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LINDA GORDON. Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890-1935. New York: The Free Press, 1994. 433 pages. $22.95.
In the early years of this century, Progressive reformers launched a successful campaign to secure state aid for poor women and their children. The figure of the poor mother evoked pity, and the reformers' efforts resulted in state mothers' aid programs. Our current system of welfare presents a starkly different picture. The welfare mother is now viewed with contempt, and although welfare remains technically an entitlement, it is hated both by those who receive it and by the public.
How are ideas about entitlement created? Where did our welfare system come from and why is it now so hard to change? These are the tough questions that Pitied But Not Entitled sets out to answer. Linda Gordon is a feminist historian whose two earlier books included much-admired histories of birth control (1978) and of domestic violence (1988). With this book, she turns her attention to the history of state policies to aid poor women and their children. "Who in 1910 imagined a world in which half the children live part of their lives with single mothers, most mothers are employed, and mothering is no longer viewed as the appropriate life's work for women?" she asks (39). Her study brilliantly illuminates the continuities and the changes in the treatment of poor women over this century.
Gordon builds on the analysis of what scholars have called America's dual-track welfare state. Devised to meet the crisis of the Depression, the Social Security Act of 1935 enacted two kinds of programs. Those called "insurance" were for unemployed male workers and treated them as primary breadwinners, automatically deserving...