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; here one may identify the
expansion of the employment-based strand of U.S. social policy.
I assess how welfare reform and the more incremental changes in
the EITC have changed the gen-dered character of social policy,
or gender policy regime. I offer an analysis of this change, making
use of a feminist policy regime frame-work I developed in a 1993
paper. This conceptualizes the dimen-sions of social policy regimes
as the character of social provision in terms of social rights
versus discretionary social assistance, the institutional relationships
among state, market, and family, and the patterns of stratification
shaped by social provision.
Welfare reform itself should be understood as incorporating at
least three components: (1) it eliminates a social right, while
eliminating caregiving as a base for making claims within the
U.S. welfare state; (2) it expands the role of the market in the
provision of income and care; and (3) it marks a shift toward
gender "sameness" in that institutionalized expectations
for mothers no longer are distin-guished from those for fathers
Ann Shola Orloff, Department
of Sociology, Northwestern University
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