When the National Center for Health Statistics reported last summer that the US birth rate had declined for the sixth year in a row, conservatives reprised a familiar rallying cry. On Fox & Friends, pundits laid the blame on “rhetoric from the left” encouraging women to prioritize their careers over starting families. Liberals and leftists were quick to point out that birth rates have declined as the economic costs of having children have risen. They cited studies showing that American women have fewer children than they report they’d like, with many referencing lack of parental leave, health insurance, and childcare support as the reasons why.
The left and the right converged on calls for restoration, with conservatives seeking a return to “traditional” values while liberals lamented the loss of a social safety net. This poses a vexing question: why has economic security eroded at the same time that gender and sexual norms seem to have loosened their hold? This historical coincidence has long troubled theorists on the left. In a 2009 essay for the New Left Review, Nancy Fraser attributed the simultaneous rise of feminism and neoliberalism to the movements’ shared affinity for “the critique of traditional authority.”[1] Melinda Cooper has sharply criticized Fraser’s viewpoint, arguing that despite their rhetorical emphasis on individualism, neoliberal policymakers have in fact sought to reinforce normative family models.[2]
Now that the Supreme Court has overturned the constitutional right to abortion, it’s hard to argue that feminism has entirely triumphed. But the decision only seems to heighten the apparent contrast between ascendant cultural norms and deteriorating material realities. Are feminism’s gains merely superficial?
One way to make sense of contrasting theories of feminism’s political significance is to understand them as describing different subjects: the feminists enjoying relaxed gender norms are the mostly white, straight, and middle-class women who have benefited the most from expanded professional opportunities.[3] The victims of resurgent “family values” politics, meanwhile, are the poor women, queer women, and women of color most harmed by the dismantling of welfare programs and union-brokered job stability. Telling these different stories, theorists are like the parabolic blind men feeling an elephant, each grasping a different part and mistaking it for the whole. To see the entirety of the animal, we need to examine how the fate of a narrow and privileged class diverged so sharply from that of other women.
Three recent books examine apparent triumphs of feminist policymaking: the establishment of no-fault divorce procedures, the legalization of abortion, and the creation of microcredit programs for women in the Global South. Taken together, these studies show that feminists working to reform very different parts of the post-New Deal liberal state all sought to address one common, underlying problem: the undervaluation of women’s paid and unpaid caregiving work. Many feminists argued that the empowerment of care workers would uplift middle-class housewives and working-class service workers alike—but the policies they ultimately supported drove a wedge between these groups.[4]
In Divorce, American Style: Fighting for Women’s Economic Citizenship in the Neoliberal Era (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), Suzanne Kahn argues that the feminist “divorce reformers” who initially sought to untether all women’s livelihoods from their marriages to men ultimately settled for an expansion of the marital privileges white, middle-class women enjoyed. Their compromise resulted from their desire to recover the status they once held as the wives of breadwinners, and from their unwillingness to ally with the women who never occupied that role. The international policymakers in Joanne Meyerowitz’s A War on Global Poverty: The Lost Promise of Redistribution (Princeton University Press, 2021) aimed explicitly to aid poor women. But they likewise backed away from their radical contemporaries’ calls to challenge a larger hierarchy—in their case, the hierarchy of nations. The negative consequences of fighting for redistribution without restructuring, and opportunity without empowerment, would fall on those who occupied the lowest status in the existing power structure, as Sara Matthiessen shows in Reproduction Reconceived: Family Making and the Limits of Choice after Roe v. Wade (University of California Press, 2021).
Second Wave feminist policymakers, these books collectively demonstrate, shared the intention of improving the material conditions of women’s lives across lines of class and race. But while their campaigns to value women’s work challenged the gendered logic of the New Deal order, they nonetheless operated from that order’s assumption that welfare must flow from the top down: from wealthy nations to poor ones, and from employers to workers. So when it came time to implement the valuation of women’s work in policy, the Second Wave feminists who held sway in government would accept the narrowest possible form of recompense. If we want to understand why the ascendance of feminist values hasn’t resulted in greater economic security for so many women, we should pay as much attention to the limitations of liberalism as to the rise of neoliberalism. If we want to realize the Second Wave feminists’ emancipatory agenda, we’ll have to envision a world entirely unlike the one in which they lived.
