Women, the State, and Welfare

Preface

Preface This anthology began as a joint project with Rosalind Pollack Petchesky. At a very early stage, when we had only just begun to discuss what might be included, she had to leave me alone with the project because of her new and very demanding job. I am keenly aware that the benefit of her intellectual rigor and knowledge, combined with the mutual learning that can occur in such a team project, would have made this a better book. My own thinking on this subject, as reflected in my first essay and in the choice of articles, has been influenced not only by Ros Petchesky but also by many other friends and colleagues with whom I have discussed these issues, at levels of abstraction ranging from a discussion about "the state" with graduate students here at the University of Wisconsin to mutterings about the daily newS. I would like particularly to thank Rosalyn Fraad Baxandall, Johanna Brenner, Lisa Brush, Elizabeth Ewen, Stuart Ewen, Martha Fineman, Nancy Fraser, Ed Friedman, Susan Stanford Friedman, Allen Hunter, Nancy Isenberg, Alice Kessler-Harris, Judith Walzer Leavitt, Gerda Lerner, Sara McLanahan, Nancy MacLean, Ann Orloff, Kathryn Sklar, Susan Smith, Susan Traverso, Susan Ware, and Ann Withorn. To some authors whose work is included here I have special debts: Nancy Fraser, Jane Jenson, and Gwendolyn Mink rewrote their articles for this anthology. Elizabeth Schneider allowed me to cut her article drastically. Jane Jenson allowed me to lop off a theoretical introduction that was very dear to her and turned herself into an American historian at my pleading. Teresa Amott produced her essay especially for this collection. Frances Fox Piven and Richard.Cloward, unintentionally, gave me, in their impressive oeuvre on welfare, not only a model of committed scholarship but an argument against which I was able to develop my own feminist analysis. vii ...