Ann Shola Orloff

• Princeton University, PhD; Harvard University, AB
• Chair at Northwestern University

This is the comprehensively revised second edition of a volume that was welcomed at its first appearance as ‘the most authoritative survey and critique of the welfare state yet published’. Of its fifty-one chapters, some chapters are brand new; all have been systematically revised, and they are all right up to date. The first seven sections of the...

Over the last few decades, the position of women vis-à-vis the welfare state has changed dramatically. Welfare states have adapted to women’s increased labour force participation and to the “new social risks” that characterize postindustrial societies. In this paper, we examine gendered policy developments in the US, focusing on conceptions of vuln...

Feminist scholars offer distinctive theoretical tools to conceptualize the relationship between gender relations and welfare states. Mainstream scholars have been responsive to this work, increasingly considering the centrality of gender to the transformations of contemporary welfare states, although some of the most important theoretical and polit...

The involvement of welfare states with gender has undergone major reconfigurations in the last century. Understanding these developments requires paying attention to women as caregivers, workers, and political actors, and to issues of power – how they shape redistributive and regulatory state projects, politics, and relationships within households.

Many Democrats hoped that a particular kind of identity politics - women's - would help Hillary Clinton win the White House. In the aftermath of the election, some commentators bemoaned the fact that a majority of white women had voted for Trump, and called it a kind of betrayal, underlining their expectation that women would naturally, on the basi...

The state is central to social scientific and historical inquiry today, reflecting its importance in domestic and international affairs. States kill, coerce, fight, torture, and incarcerate, yet they also nurture, protect, educate, redistribute, and invest. It is precisely because of the complexity and wide-ranging impacts of states that research o...

The state is central to social scientific and historical inquiry today, reflecting its importance in domestic and international affairs. States kill, coerce, fight, torture, and incarcerate, yet they also nurture, protect, educate, redistribute, and invest. It is precisely because of the complexity and wide-ranging impacts of states that research o...

In recent decades, it is possible to point to a new and evolving debate among analysts of sexuality, political economy, and culture, focused on the implications of feminism's changing relations to institutions of state power and law in the United States. According to these analysts, to whom we refer as the critics of feminism in power, the alliance...

In contrast to the scholarship allied with first and second waves of feminism, feminist analysts today survey a changed landscape of gender across the United States and much of the world: formal exclusions and discrimination are outlawed, gender hierarchies have been undermined, and women are appearing among economic, political, and other elites to...

I contend that we should remake conceptions of power and politics, taking off from the project of remaking "modernity." Here, I perform a similar move for "power and politics," core concepts for history and the human sciences, building on the foundational work of the 1970s and 1980s and bringing in key elements of institutionalist and culturalist c...

Feminist scholarship changed the study of welfare states; influential policy experts have taken off from the feminist critique, incorporating it as they crafted their own social investment strategy, (mis-)translating (and transforming) feminist arguments into an economic rationale. Social science mattered as well: it helped to create a new policy p...

Can feminists count on welfare states—or at least some aspects of these complex systems—as resources in the struggle for gender equality? Gender analysts of “welfare states” investigate this question and the broader set of issues around the mutually constitutive relationship between systems of social provision and regulation and gender. Feminist sc...

Farewell to maternalism ? State policies and mothers’ employment. This paper analyzes the course of transformations in social politics and policies and in the social arrangements with respect to mothers’ employment and caregiving in which we are moving from policy support for women’s full-time caregiving toward support to mother’s employment, with...

With respect to modernity and women's place in it, Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris and Iris Marion Young are sharply at odds. Young sees a rending and tearing of the social fabric, and no determinate relationship between gender equality and modernity, while Inglehart and Norris think modernization and women's rights are seamlessly joined at the h...

Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society 12.2 (2005) 159-169 "Restructuring" has emerged as one of the key concepts of contemporary social science, as scholars attempt to make sense of profound transformations in political economies, welfare states, families, and communities. Many of these shifts are associated with chang...

A state-of-the-field survey of historical sociology, Remaking Modernity assesses the field’s past accomplishments and peers into the future, envisioning changes to come. The seventeen essays in this collection reveal the potential of historical sociology to transform understandings of social and cultural change. The volume captures an exciting new...

In the wake of 9/11 and the subsequent struggles in Afghanistan and Iraq, gender has become even more obviously important for understanding contemporary world politics, including armed conflict and war. Gender is an explicit structuring principle of contemporary conflicts between Western powers and an Islamist fundamentalism energized by opposition...

Fatherhood is on the political agenda in many countries, often cast in terms of crisis. One side of the policy debate focuses on fathers as deadbeat dads who do not provide financial support and care for their children. The other revolves around making men into active and engaged fathers. However, these policies are often at odds with the employers...

US welfare reform eliminates social rights and caregiving as bases for making claims; it expands the role of the market; and it marks a shift in patterns of stratification toward gender `sameness', in that mothers and fathers must be employed. The expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit reinforces these changes, channelling resources to poor pare...

A research paper that reviews material on women’s employment and the social policies that affect it; looks at options for women unable to work for pay; and lastly attempts to explain different national patterns of policy affecting women’s employment. Author concludes with thoughts about the ways in which women’s employment may lead to greater gende...

The 1996 reform of the welfare system is widely recognized as a turning point, which might be characterized as the ending of the maternalist strand of US social policy. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996 eliminated Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the federal program that was the "des...

The 1990s have seen dramatic restructuring of state social provision in the US, the UK, Canada and Australia. This has occurred largely because of the rise of market liberalism, which challenges the role of the state. This important book examines the impact of changes in social policy regimes on gender roles and relations. Structured thematically a...

The author wants to note that welfare reform is but one part of what is happening politically to gender relations, to women, and to poor mothers, even within the system of income support, in the United States. Of particular importance within income support is the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which is having noticeable and positive effects on th...

Gender relations, as embodied in the sexual division of labor, compulsory heterosexuality, discourses and ideologies of citizenship, motherhood, masculinity and femininity, and the like, profoundly shape the character of welfare states. Likewise, the institutions of social provision the set of social assistance and social insurance programs, univer...

Gender relations--embodied in the sexual division of labor, compulsory heterosexuality, gendered forms of citizenship and political participation, ideologies of masculinity and femininity, and the like--profoundly shape the character of welfare states. Likewise, the institutions of social provision--the set of social assistance and social insurance...

State social provision affects women's material situations, shapes gender relationships, structures political conflict and participation, and contributes to the formation and mobilization of identities and interests. Mainstream comparative research has neglected gender, while most feminist research on the welfare state has not been systematically c...

Ann Orloff is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and an Associate of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of The Politics of Pensions: A Comparative Analysis of the Origins of Pensions and Old-Age Insurance in Canada, Great Britain, and the United States, 1880s–1930s (forthcoming from Univ...

Britain was a pioneer in launching a modern welfare state. Before World War I, it instituted workers' compensation, old age pensions, health insurance, and the world's first compulsory system of unemployment insurance. By the end of the nineteenth century, the United States had expanded Civil War pensions into de facto old age and disability pensio...

The 1996 welfare system reform is widely recognized as a turning point, which might be characterized as the ending of the maternalist strand of U.S. social policy that dates back to the 1910s and 1920s. Less noticed, but potentially as significant, has been the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which assists poor employed parents; h...

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Princeton University, 1985. Bibliography: leaves 298-326.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Princeton University, 1985. Bibliography: p. 298-326. Microfiche.