SKOCPOL'S UNDERSTANDING OF MATERNALISM SHOULD BE ADOPTED

SKOCPOL'S UNDERSTANDING OF MATERNALISM SHOULD BE ADOPTED

Kornbluth, Felicia A., “The New Literature on Gender and the Welfare State: The U.S. Case,” FEMINIST STUDIES, April 30, 1996, p.171.

Skocpol clarifies her operating definition of maternalism by analogy to the "paternalism" she argues characterized most other welfare states. "Pioneering European and Australasian welfare states," she writes, in Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, were doubly paternalist:
Elite males, bureaucrats and national political leaders, established regulations or social benefits for members of the working class-that is, programs designed "in the best interest" of workers, rather than just along the lines their organizations requested. [W]hile very little paternalist legislation was passed in the early-twentieth-century United States, the story was different when it came to what might be called maternalist legislation. (P. 317) As paternalist social policies were paternalist in two ways-in their content, which treated men as fathers and heads of families, and in their processes of creation, which were largely closed to their putative working-class beneficiaries-so were maternalist policies maternalist in two ways. In content, they treated women as mothers who made claims on the state thereby; in their processes of creation, they were designed by ambitious middle-class women for working-class women, with the latter's perceived best interests in mind.
2. Maternalism understandS that women have a POLITICAL role as mothers.

Felicia A. Kornbluth, “The New Literature on Gender and the Welfare State: The U.S. Case,” FEMINIST STUDIES, April 30, 1996, p.171.

Maternalist reformers may be familiar to some readers, who know them as "social feminists," or as the fractious, exhausted, post suffrage women's movement. Readers may also hear in maternalism, which simultaneously justified a public role for women and affirmed women's primary responsibility for children, echoes of what historians of the early national United States have termed "republican motherhood." However, maternalism represents a unique political philosophy that is particular to the historical moment at which it emerged. Many women reformers in U.S. history may have believed (in Ladd-Taylor's phrase) "that there is a uniquely feminine value system based on care and nurturance" or (in Gordon's) have "imagined themselves in a motherly role toward the poor." But we can distinguish maternalism from social feminism, republican motherhood, and other reform ideologies by emphasizing its special, time-bound contribution to political thought. Maternalists were those reformers at the turn of the twentieth century who believed that motherhood or potential motherhood was a legitimate basis for women's citizenship, that women as mothers deserved a return from their governments for the socially vital work they performed by raising children, and/or that governments had a special responsibility to ensure the health and welfare of children.

3. THE HISTORY of maternalisM SHOWS the importance of women’s experienceS

Kristin Kay Barker, Professor of Sociology, “Federal Maternal Policy and gender Politics: Comparative Insights,” JOURNAL OF WOMEN’S HISTORY, July 31, 1997, p.183.

For over 20 years feminist scholars have outlined the ways in which maternalist rhetoric and strategies were employed in the formation of social policy campaigns and crusades. Although often overlooked in scholarship focused on state provisions to workers, federal social programs for mothers, potential mothers, and children figured prominently in the configuration of early welfare politics. These texts continue to advance the larger claim of feminist scholarship that existing categories of analysis fail to capture adequately women's realities. Historical accounts of the emergence of maternal policies are significant not only because they make for a richer representation of the crucial years of welfare-state development in Western capitalist democracies between 1880 and 1940. More important, they offer a fundamental restructuring of our current understanding of what is political.

SKOCPOL’S THEORY CANNOT CREATE CHANGE

Terrance C. Halliday, Senior Research Fellow, American Bar Foundation, Adjunct Professor of Sociology, Northwestern University, “Review Section Symposium: Lawyers and Politics and Civic Professionalism: Legal Elites and Cause Lawyers,” LAW AND SOCIAL INQUIRY, Fall, 1999, p. np.

Theory of the State. Within political sociology, a substantial literature has arisen that critiques the failure of pluralist theories to recognize the centrality of the state as an institutional actor with interests of its own with some measure of autonomy from the economic and political interests that emerge from the market and civil society. Shamir sympathizes with Theda Skocpol's thesis that state managers develop their own agendas, but he criticizes Skocpol and other state theorists for failing to comprehend law's autonomy: "In asserting the autonomy of the state, in both class and state- centered approaches, law and its carriers had been reduced to a mere instrumentality" (p. 165). Hence Shamir maintains that if it is good enough to argue for the autonomy of the state and its managers, it is also good enough to take seriously the autonomy of law.
2. THE WELFARE STATE IS AN INSTITUTION OF EXPLOITATION THAT CAN'T BE REFORMED

Steven Wineman, Author, THE POLITICS OF HUMAN SERVICES, 1984, p.36.

It is a mistake to view the welfare state policies as representing a qualitatively different system from the conservative program. Instead, they represent a different version of how to sustain the corporate capitalist structure. Point for point, liberal human services leave basic elements of the political economy in tact: structural unemployment; severe stratification of power; the predominance of giant corporations; reliance on industrial production which poisons the planet. If the true agenda of the conservative program is to serve the interests of big business, the hidden function of the welfare state is to maintain political and social stability and to deter fundamental change- in the interests of the corporate order. This function proceeds despite the conscious of many individuals, from legislators to bureaucrats to social workers, to "do good."
MATERNALISM IS FLAWED
1. Maternalism can only provide a limited concept of rights and responsibilities for American women; this causes their policy influence to often be counter productive.

Michel, Sonya, teaches American women's gender, and social welfare history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she is also the co-editor and author of a variety of works on these subjects, "The Limits of Maternalism," MOTHERS OF A NEW WORLD (ed. Koven & Michel), New York: Routledge, 1993. p. 307.

The case of child care and mothers' pensions reveals both the strengths and the limitations of an ideology rooted in arguments about women's natural capacity as mothers. While maternalism empowered the early female philanthropists to establish day nurseries and the NDFN to improve them, maternalism can also cast public child care as peculiarly unstable enterprise with a self-divided and self-defeating sense of purpose. Similarly, it was maternalism that fueled the campaign for mothers' pensions, but also maternalism that contributed to the humiliating and punitive treatment of recipients. Ironically, after the turn of the century maternalist ideology began to weaken as parent education and other fields challenged the notion of maternal instinct and called for training and professionalization for those who dealt with children. What became extracted and reified was the single trope of the woman as mother in the home, which continued to be reproduced not only by experts on children and the family, but also by policy makers seeking to restrict governmental services for women. It was the limited vision of women's rights and responsibilities, not the idea of child care as public service to all, and that became maternalism's legacy to the American welfare state.