Amid postmodernist circumspection about definitive or comprehensive accounts, the absence of a comprehensive theory of the masculinist powers of the state is an admittedly ambiguous lack. However, there are two overlapping sets of political developments in the United States which suggest the need for as full, complex, and nuanced reading of state powers as purveyors and mediators of male dominance as feminist theorists can achieve. First, the state figures prominently in a number of issues currently occupy-ing and often dividing North American feminists, including campaigns for state regulation of pornography and reproductive technologies; contradictory agendas for reforms in labor, insurance, and parental leave legislation (the" difference-equality" debate in the public policy domain); and appeals to the state, at times crosscut by appeals to the private sector, for pay equity, child support and daycare funding. Second, an unprecedented and growing number of women in the United States are today directly depen-dent upon the state for survival. Through the dramatic increase in impoverished" mother-headed households" produced by the socially fragmenting and dislocating forces of late-twentieth-century capitalism, and through the proliferation of state policies and ser-vices addressing the effects of these forces, the state has acquired a historically unparalleled prominence-political and economic, so-cial and cultural-in millions of women's lives. State-centered feminist politics, and feminist hesitations about such politics, are hardly new. Nineteenth-century feminist appeals to the state included campaigns for suffrage, protective labor legislation, temperance, birth control, and marriage law reform. In the twentieth century, the list expanded to campaigns for equal oppor-tunity, equal pay, equal rights, and comparable worth; reproduc-