Fortunes of Feminism by Nancy Fraser

Author:Nancy Fraser
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Verso Books

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* Research for this essay was supported by the Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research, Northwestern University. For helpful comments, I am indebted to Rebecca Blank, Joshua Cohen, Fay Cook, Barbara Hobson, Axel Honneth, Jenny Mansbridge, Linda Nicholson, Ann Shola Orloff, John Roemer, Ian Shapiro, Tracy Strong, Peter Taylor-Gooby, Judy Wittner, Eli Zaretsky, and the members of the Feminist Public Policy Work Group of the Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research, Northwestern University.

1 Mimi Abramowitz, Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present, Boston: South End Press, 1988; Nancy Fraser, “Women, Welfare, and the Politics of Need Interpretation,” in Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989; Linda Gordon, “What Does Welfare Regulate?” Social Research 55:4, Winter 1988, 609–30; Hilary Land, “Who Cares for the Family?” Journal of Social Policy 7:3, July 1978, 257–84. An exception to the built-in family-wage assumption is France, which from early on accepted high levels of female waged work. See Jane Jenson, “Representations of Gender: Policies to ‘Protect’ Women Workers and Infants in France and the United States before 1914,” in Women, the State, and Welfare, ed. Linda Gordon, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.

2 This account of the tripartite structure of the welfare state represents a modification of the account I proposed in “Women, Welfare, and the Politics of Need Interpretation.” There I followed Barbara Nelson in positing a two-tier structure of ideal-typically “masculine“ social insurance programs and ideal-typically “feminine” family support programs. (See her “Women’s Poverty and Women’s Citizenship: Some Political Consequences of Economic Marginality,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 10:2, Winter 1984, 209–31, and “The Origins of the Two-Channel Welfare State: Workmen’s Compensation and Mothers’ Aid,” in Women, the State, and Welfare, ed. Linda Gordon.) Although that view was a relatively accurate picture of the US social-welfare system, I now consider it analytically misleading. The United States is unusual in that the second and third tiers are conflated. What was for many decades the main program of means-tested poor relief—Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)—was also the main program supporting women’s childraising. Analytically, however, these are best understood as two distinct tiers of social welfare. When social insurance is added, we get a three-tier welfare state.

3 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Oxford: Blackwell, 1989; Scott Lash and John Urry, The End of Organized Capitalism, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987; Robert Reich, The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism, New York: Knopf, 1991.

4 Joan Smith, “The Paradox of Women’s Poverty: Wage-earning Women and Economic Transformation,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 9:2, Winter 1984, 291–310.

5 Judith Stacey, “Sexism By a Subtler Name? Postindustrial Conditions and Postfeminist Consciousness in the Silicon Valley,” Socialist Review no. 96, 1987, 7–28.

6 Kath Weston, Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship, New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.

7 Nancy Fraser, “Clintonism, Welfare, and the

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