§
Divorce, American Style begins by describing the mid-century laws that admitted a limited set of transgressions—such as adultery—as legal grounds for ending a marriage and awarding alimony on the same basis. When legally innocent spouses wanted to separate, they could collude. In some cases, couples hired women to pretend to have affairs with husbands, and private detectives to “discover” the affair. But of course, such schemes were expensive and difficult to pull off, which helps explain why the postwar divorce rate stayed below 10 per 1,000 married women until the mid-1960s.[5]
Kahn’s account of the difficulties of divorce at midcentury adds to generations of scholarship that have shown how New Deal policies made women’s access to postwar affluence contingent on their marriage to a (white) male breadwinner.[6] The coexistence of a stronger social safety net and conservative sexual norms at midcentury was, after all, no coincidence. The Social Security Act of 1935, the foundational legislation of the modern welfare state, exempted agricultural laborers, domestic servants, hospital employees—largely women and people of color— from its guarantees for old-age and unemployment insurance. Likewise, only as the wives of stably employed men could most women legally access breadwinner wages, mortgages, consumer credit, health benefits, and pensions. Single women could access cash aid through the SSA’s much less generous Aid to Dependent Children (later Aid to Families with Dependent Children) program, and only if they did not work. The structure of the welfare state both assumed women’s economic dependence on men and enforced that dependence, offering little protection for wage-earning women.
If men’s wages and benefits were the carrot that incentivized early and long marriages in the postwar era, then fault-based divorce laws—Kahn’s account suggests—were the stick. These laws met resistance, Kahn explains, from both feminists and “men’s rights” groups. As the existence of mistress-for-hire schemes suggests, custom dictated that husbands take legal blame and financial responsibility in situations where couples decided mutually to part. Women saw the arrangement as compensation for the dependent role they played in marriage, and so were frustrated to find that only some divorcees were actually entitled to alimony. Lax enforcement ensured that even the lucky few failed to collect it. Meanwhile, men saw alimony as a price courts exacted for divorce. Heeding calls for reform, fifteen states eliminated all fault grounds from divorce proceedings by 1979, replacing them with a patchwork of procedures that made divorce more accessible but the guidelines for dividing marital property murkier.
The divorce rate doubled over the course of the 1970s, and from the ranks of the newly separated emerged a cohort of women Kahn identifies as “feminist divorce reformers.” Typically white, middle-class, and lacking a previous history of activism, these women came to the forefront of their movement not because they elbowed others out of the way but because of the particularly sudden and significant effect that divorce had on their material status. Without a guarantee of alimony, divorce left such women without a regular income, healthcare, or access to credit for the first time. They found that their position on the welfare state’s privileged tier was only conditional.
Kahn argues that reformers shared a desire for the state to recognize marriage not as a status but as an economic partnership in which couples divvied up necessary labor—paid and unpaid—and therefore as a claim to earnings and benefits. But as feminists lobbied for legislation to realize this vision, they disagreed about exactly how much women’s unpaid labor was worth, and who would foot the bill.
Kahn follows these disagreements across four case studies concerning efforts to augment different forms of government and employer-provided support: credit, health care, social security, and retirement pensions. Currently a policy researcher for the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank, Kahn excels at foregrounding the minutiae of legislative strategy that sometimes eludes historians focused on ideology and rhetoric. While the political dynamics and outcomes vary in each case, Kahn identifies divorce reformers’ failure to expand public programs as a constant through line.
