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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 October 2011
Thinking big about the development of social policies in the United States has become fashionable. Until recently, occasional comprehensive histories of social provision in America focused on single periods of reform ferment, such as the Progressive Era, or the New Deal, or the Great Society. Then, James T. Patterson's 1981 book America's Struggle Against Poverty, 1900–1980, and Michael B. Katz's 1986 book In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America, provided overviews of American attitudes toward poverty and attempts to do something about it from the nineteenth century to the present. These authors were clearly perplexed by the devolution of the antipoverty efforts of the War on Poverty and the Great Society into the political stalemates of the late 1970s and the conservative backlashes of the 1980s. Their books seem to be trying to use rich descriptive overviews of the past to gain some perspective on where American “welfare reforms” might go in the future.
1. Patterson, James T., America's Struggle Against Poverty, 1900–1980 (Cambridge, Mass., 1981)Google Scholar; and Katz, Michael B., In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (New York, 1986).Google Scholar
2. For a recent review of this literature, see Skocpol, Theda and Amenta, Edwin, “States and Social Policies,” Annual Review of Sociology 12 (1986): 131–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3. Rimlinger, Gaston, Welfare Policy and Industrialization in Europe, America, and Russia (New York, 1971).Google Scholar
4. My comments here, as well as the empirical criticisms of Quadagno and Levine, draw upon Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Politics of Social Provision in the United States, 1870s–1920s (forthcoming from Harvard University Press). See also my articles: “‘Why Not Equal Protection?’: Explaining the Politics of Public Social Spending in Britain, 1900–1911, and the United States, 1880s–1920” (with Ann Shola Orloff), American Sociological Review 49 (6) (December 1984): 726–50; “Did Capitalists Shape Social Security?” (with Edwin Amenta), American Sociological Review 50(4) (August 1985): 572–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and “The Politics of Unemployment Insurance in Five American States” (with Amenta, Edwin, Clemens, Elisabeth, Olsen, Jefren, and Parikh, Sunita), Studies in American Political Development 2 (1987): 137–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
5. The advantages of a historical-institutional approach are discussed and exemplified in Weir, Margaret, Orloff, Ann Shola, and Skocpol, Theda, eds., The Politics of Social Policy in the United States (Princeton, 1988).Google Scholar
