Did the New Deal save the working class or destroy its ability to struggle for the well-being of all.

A comparative analysis of social policies in Britain and France between 1914 and 1945.

The attack on welfare was, and is, an attack on our class autonomy, structured to maintain a patriarchal and racist order, drive divisions, and disrupt our ability to collectively refuse capital's exploitation and the state's discipline. Mariarosa Dalla Costa's Family, Welfare and the State powerfully reminds us that the welfare system can only be understood through the dynamics of resistance and struggle, and women have been at the center of it. In reflecting on the history of struggles around the New Deal in which workers' initiatives forced a new relationship with the state on the terrain of social reproduction , Dalla Costa asks if the New Deal and the institutions of the welfare state were saviors of the working class, or were they the destroyers of its self-reproducing capacity' Family, Welfare and the State offers a comprehensive reading of the welfare system through the dynamics of women's resistance and class struggle, their willingness and reluctance to work inside and outside the home, and the relationship with the relief structures that women expressed in the United States during the Great Depression. Revisiting the origins of this system today on a sociopolitical level'its policies governing race, class, and family relations, especially in terms of the role that was delegated to women's labor power'remains vital for a deeper understanding of the historical and ongoing relationship between women and the state, crisis and resistance, and possibilities for class autonomy.

In the 1930s, buoyed by the potential of the New Deal, child welfare reformers hoped to formalize and modernize their methods, partly through professional casework but more importantly through the loving care of temporary, substitute families. Today, however, the foster care system is widely criticized for failing the children and families it is intended to help. How did a vision of dignified services become virtually synonymous with the breakup of poor families and a disparaged form of "welfare" that stigmatizes the women who provide it, the children who receive it, and their families? Tracing the evolution of the modern American foster care system from its inception in the 1930s through the 1970s, Catherine Rymph argues that deeply gendered, domestic ideals, implicit assumptions about the relative value of poor children, and the complex public/private nature of American welfare provision fueled the cultural resistance to funding maternal and parental care. What emerged was a system of public social provision that was actually subsidized by foster families themselves, most of whom were concentrated toward the socioeconomic lower half, much like the children they served. Analyzing the ideas, debates, and policies surrounding foster care and foster parents' relationship to public welfare, Rymph reveals the framework for the building of the foster care system and draws out its implications for today's child support networks.

This book explains why countries have adopted different policies for working parents through a comparative historical study of four nations: France, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United States.

This work analyses in a historical and comparative perspective the relationship between the family and the welfare state in two Mediterranean countries: Italy and Spain. Two aims form the focus of the book. Firstly, to open the black box of the family in welfare state analysis, introducing a focus on inter-generational and kin relations. Secondly, to explain why the southern welfare states have offered very low support to families with children by taking into account several factors: the legacy of fascism, the role of the Church, and the specific role played by leftist parties in defining family policy as labour policy.

This book uses data from Finland, Denmark, Norway and Sweden to rethink welfare policy.