Because it tracks the New Deal’s quintessential entitlement, Kahn’s discussion of social security is particularly revealing. According to her, Congresswomen Bella Abzug, Martha Griffiths, and Barbara Jordan proposed different ways of expanding social security coverage to support women’s unpaid household work. Abzug hoped to raise a general tax to extend social security to any person who performed household services to support a wage earner. But she valued this care work at its market rate—which, of course, was artificially low. In contrast, Griffiths and Jordan drafted a bill that valued housework at the median amount earned by all working individuals, a proposal that might have helped increase the market value of paid service work. But they would have funded their bill with a payroll tax, limiting its coverage to homemakers attached to a covered wage earner.
In the end, both bills failed. Soon after, in 1977, Congress passed an amendment to the Social Security Act that simply lowered the duration of marriage required for divorced women to continue claiming benefits as their husbands’ dependents from twenty to ten years. Instead of recognizing women as their husbands’ economic partners, the legislation simply extended their status as wives.
In the wake of their failure to alter social security’s breadwinner-homemaker model, divorce reformers sought to garner recognition of women’s economic contributions in marriage by working along another dimension of the US welfare state: its allocation of aid through employer-provided benefits. In the 1980s, feminist litigants successfully established precedents for awarding women shares of their husbands’ private pensions and healthcare benefits in divorce settlements. But because the judiciary system could not expand access to these elective entitlements, victories in the courts rarely benefited the low-income women and women of color whose husbands’ employers were less likely to provide generous retirement benefits (and who could not afford expensive legal feeds if they did).
Was a different outcome possible? Kahn points to the reluctance of divorce reformers to ally with the black-led National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) to expand state welfare programs. At first largely excluded from Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) black women became disproportionately represented among the program’s recipients in the 1960s after lawmakers amended eligibility requirements to mandate rather than prohibit waged work.[7] The NRWO fought to expand eligibility for AFDC, increase the aid it offered, and eliminate work requirements, an effort that divorce reformers might have productively joined. But instead of risking alliance with recipients of the welfare state’s most stingy and stigmatized program, divorce reformers sought to restore their status on its privileged tier. Seeking to challenge the welfare state’s gendered structure, they nevertheless took advantage of its employer-centered structure and the class and race hierarchies it reinforced.
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Feminist scholarship on America’s gendered welfare state has focused largely on domestic policy.[8] But Joanne Meyerowitz’s A War on Global Poverty: The Lost Promise of Redistribution and the Rise of Microcredit makes clear that the US welfare state has always had an international dimension. We can’t understand how the social safety net eroded without examining its reach abroad.
Meyerowitz, a professor of history and American Studies at Yale University, helped pioneer the study of gender and the US political economy. Her now classic first book, Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880–1930 (1988) examined young women’s entrance into urban labor markets at the turn of the twentieth century. Meyerowitz argued that by treating them as the dependents of their fathers and husbands, the employers who relied on young women’s labor justified their low wages as supplementary “pin money.” This analysis would lay the groundwork for subsequent feminist critiques of the welfare state’s breadwinner logic, which enforced the dependencies those employers assumed.
In A War on Global Poverty, Meyerowitz finds that the creation of gendered dependency in the US had a parallel in the foreign policies that made the Global South’s receipt of aid contingent on the Global North’s economic, ideological, and military terms. Just as women’s dependency on men left them vulnerable to economic disenfranchisement in the absence of a male breadwinner, so did aid-recipient countries become mired in debt in the wake of global commodity price increases, recessions, and natural disasters. By 1981, the debt of developing countries exceeded $81 billion dollars.
Even before the debt crisis reached its climax, the foreign aid system had attracted calls for reform from both the left and the right. While Meyerowitz worked in the tradition of bottom-up social history in Women Adrift, she moves inside arenas of global power in A War on Global Poverty—studying the government leaders and intellectuals who sought to reshape foreign aid policy. Inside those arenas, conservatives argued that aid wasted money and entrapped the US in unnecessary foreign entanglements. Liberals lobbied for a shift from trickle-down assistance schemes geared at incentivizing macroeconomic development to a more redistributive agenda focused on meeting the “basic needs” of the poor. Calls from foreign leaders and their allies in the US to more thoroughly restructure the global economic hierarchy by renegotiating trade terms and distributing aid through multilateral institutions with Global South representation mostly went ignored.
