The Legal Tender of Gender

Law, Welfare and the Regulation of Women's Poverty

Shelley A. M. Gavigan, Dorothy E Chunn, Shelley A. M. Gavigan, Dorothy E Chunn

• Publisher: Hart Publishing
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9781841133157
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781847315625
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Gender & The Law
• Index: Law

Extensive welfare, law and policy reforms characterised the making and unmaking of Keynesian states in the twentieth century. This collection highlights the gendered nature of these regulatory shifts and, specifically, the roles played by women as reformers, welfare workers and welfare recipients, in the development of welfare states historically. The contributors are leading feminist socio-legal scholars from a range of disciplines in Canada, the United States and Israel. Collectively, their analyses of women, law and poverty speak to long-standing and ongoing feminist concerns: the importance of historically informed research, the relevance of women's agency and resistance to the experience of inequality and injustice, the specificity of the experience of poor women and poor mothers, the implications of changes to social policy, and the possibilities for social change. Such analyses are particularly timely as the devastation of neo-liberalism becomes increasingly obvious. The current world crisis of capitalism is a defining moment for liberal states – a global catastrophe that concomitantly creates a window of opportunity for critical scholars and activists to reframe debates about social welfare, work, and equality, and to reinsert the discourse of social justice into the public consciousness and political agendae of liberal democracies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Prelims
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Historicizing Social Reproduction, Welfare and Neo-liberalism
• 1 Women, Social Reproduction and the Neo-Liberal Assault on the US Welfare State
• 2 Women, the State and Welfare Law
• Part II Women’s Agency and Activism in the Welfare State: Comparative and Historical Perspectives
• 3 Gender and the Rise of the Welfare State in Fin-de-Siècle New York City
• 4 ‘Mothers at Work’
• Part III The Precarious Citizenship and Legal Construction of Poor Women
• 5 Women in the Workforce in the Context of Neo-Liberalism
• 6 ‘Risky Women’
• 7 Intimate Intrusions
• 8 Retrenchment not Reform
• Part IV Reconceptualizing State Forms and Socio-Legal Policy
• 9 Substantive Universality
• 10 Women’s Work and a Guaranteed Income
• Index