/Advertiser
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Stephen Pimpare
Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm Stephen Pimpair, host of the Public Policy Channel, and we are joined today by Mimi Abramovitz, who is the author of Regulating the Lives of Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present. Excuse me. Coming out now in its fourth edition from Rutledge. Mimi, welcome. So nice to have you with us today.
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Mimi Abramovitz
Thank you so much. And it's good to see you again, Stephen. It's a real treat. It's been a while.
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Stephen Pimpare
Likewise.
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Mimi Abramovitz
It is to the President. We'll get to the President at the end. Okay, perfect.
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Stephen Pimpare
So why don't we start? For those who May not know you and your work. Why don't you tell folks a little bit about who you are and what you think is relevant about your background and what it is that initially caused you to write the book way back when in its first edition.
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Mimi Abramovitz
Well, it's nice to go down memory lane, so I'll start. The book is about the welfare state, welfare state and women, women's relationship to the welfare state. And so how did I get here? Well, I started to think about that my first job was as a welfare worker in the state of Connecticut. The program was known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children for Single Mothers. So I worked there for a couple of years. And during that same period, I became involved in the civil rights and the women's liberation movements. And both of these sort of spoke to my experience as a welfare worker and also sort of helped me better understand women's, women's roles, inequality and social justice in America. And also the power of social movements to create change. So this began to build in me, my thinking. And then I went back to graduate school and I studied social welfare policy in the master's program at Hunter Carl School. I mean, at Columbia School of Social Work, and also in their doctoral program. So with about six years in between, and then finally with my doctorate in hand, I landed a job at Hunter College School of Social Work and a joint program in a joint appointment with the Graduate center at the City University of New York. So that's a bit of my background. However, once in academia, I learned the mantra, and I quickly learned the mantra, publish or perish. So what am I going to do? I sort of. I didn't know quite what I was getting into when I went into academia. So I had to quickly think on my feet. So I drew on my early experiences as a welfare worker, an activist, a student, and a professor of social policy, which that began to shape my research. And along the way, somewhere along the way, I picked up that women made up the majority of social welfare clients and social workers. So this became a focus of my work. And in my dissertation I had developed and worked with theories of the state, which was popular at the time to frame my doctoral dissertation, which then taught me about the state in general and the welfare state in particular. So all of this, quite a few years to take account of, led me to ask a central question. How has the welfare state affected the lives of women? And this question became the foundation of my book, Regulating the Lives of Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present. The fourth edition, just released by Routledge, represents The most extensive revision up to date.
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Stephen Pimpare
So let's start with some basics for folks who may not be familiar. What are we talking about when we're talking about the welfare state and what is the range of manifestations of that state power? What are the programs that you talk about throughout the book?
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Mimi Abramovitz
All right, well, I'll start with that then. So the welfare state, it's always been very controversial. It's even more controversial today as it's being torn to shreds. But we'll get to that. So it's commonly defined as a system of government programs designed to protect and promote the well being of individuals and families, especially during economic hardship, when they're experiencing economic hardship. But in practice it's much more complicated. So the book delves into various complications, but just a little bit of history, how we got the welfare state in the first place. So this government aid to individuals and families dates back to colonial America. The colonial poor laws. Later on, social policy became a responsibility of the states. Some provided help, some did not. The modern welfare state emerged from the Great Depression. The 1929 stock market crash and the economic collapse that followed forced the federal government to step in and basically to save capitalism from itself to start helping people in need and helping business, labor and individuals. And so From World War II through the mid-80s, the welfare state expanded. Why? In response to population growth, inflation, everything costs more money and emergence of social needs that to be addressed that hadn't existed before then. From 1980 to the present, well, things started to go downhill. And it started with Ronald Reagan. And starting with Reagan, probably it's been in the air long before him, but he brought it forward. Critics of the so called big government began to cut programs that Trump, Donald Trump is now dismantling. So that's some historical account. What I learned was that women were major participants in this, not only as clients and workers, but as the social reformers who worked to develop this over the years. So the welfare state includes lots of programs today. But the book focuses on the three well known core welfare state programs that provide cash assistance. Cash is money to people in need. The first two programs, Social Security and unemployment insurance, serve the middle class and the poor. The third, public assistance or welfare, quote unquote, serves just the poor. So Social Security is for older adults age 65, 65 or 62 for early retirement, although now it's I guess 67. Unemployment insurance for jobless workers who've lost their jobs, but they're actively seeking work and public assistance. This is the most controversial program. It's always been controversial. It's originally called Aid to Dependent Children. Then it became Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and then now it's called Temporary Aid to Needy Families after it was seriously cut back by President Clinton in 1996 under what was known