Women become a part of this story in the second half of the book, when Meyerowitz turns her focus on one prominent camp of reformers that emerged among proponents of the “basic needs” approach: the “Women in Development” (WID) movement. Feminist advocates of WID, like their liberal peers, sought to redirect aid from top-down, large-scale development projects to grassroots community programs. Women, they argued, were doubly disadvantaged by programs that expected aid to flow down first from those countries’ economic elites, then to heads of households, and only then to dependents.
Meyerowitz argues that WID challenged development experts’ prevailing racist view of Global South women as exceptionally fertile agents of overpopulation, making an economic and moral case for viewing mothers as “income generators” rather than only “child bearers.” Economically, WID supporters pointed to the importance of women’s “informal” work in home production, local markets, and agriculture. Like Kahn’s divorce reformers, they urged policymakers to recognize and value work obscured by the paradigm of the male breadwinner.
But unlike the divorce reformers, they also argued that women were more deserving recipients of aid than men because they would use it to support their children and communities – rather than, presumably, for liquor and leisure. Appealing to the longstanding Western penchant for “saving brown women from brown men,” [9] as the theorist Gayatri Spivak famously put it, they positioned Global South women as the ultimate “deserving poor” (Meyerowitz 178). In doing so, as Meyerowitz points out, they ironically inverted the stereotype of American women of color recipients as “welfare queens.” Even as policymakers depicted welfare recipients at home as loafers and cheats who exploited government generosity to enjoy a life of luxury, WID advocates depicted Global South women as uniquely selfless and virtuous. But like the welfare queen trope, this equally essentializing caricature treated poverty as a moral and individual problem, redirecting attention away from the need for widespread, structural redistribution.
In 1973, WID advocates secured passage of the Percy Amendment to the US Foreign Assistance Act, mandating that the federal government administer aid with “particular attention to those programs, projects, and activities which tend to integrate women into the national economies of foreign countries.” But the act did not specify how aid programs should integrate women, and, as Meyerowitz shows, the model that had prevailed by the 1980s was “microcredit”: small loans aimed at transforming women’s informal work into entrepreneurial ventures. Development experts positioned microcredit as the antithesis of the structural debt adjustment programs that had created such a conspicuous crisis: debt was bad; credit was good. But in reality, microcredit burdened Global South women with debt without altering their economic status—or their countries’.
WID feminists, like Kahn’s divorce reformers, might have achieved a better outcome had they made common cause with potential allies: in this case, Global South activists who argued that truly helping women in poor nations required restructuring the global economic hierarchy. But like divorce reformers, they ultimately settled for trying to redirect funds to women within a structure that still channeled aid and decisions about how to allot it from the top down.
Focusing on the US and international policymakers who designed foreign aid programs, Meyerowitz does not examine the fate of the women on their receiving end. But evidence of the disastrous effects of microfinance programs is not hard to find. In the past decade, countless academic studies and news articles have documented the cases of poor women offered small loan after small loan until they found themselves mired in debt. Especially since 2012, when the relaxation of international regulatory standards opened the door for the proliferation of private credit companies engaged in unethical collection practices, microcredit has attracted almost as much scandal as structural debt adjustment programs once did.[10]
Seeking to free poor women from their economic dependency on men, US feminists accepted the subordination of the Global South to the Global North. Seeking to transform the gendered New Deal welfare state they helped create into a truly universal program for redistribution, they ended up perpetuating its inequities.
