In "What is 'Welfare'?," Gordon explains that welfare's meaning in today's society as an underserved handout is primarily liked to the AFDC program. AFDC is the successor to ADC which was part of the Social Security Act of 1935. But Social Security had 11 titles that established 9 different programs, but it is in the difference between Old Age Insurance and ADC that Gordon sees the historical roots of welfare's stigmatization:

The Social Security Act created the contemporary meaning of "welfare" by setting up a stratified system of provision in which the social insurance programs were superior both in payments and in reputation, while public assistance was inferior - not just comparatively second-rate but deeply stigmatized. Public assistance is what Americans today call "welfare"; recipients of the good programs are never said to be "on welfare." And while most people hate "welfare," they pay the utmost respect to Old-Age Insurance.

By shifting the focus from OAI to ADC, Gordon gives us a new view of the Social Security Act of 1935.

AFDC is linked today to the problem of "single mothers," which Gordon reminds us is not a problem of the last few decades but rather one of the 20th Century as a whole. As the 19th C patriarchal society broke down, along with the community bonds that had held it together, the increasing presence of unmarried women with children became the concern of social reformers. Aid to unemployed men was intended to retain their status as "breadwinners," whereas the aid to single mothers was designed so as not to let them get too comfortable in that status.

The apparent irony in terms of the specific design of welfare in ADC is that it was designed by feminist women, women who cared deeply about the plight of women and children in the Great Depression of the 1930s. Yet this is problematic for us only if we take an ahistorical view of gender and how it works. It was because these women sought to protect the "family wage," by which a husband and father could support the family that they supported a proposal for ADC that ended up stigmatizing the recipients. Because the ADC program was cast in terms of needs, instead of rights or earnings, it was socially constructed as a handout. Single mothers are thus "pitied but not entitled."

"Single Mothers: The Facts and the Social Problem" considers the real problem created by industrialization. Women who were without husbands were likely to earn the least and have the double burden of raising children. At first, in response to industrialization, there were efforts at institutionalizing child care. White protestants were fairly quick to mobilize against that option, as it was detrimental to women's special role as mothers. Many children ended up in orphanages as a result of their mother's not being able to support them. Progressive reformers saw the rise in single mothers as a sign of social decline and sought to provide poor relief.

Progressive Reformers' efforts are considered in "State Caretakers: Maternalism, Mothers' Pensions, and the Family Wage." These Progressives developed an approach to mothers' aid that would underlie the structure of ADC in the Social Security Act. In a world in which laissez faire capitalism held that poverty was the result of personal failings, the advocacy of mothers' aid by reformers like Jane Addams seems quite progressive. She insisted that the phenomenon of impoverished single mothers was a result of advanced industrial capitalism. Mothers' pensions were a first step in the direction of a more comprehensive approach to aid intended to offset the endemic tendencies of capitalist competition.

In "'Pity is a Rebel Passion': The Social Work Perspective" Gordon discusses the work of social workers from the 1920s who ran the Children's Bureau of the Department of Labor. Despite the fact that they lived as single professional women, within a network of women, they supported a maternalist policy that gave primary emphasis to women's roles as mothers. Gender roles it seems had not caught up with gender ideology. When the Great Depression descended upon the nation in 1929, its was the Children's Bureau that was uniquely positioned to fight for the social work perspective within the federal government.

Julia Lathrop and Grace Abbott were the primary architects of the welfare provisions in the Social Security Act of 1935. Both of whom were highly educated and politically progressive alumnae of Hull House in Chicago. They were part of a larger maternalist social reform movement that constituted, in essence, an "old girls club." Many of these women were female celibates, others were lesbians, but all were dedicated to the the cause of reform and made life choice based upon what Gordon calls the "nuns' sensibility." The racial context of their thought was shaped by their white elite Protestant culture in a reform movement that saw immigrant culture as a danger to American society. Segregationist in spirit and in practice, white settlements excluded blacks and focused on "Americanizing" white immigrants.

In contrast to the Women's Bureau (est. 1918), the women of the Children's Bureau were firmly opposed to women's paid labor. Out of the process of administering the Sheppard-Towner Act at the local level, the local women connected to the national Children's Bureau developed a network that shaped the local character of relief to single women with children which would be a matter for local administration henceforth. In this environment "maternalism was quickly becoming a state-building impulse" in the 1920s. Fighting the creeping influence of the male-dominated Public Health Service (PHS) and the labor-oriented Women's Bureau, the Children's Bureau emerged from the 20s as a force to be reckoned with in bureaucratic politics of the New Deal.

"'Don't Wait For Deliveries': Black Women's Welfare Thought" explores the other side of the black-white race divide of reform. Black women's reform movements were aimed at race uplift and must be understood in the context of the exploitation of black women in American society. The seemingly puritanical emphasis on cleanliness and purity of black mothers is best understood as part of a larger program of "resistance to sexual slander." Agreeing with white reformers on the importance of protecting black mothers, they spoke similarly about women's appropriate sphere. Yet the realities of African-American life mean that women needed to work, and the black reformers were therefore much more likely to support daycare and kindergarten facilities for working mothers to ease the "double burden."