as welfare reform. And this primarily serves poor families, especially single mothers. Just a couple more things. I want to say something about the terminology of welfare, the word welfare, because it can be very confusing. So most of us, many people use the word welfare to refer to all welfare state programs. Notice the word welfare is in both those statements, but when in fact it technically refers just to the welfare program for the poor, the public assistance today known as tanf. This mistake is not their fault. Rather, it happens because the opponents of the welfare parts of government spending for the welfare state and lots of other things have intentionally, deliberately blurred the line between the word welfare and the broader term welfare state, meaning things that everybody benefits from. Some of these programs, they did this to build support for cutting the unpopular program, the more unpopular program for poor women and single mothers and also for the popular ones. So it's been very hard to. It's easy to cut welfare for poor people. That's happened a long time ago. It hardly exists anymore. It's been replaced by earned income tax credit and food stamps have taken up the slack. But Social Security and employment insurance, which almost every. Almost everybody can become eligible for it, these have been much harder to cut. In fact, cutting Social Security of income thought it was the third rail of politics. Politicians wouldn't touch it. Well, if you follow the news today, you know that's no longer true. But that. So that. So I just want people to understand because they use that word welfare, they're really only the negative feelings have been transferred to the popular programs in order to justify cutting them. And one last thing is that that's important to know is all western industrial societies have welfare states, but ours is more limited, conditional and unequal than most advanced democracies. Why? Because of our individualist political culture, faith in the market, and our longstanding racial and gender hierarchies, which we'll be talking more about as we go along.
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Stephen Pimpare
I was going to say why don't we pick up right there and talk, if you will, with us about what happens when we apply a gendered lens to thinking about these institutions and the way in which they function. After all, the. As you well know, the title of the book is Regulating the Lives of Women. How does the welfare state regulate the lives of women?
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Mimi Abramovitz
Well, it's a complicated Story, and I'll try to. I think it's really, really important and something that not everybody knows about. So first of all, the welfare state has a dual role and it's always had a dual role in the lives of women. It is not gender or race neutral, even though it seems that way. On the one hand, the welfare state supports women's families, women's care, work in the home by providing income, health care, childcare, retirement benefits and many more benefits. On the other hand, it regulates women's behavior. It its rules and regulations perpetuate gender, race, class, work and family stereotypes that enforce big word, patriarchal and racialized norms that disadvantage women. They make it much harder for women to gain access to the programs. And so how does it do this? Well, from the start, the US Welfare state supported what was called the male breadwinner, female homemaker, model, family model. And its programs rewarded women for their economic dependence on men, which feminists link as a linchpin, as a centerpiece that holds patriarchy in place. That's another whole story. We'll save that for another show. For example, the Social Security programs treated women as dependents for many years, not as workers, even when they worked outside the home. So even when employed, married women in particular collected higher benefits based on their husband. As a dependent of a male breadwinner, based on his work record, he got a spousal allowance for her and his kids rather than through her own work record, which meant that single divorced women received little or no support because they couldn't collect the spousal or benefit. Although divorced women later on got got entitled to benefits, but that took about 30 years. Unemployment insurance required. You know, if you have applied for unemployment insurance, you have to work a certain amount of time, you have to work full time, you have to work steadily, you have to prove your attachment to the labor force for a long, long time. And given women's roles in the home, they could not meet this, this requirement because they were socially assigned to carry out family responsibilities. And many women did. So that's just in general how unemployment women had a harder time meeting those requirements. So if they're working, they applied, they disqualified. And then there was also the program requires you to leave. You can't decide to leave. You have to be unemployed because of the economy or employer. But if you decide to leave, it has to be for an acceptable or good cause reason. But the reasons didn't apply to women who left work for what were considered unacceptable reasons, or pregnancy, caregiving and domestic violence, or following a spouse to another job, those things didn't apply to men. So women had a hard time if they left for those reasons, no benefits from them. And then public assistance served mostly single mothers. And it was designed, I think I mentioned some of this before, it was originally designed for widows. And it's more single mothers and separating divorced women became eligible. The rules became more restrictive and punitive. And due to systemic racism, which I can say more about later, black single mothers became overrepresented on the welfare roll. The welfare rolls, that is the right name for that program. And with this policymakers increasingly, they always say, but it was this group in particular, blame poverty on their so called lack of personal responsibility, by which they meant they had kids outside of marriage. And so it's possible that this independence of women, and especially black women, posed a threat here. These women were independent, they were functioning on their own. They didn't have a male brethren. They were managing to survive a threat to patriarchal arrangements. So it had to be discouraged with reduced loss or denial of benefits. Then there's the infamous welfare queen, the stereotype just that Reagan introduced to punish strict work, to use strict work requirements that stigmatized poor women and denied them their benefits and reinforced enforced racial inequality. So all the programs had something that were regulatory for women. And all cases, black women got the short end of the stick.