§
On the domestic front, poor women have seen the small amount of economic security the New Deal state had given them erode over the course of the past fifty years as policymakers have slashed welfare programs, dismantled market regulations, and filled prisons. While those trends have been documented in broad terms, historians are only now beginning to examine the toll that neoliberalism has taken specifically on poor women and women of color. If New Deal architects’ assumption that women were economically dependent on men justified the policies that in fact made them dependent, now the assumption of women’s legal independence leaves them with little support at all.
Sara Matthiesen, a professor of history and women’s gender and sexuality studies at George Washington University, examines this dynamic through the lens of reproductive rights in her Reproduction Reconceived: Family Making and the Limits of Choice After Roe v. Wade. The feminist campaign for the “right to choose,” she argues, posed a radical challenge to the central assumption of the breadwinner-homemaker model: that women’s capacity to bear children necessitates that they perform the labor of motherhood. But while Roe—when it still stood— allowed many women to untether motherhood from pregnancy, she shows, it did nothing to ensure that women who did raise children (or care for other kin) could do so safely or affordably.
Far from outdated by the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs, Reproduction Reconceived is an urgent reminder that a renewed fight for the right to choose must do more than restore legal access to abortion.
Matthiesen agrees with contemporary progressive critics who point out that rising healthcare and childcare costs make family making more difficult. But she also insists that such oft-cited concerns comprise only a fraction of the barriers to reproductive justice. Looking beyond the household, her wide-ranging case studies examine hospitals, prisons, courtrooms, and crisis pregnancy centers as sites of reproductive labor. Different chapters focus on incarcerated mothers’ battles to secure even minimal communication and visitation rights with their children, and the efforts of mothers diagnosed with AIDS to compel public health officials to recognize and respond to the disease’s impact on women and children. Matthiesen identifies the common source of these seemingly separate struggles as state neglect, though other critics have attributed such policies to the state’s active efforts to punish the poor.[11]
If neoliberal policies have undermined men’s ability to financially support their spouses and children, they have increased the expectation that women (whether or not they also work for wages) should care for their families and their communities without remuneration or support. Feminists in the 1970s sought legal and financial recognition of women’s unpaid and underpaid work. Decades later, Matthiesen shows, that work has exploded both in volume and in the degree of its exploitation.
Despite this pessimistic assessment, though, Matthiesen offers readers some reason for hope. Differing in class, race, and sexual orientation, the various women whose activism comprises Matthiesen’s case studies share the common desire to create families under conditions of their choosing. Understandably, many of these campaigns have focused on addressing women’s particular, immediate—often life-or-death—needs. But it’s hard not to wonder if they might form the basis of an unrealized coalition with a broader agenda. The 1970s campaigns documented by Kahn, Meyerowitz, and Matthiesen, after all, had the potential to value women’s labor and to unite housewives, paid service workers, and informal workers. They failed to do so. But if women are still undervalued and overexploited workers, then they still may become the leaders of a fight to make economic security unconditional.
§
Not seeking merely cultural or symbolic change, Second Wave feminists assailed a core assumption of the architects of the New Deal: that women should depend on men for economic security. As Kathi Weeks has argued with reference to the Marxist-feminist “Wages for Housework” campaign, the demand that governments recognize women’s socially essential labor (whether it be paid or unpaid) was—at its most expansive—a demand to decouple economic security from apparent economic productivity entirely.[12]
But even as they challenged the material basis of liberalism, feminists also struggled to envision a world outside of its ideological constraints. Insisting that women should not have to rely financially on men, they accepted that workers must rely on their employers, and that poor nations must rely on wealthy ones. As a result, the privileged “victors” of feminist reforms do receive greater—if still insufficient—support for their professional and caregiving work. Meanwhile, the great majority of women find that the conditions of their social reproductive labor have deteriorated, even as its volume has increased. For them, neoliberalism has not brought a new order so much as it has intensified the hardships and exaggerated the exclusions of the old.
