In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

9 Liberal Feminism and the Reshaping of the New Deal Order susan m. hartmann In 1970, Mrs. Frank Hallonquist wrote from Waco, Texas, to Michigan Congresswoman Martha Griffiths about the unfairness of her retirement situation. “My working days were during the depression,” she recalled, “5½ to 6 days working week, no coffee breaks, no additional benefits, other than a check at the end of the month. I worked hard and have EARNED every penny of my SS [Social Security] retirement.” Yet, as a married woman she would not receive the full value of her payments to a system that she had been required to contribute to. Hallonquist noted that she had no company pension to mitigate her family’s financial need. “We don’t want any guaranteed family income nonsense,” she concluded, “all we want is al l t hat we have wor ked a nd paid f or .”1 In imploring Griffiths to act against the discrimination embedded in the Social Security system, Hallonquist implicitly identified the gender bias of New Deal programs that contemporaries and later scholars erroneously described as “universal.” In addition, Hallonquist’s sense of injustice challenges those who dichotomize twentieth-century liberalism as class-oriented or rights-oriented. Indeed, her claim for rights, which Griffiths incorporated into her feminist agenda in Congress, was firmly based in her own and her family’s material needs and interests. This essay examines the policy goals and activism of the “mainstream” wing of second-wave feminism to understand how this movement both sustained and redefined liberalism and the New Deal order after World War II. It challenges the argument that liberalism fell into disarray when it turned away from a universal economic agenda laid down in the New Deal to one promot- ing the rights and interests of particular groups.2 To be sure, incorporation of gender issues into the liberal agenda contributed to the rise of a conservative countermovement, but without equal rights, the universal promise of New Deal economics would remain empty. Feminists allied with the Democratic Party did not abandon economic issues, but, like Mrs. Hallonquist, sought to ensure that the New Deal programs offered equal benefits to women. Theirs was a “rights” liberalism, but it was so because they were seeking the same right to economic security that the New Deal granted to white men. Rather than deviating from the New Deal policy order, liberal feminists sought to include women within its benefits and to expand its regulatory and social provision powers to accommodate women’s dual roles as workers and mothers.3 Moreover, in their focus on material security, mainstream feminists coalesced across divides of race, ethnicity, and class on behalf of policies that would expand economic justice for a broad range of disadvantaged groups.4 And, while the conservative countermovement that arose in the 1970s certainly objected to what its participants considered feminist threats to traditional values, material interests also motivated antifeminists. In the 1990s, scholars began to deconstruct the understanding of New Deal liberalism as a set of universalist policies. First, building on the work of political scientist Barbara Nelson, Linda Gordon articulated the two-tiered nature of the Social Security Act. White men gained social insurance against unemployment and old age, entitlements based on their status as workers.5 Some women gained benefits through their status as wives and daughters of male workers, but most employed women and minority men were left out because their jobs lay beyond the coverage of these programs. By contrast, women gained public assistance, the Aid to Dependent Children program, based on their status as dependent and needy. Alice Kessler-Harris extended this analysis of what she calls the “gendered habits of the mind” embedded in New Deal legislation; they privileged white men not only in Social Security, but also in tax policy and the Fair Labor Standards Act.6 The white male–breadwinner orientation of these liberal programs gave those who were left out no alternative but to argue for their rights to inclusion . Scholars have demonstrated this inseparability of rights and material interests in a number of settings. For example, studies of black tobacco workers and steelworkers show that their struggles joined civil rights to industrial democracy.7 Other scholars, such as Dorothy Sue Cobble, Dennis A. Deslippe, and Nancy Gabin, have described how union women actually prefigured second-wave feminism in seeking the right to equal economic opportunity within the context of industrial unionism.8 More recently, Nancy MacLean liberal feminism and the...

Share