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Stephen Pimpare
That feels like a good opportunity to ask you to say more about that. So you've talked a little bit about sort of the way in which we understand the gendered nature of the operations of the welfare state. What happens when we layer in race on top of that gendered analysis.
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Mimi Abramovitz
First, I actually want to mention one more thing before I go into that, because the book introduces a concept called the family ethic and sort of elaborates on what I'm talking about. So for decades, most welfare state research focused on class, men and markets, so there was no discussion of women. So they regulated the lives of men by conditioning their receipt of benefits deserving or undeserving of aid based on their compliance with the work ethic. However, the work ethic women were supposed to be at home. The work ethic didn't really account for their experience, so they were disappeared or ignored in these otherwise scholarly and useful accounts. So to bring women into view, I developed this concept called the family ethic, to the idea that women's place was in the home. And how did that work out? So if the welfare state judged women for their adherence to the work ethic, judged men for their adherence to the work ethic, it judged women by their Adherence or compliance with the family ethic or women's socially prescribed wife and mother roles. That's what the family ethic speaks to. So to enforce the family ethic from the start, social welfare programs consistently rewarded women who complied with the family ethic and penalized those who did not. And these rules favored married and non working wives over single, divorced, and working women. Then how does race fit into this story? Race is definitely central to the story of the welfare state, and increasingly so. It may be pure race and gender neutral, but the welfare state reproduces. It reproduces, and this is key. The racial and gender inequality that is built into y society. And it's a product of society that it's a part. It cannot escape it. None of us can. So the family ethic more broadly has always been racialized. So women of white, how is it women of color more likely to live without a male breadwinner and more likely to work outside the home to survive? So the welfare state automatically viewed them as violating the family ethic. They were not seen as real women, which was also the case in wider society. And they were not deserving of the same protection over to white women, which was already quite minimal. One of the most famous examples of this is that both the Social Security and unemployment insurance excluded domestic and agricultural workers, jobs held by permanent black women and men. And this was a deliberate compromise that allowed Southern segregationists to maintain control over black labor that lasted until the 1950s. And so the program continued with systemic racism. Some people call it welfare racism. And so when there's racial discrimination or people that discriminate, it makes it, as I said before, it makes it harder for them to qualify for benefits. And then there's a built in administrative bias because people bring their own racism into it and how they treat people and so on. So black women just got the shorter. And they said, it's a long story. I don't have time to go into it now, but it really is a very sad and actually horrific story. But they got less, received less from the programs, even Social Security, even though they paid the same Social Security payroll tax.
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Mimi Abramovitz
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Stephen Pimpare
So before I asked you to talk to us a little bit about how you think about the current moment that we are inhabiting in the context of this history, I wonder if you might reflect a little bit on you've talked about the ways in which the welfare state contained the potential both to embolden women's lives as well as engaging in the kind of control and regulation you've talked about. I wonder if you might talk to us a little bit about that and what you see there.
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Mimi Abramovitz
Yeah, I think that's really important and it's really not something that's widely understood or discussed. But basically women have never been passive recipients. We're supposed to be passive, but we haven't in any part of life. I certainly in relation to welfare state benefits and scholars have shown so the background of this is that scholars have shown that the welfare state when it increased benefits, it did it when the economy sagged in order to mute social unrest and give people something makes them happy. They don't protest, however, what I started to think about was that the provision of economic aid outside of the market, or what the British call the social wage alternative to the market wage, reduces the fear of economic insecurity. And it's that if you're not something, you're going to have no money, you're much more willing to. It's emboldening. You're much more willing or capable to take the risk to fight for what you need. So the welfare states creates the conditions for the very protest it set out to. Quiet. So that's kind of interesting. So one of the benefits of the welfare state was that especially for poor women, it shifted the burden of unpaid care work from women to the state. They subsidized women's care work in the home. So at some point, women use that leverage to demand, hey, listen, we're doing this. Stop punishing us, stop treating us so badly. And that was sort of the mantra of the welfare rights movement in the 1970s, 60s and 70s, and it challenged the punitive policies, some of which I mentioned, and reframed welfare as a right, not a handout. And also middle class feminists also fought for legislative reforms to make Social Security and unemployment insurance better for them. That group, so it was fighting for better benefits. But also the social wage can support workers to ask for more. It's like a strike fund, okay? The income security provided by access to welfare benefits can enable the individual workers to demand better wages on their jobs, women to challenge male dominance, and people of color to resist systemic racism. When you don't fear your loss of income, it can also embolden people to support and get involved in social justice movements and the movements to organize people when there's less fear of deaths than tuition. So while the welfare state, and this is one of my favorite parts of the welfare state, because people don't really talk about it a lot. It's so stigmatized and so demonized. But while the welfare state was created to stabilize capitalism and contain social unrest, it also provided the very tools that enabled collective resistance and social change.