Kahn, Meyerowitz, and Matthiesen’s books are all based on years of research, so it’s serendipitous that they all came out in 2021—a moment when women’s paid and unpaid labor once again came to the fore of public consciousness. Since the beginning of the pandemic, a number of well-publicized studies have shown that women have dropped out of the waged workforce at a higher rate than men. Typically, progressives have attributed the cause of the discrepancy to women taking on a disproportionate share of childcare and household chores with the closing of schools and daycares. Men, supposedly, haven’t picked up the slack.
That analysis undoubtedly has some truth to it, but as Matthiesen might point out, it ignores the other labor struggles that women have faced during the pandemic. Women have organized tenants threatened by evictions, patients permanently disabled by Covid, and the employees of daycares and schools that reopened without adequate protections. The problem with focusing only on the unfair division of household chores between husbands and wives isn’t that it mistakes a material problem for a cultural one. Those “chores,” as feminists have taught us, are labor. It’s a problem because it isolates a single manifestation of women’s labor exploitation—the one most likely to affect middle-class women— from a much broader pattern.
It’s also a problem because it doesn’t tell us how to address the exploitation of women’s labor in a way that will benefit all women. As Kahn’s story of divorce reform suggests, even government-provided support for women’s unpaid household labor—as progressives call for in the form of childcare, healthcare, or paid time off—won’t benefit more than the privileged few if it’s still funneled through employers. And as Meyerowitz might warn us, any attempt to extend those benefits to women abroad must unyoke them from the limited and conditional terms on which wealthy countries typically offer aid.
Now, after Dobbs, many feminists correctly point out the consequences of the end of a constitutional right to abortion will fall hardest on the poor, people of color, and LGBTQ people. But we shouldn’t understand the struggles of these groups as somehow separate from the struggles of women, generally. That’s in part because, as Rebecca Traister argues, doing so risks encouraging the complacency of white, middle-class women who wield political influence. But it’s also because a feminism that learns from the limitations of the Second Wave must articulate how the interests of women across identity lines overlap as well as diverge. It’s too tempting to dismiss racism, poverty, and the oppression of queer and trans people as problems caused by some force other than patriarchy, problems some other social movement should solve: to let feminism off the hook.
If feminists are to renew their struggle in the wake of the pandemic and Dobbs, we must defne our movement’s goal as ambitiously as possible: as a guarantee of economic security and bodily autonomy not as privileges of marriage, employment, or citizenship, but as rights of all people.
Notes:
[1] Nancy Fraser, “Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History,” New Left Review 56, 115. Though Fraser does not “blame” feminism for neoliberalism, she argues that the emancipatory aspirations of Second Wave feminists dovetailed with the efforts of policymakers and business leaders to dismantle bureaucratic obstacles to capitalist expansion.
[2] Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2017).
[3] Fraser, “Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History,” 107.
[4] Kate Weigand traces the Marxist-feminist analysis of housework to the political thought of Mary Inman, a Communist Party member active in the interwar era. See Weigand, Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women’s Liberation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).
[5] Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 2018), 7.
[6] The classics include Linda Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890–1935 (New York: Free Press, 1994); Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
[7] Jennifer Mittelstadt, From Welfare to Workfare: The Unintended Consequences of Liberal Reform, 1945–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
[8] Though it doesn’t focus specifically on gender, Amy Offner’s Sorting Out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019) is an excellent account of the US welfare state’s international origins and implications.
[9] Spivak qtd. in Meyerowitz, A War on Global Poverty, 158.
[10] Ranjula Bali Swain and Supriya Garikipati, “Microfinance in the Global South: Examining Evidence on Social Efficacy,” University of Liverpool Working Paper in Economics #201908, September 2019.
[11] Samuel Aber summarizes the trend in recent scholarship to understanding neoliberalism a force not only for “deregulation” but also for “reregulation”: a more active role of the state in protecting capital and foreclosing public claims on economic decision-making. See his “Neoliberalism: An LPE Reading List and Introduction.” https://lpeproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Neoliberalism-Primer.pdf
[12] Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), Chapter 3.