In "Prevention Before Charity: Social Insurance and the Sexual Division of Labor," Gordon shows how the network of white male progressives advocated and secured the acceptance of social insurance as an entitlement for men. The belief of John Commons and the Wisconsin School was largely that unemployment was the product of economic cycles and that workers were entitled to relief when they were hit by the ill effects of the labor market. Hence male social insurance became an entitlement as opposed to the handout of poor relief. Destigmatizing relief to male heads of households, they freed male workers from the laissez faire market.

In support of this vision of male social insurance, female social workers supported the "family wage" for working families and through the case study methodology shaped relief to poor mothers with children as "needs based." Representing the hands-on approach of case work in the developing profession of sociology, women resisted the male take-over of the newly professionalized field against the encroachment of academics. But their recourse to case work methodology supported the very means-testing that relegated ADC to a lesser grade of relief. Through the family wage system, male and female reformers found common class ground. The gender ideologies of progressive reform were not divided along strictly male-female lines, rather like race in the antebellum south, they tended to support existing class structures.

"The Depression Crisis and Relief Politics" shows the shaping of New Deal policy through the conflicts between the Roosevelt Administration's Harry Hopkins and state and local relief officials. Within a federal structure that put an emphasis on the male head of household's wage in depression America, the Women's Bureau was quick to protest discrimination against women in the WPA. The Children's Bureau, committed to their maternalist vision was more likely to overlook these problems. Tenaciously guarding their rights against usurpation by the federal government, states and localities insisted upon exercising control. In the South this meant that employers remained free to hire labor at the starvation wages they had since the end of Reconstruction. It also meant that relief to poor mothers with children would be administered by local officials who would means test and otherwise stigmatize single mothers with children. In the conflict between Harry Hopkins and the state and local authorities, the sentiments of the Children's Bureau were clearly aligned against the domineering Hopkins.

"New Deal Social Movements and Popular Pressure for Welfare" explains how popular agitation for poor relief during the Depression shaped the New Deal approach to relief, valorizing the deserving poor (unemployed men and the elderly) at the expense of stigmatizing the undeserving poor (single women with children). The New Deal Administration was besieged by a variety of reform proposals during the early years of the Depression. California's Francis Townsend proposed his EPIC (End Poverty in California) program and Huey Long called for a Share Our Wealth (SOW) program. In response to these pressures from the left, FDR veered leftward in 1935. Yet he didn't veer as far left as to countenance proposals by the socialists and communists, who were the main force behind the most progressive of all legislation of the period. The Lundeen Bill was structured to extend relief to black Americans and to support female heads of household. The bill went down to defeat as "too expensive" and as "a communist plot." Yet along with the other pressures for welfare relief it contributed to the administration's momentum behind social security. Marginalized at the time, those who called for more radical approaches to relief were not to shape the form of relief extended to single mothers with children.

"The Legislative Process: Reformers Face Politics" shows how the Children's Bureau, cowed by years of red baiting and perpetually anxious in its battles against the PHS, made only modest claims for single women with children in crafting the ADC portion of the Social Security Act. They believed, as did many others, that the provisions for unemployed and retired breadwinners would ultimately take care of mothers and their children. In the bureaucratic maneuvering around the social security act, though ADC was drafted by the Children's Bureau its administration was ultimately taken over by the Social Security Board. The forces of states rights then moved in to further limit the distribution of ADC.

Conservative Southern voices in Congress ensured that federally imposed standards would not undermine their access to cheap wage labor by providing a social security net for, say, migrant working families. They also sought to hold black women in agricultural and domestic service at low wages. Freed by federal programs from working at low wage jobs, black women would be less ready to accept this kind of work. Unless strictly contained, programs like ADC threatened to undermine the entire social structure in the minds of conservatives. The provisions that finally emerged in Social Security excluded domestic and migrant workers from unemployment relief and left the shaping of ADC administration in local hands. States could then shape the programs to fit their liking, forcing an all or nothing approach on the federal government. In a telling commentary, Gordon notes in conclusion of this section on the legislative process:

The inferiority of ADC in comparison to other Social Security programs was not created directly by sexism or hostility to single mothers. On the contrary, to most legislators in 1935 single mothers were respectable, pitiable widows. The gender system imported by ADC designers came into play at a more basic level, through assumptions that made the program small and marginal and the programs for men large and honorable. But American politics and Congress in particular brought race into ADC and the whole Social Security package. Indeed one could say that the fate of ADC was defined by the Civil War and Reconstruction - by the economic race relations and party alignments then constructed. These included the South's loyalty to the Democratic party and the party's dependence on its southern support, the retention of strong states' rights in constitutional adjudication and in legislation, and the enforced low-wage labor of black agricultural and domestic service workers. (p. 285)

Hence are race and gender inequities linked via the oppression of Southern conservatism.

In her coda on "Welfare and Citizenship," Gordon notes that gender ideology does not correspond to a male-female split. As we are reminded in Unequal Sisters, women who accept and participate in a gender ideology ladened with class implications often reap a bitter harvest. Believing deeply in the importance of the "family wage," Children's Bureau feminists got a program that was enfeebled from the very start. Only by recognizing the was in which race, gender and class interact can progressive causes build solid foundations for programs that have a lasting positive impact. Rather than retreat, Gordon urges an aggressive expansion of federal support for single women with children, who are entitled as citizens to the support of the government. The problem with today's welfare system is that it blames the victim, applying intrusive "home visits," means tests and morals tests, it degrades those it seeks to help.