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Stephen Pimpare
I'm so glad that you emphasized that point. I mean, I think, rhetoric notwithstanding, right? We don't, I think, fully appreciate the ways in which welfare can make one more free as opposed to the rhetoric about the harm that it causes to populations. And I think, as you say, we lose sight of that pretty regularly.
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Mimi Abramovitz
And I think that's why benefits have always been kept so low, because if you make benefits higher, the power to embolden is increased. So you keep benefits low.
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Stephen Pimpare
So As I promised, as we work our way toward concluding here, Mimi, I wonder if you might use your historical and gendered and racial lens to offer folks your thoughts on the current moment in history that we inhabit. As we are recording it is the end of the year of 2025, coming to the end of the first year of the second Trump administration. How are you thinking about where we are?
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Mimi Abramovitz
Well, I am horrified. So just personally, it's not my academic self. My personal self is horrified and scared. I think it's a very dangerous period. But that said, I think that we have to talk about the welfare state was never popular. It was always suffering cuts from day one. And I said, Trump is working to dismantle it. But one of the things that did happen because of its emboldening possibility in the 80s, 90s and so on, as more women went to work, as more women, as unmarried motherhood became less stigmatized, that created pressure on the welfare state to try to women got more benefits from it. And the welfare state had to reform itself to accommodate these demographic changes. It fought tooth and nail, but it tried to accommodate them. So there was some improvements until about mid-90s in welfare reform took hold and sort of gave permission to attack the welfare state. And now 20 years later, that's full blown. So, of course, if you're familiar with Project 2025, as I'm sure you and many of your listeners are, it laid out many things that the Trump administration is doing, but it also had sections that focus on women's traditional role. It did not like that women had gained independence in any way and including from the welfare state, although they didn't put it in terms of independence. They said they were personally engaged and personally irresponsible. Later behavior. They didn't work. They cheated the welfare state. They were greedy old ladies. I mean, they came up with every challenge. And so as we now know, it's laid out in Project 2025. But some of the Trump administration, I think it was Vance who said women should not be working, women should stay home and have babies and make a lot of babies. And they said something about the trad wife. They tried to really sort of bringing back the family ethic full steam. Women's lives have begun to challenge it. And we saw that in the welfare state, we didn't obey it anymore. We started to do things that we weren't supposed to do according to that. And so now they want to restore this and you might notice, and they're doing it every which way. All the social welfare state cuts are Bent undermining the ability of the state to subsidize women at home, which is ironic because they want women to stay home, but they're punishing women for who they are. I just lost my train of thought. But yeah. And so firing all the welfare state workers is particularly targeted to black people who are overrepresented among public sector employees. And they the welfare state for African Americans in particular was a path to the middle class during the post war period because when the private sector wouldn't hire them, the government was hiring people. So that's why black people are overrepresented in public sector jobs. These cuts and these furloughs and all that are falling heaviest on them. Falling heaviest on. Now you're taking away food stamps. I mean that's today as we speak is the end of food stamps are about to end tomorrow due to the government shutdown. But shutting the government down, what does it do? It implements Project 23 5. It stops supporting families in need who are thought as undeserving of help because of who they are, what they look like and so on. And even when the shutdown ends, which it will someday, they're going to continue to try to go after what was once known as the third rail of politics. Is the Social Security there? And this is not in my book, but they're also talking about privatizing Social Security. That's in my book discussing that. But they're also talking about privatizing Medicare. So really trying to get rid of this welfare state which in the United States is so meager to begin with. And the the majority of the harsh treatment is falling on women and then women of color. So that's a short version.
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Stephen Pimpare
You're listening to the Public Policy Channel of the New Books Network and we have been speaking with Mimi Abramowitz about her book Regulating the Lives of Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present from Rutledge Press. Mimi, thank you so much for joining us today. Much appreciated. You know the words dominating today's headlines.
- [30:49]
Mimi Abramovitz
Private equity, generative capital gains on Fed rate cuts.
- [30:54]
Stephen Pimpare
But do you understand how they impact your world and your wallet in a world that skims the what? Understand the why. Because context changes everything. Subscribe@Bloomberg.com.