Gender and the Welfare State: Dividing Citizens

POSC 459 — Social Welfare Politics and Policy · Week 13, Wednesday 18 November 2026

Accessible text version of the Week 13 Wednesday slides — same content in linear order, with no slide-scaling container. Each image carries a text description. Reading: Mettler 1998, Dividing Citizens, chapters 1, 5, and 6.

A red, white, and blue Social Security Board poster headed “A monthly check to you” shows a hand holding a Social Security check beside the U.S. Capitol dome; its eligibility box reads “everybody working for salary or wages (with only a few exceptions, such as agriculture, domestic service, and government work).”

Mettler 1998, Dividing Citizens, chs. 1, 5, 6

Poster: Social Security Board, 1936–37 · public domain

Today

  1. From Monday to 1935
  2. Mettler’s question
  3. Two kinds of citizenship
  4. Building unemployment insurance (UI) and Aid to Dependent Children (ADC)
  5. Running them, 1936–1950
  6. Mettler and Michener, side by side
  7. Paper 5

From Monday to 1935

Monday, Michener: where states got to choose, racial gaps followed

Today, Mettler: Congress faced that choice in 1935

What to run nationally? What to leave to the states?

Franklin D. Roosevelt, seated at a desk in a light suit with a pen in hand, signs a document as about a dozen men and one woman in a dark hat stand close behind him.

Roosevelt signs the Social Security Act, Aug. 14, 1935 · FDR Library, CC BY 2.0

Michener 2020, pp. 550–51 · Mettler 1998, pp. 1–6

Mettler’s question

Before 1935: what citizenship meant was “defined primarily by the individual states”

New Deal: Washington steps in, but only for some

Structured governance (her method): look at how a program is designed and who runs it, then at what kind of citizens it makes

Think: a check from Washington, set by formula, vs. a county caseworker’s decision

Social citizenship: the right to basic economic security, as a member of the community

Mettler 1998, pp. 1–5, 9 · figure 1, p. 5

Divided citizenship

Diagram of Mettler’s Table 1, a two-by-two grid. Columns: liberal inclusion, as individual wage earners, and nonliberal inclusion, by role, relationship, or need. Rows: national, standardized administration, and state-level, variable, discretionary administration. National and liberal: Old Age Insurance and the Fair Labor Standards Act, for full-time wage earners, mostly white men. National and nonliberal: Old Age and Survivors’ Insurance, 1939, for wives and widows through their husbands. State-level and liberal: Unemployment Insurance, a hybrid, national for most white men and state-level for women and nonwhite men. State-level and nonliberal: Aid to Dependent Children, Old Age Assistance, and protective labor laws, for women and nonwhite men.

Redrawn from Mettler, table 1, p. 23 · labels from pp. 5, 23–25

Who counted as a worker?

Workers stoop and kneel among rows of bean plants in a sandy field, a young Black man in a straw hat in the foreground and bushel baskets set between the rows.

A Black woman in a white apron stands at a kitchen counter beside a blond toddler seated in a wooden high chair.

1935: farm workers and domestic workers left out of Social Security and unemployment insurance

Domestic servants on relief, 1934: more than two-thirds Black

Mettler, pp. 20, 26 n. 78, 136 · Photos: Russell Lee, Oklahoma, 1939; Marion Post Wolcott, Atlanta, 1939 · FSA/OWI, Library of Congress

Building unemployment insurance

Frances Perkins, in a dark dress and dark hat, stands holding a sheaf of papers beside a table in a hearing room while seated men look on.

Perkins, Jan. 22, 1935 · Harris & Ewing, LOC

Mettler, ch. 5, pp. 120–28, 136; ch. 6, p. 144

Building Aid to Dependent Children (ADC)

A mounted publicity print shows a woman leaning over a bed to feed a small child, with a typed caption strip about aid to dependent children below.

Federal Security Agency publicity print, 1940s · FSA/OWI, Library of Congress

Mettler, ch. 5, pp. 120, 129–40

1935: “fairly comparable ground”

UI ADC
Run by national and state together national and state together
Who qualifies: set by states states
Merit-based hiring required no no
Paid for by payroll tax on employers, held in Washington grants: $1 federal for every $2 state

Same start in 1935. What split them later: how each was paid for and run.

Mettler, table 4, p. 142; pp. 141–43

UI in practice: who qualifies?

Grouped bar chart titled “Share of workers who earned this little in 1939.” Earned under $199: women 18 percent, men 8.8 percent. Earned $200 to $399: women 17.6 percent, men 12.5 percent.

To qualify: earn at least $100–300 a year (15 states, 1939)

More women than men earned too little

“Available for work” = full-time, daytime

Quit for family reasons (a “domestic quit”): no benefits

Mettler, ch. 6, pp. 150–53 · 1940 Census, cited

Pregnancy and marriage rules

Bar chart of the number of states whose unemployment insurance laws disqualified pregnant women or women who had recently given birth: 5 states in 1941, 18 in 1945, 37 by 1966.

Pregnant: disqualified, or ruled “unavailable” for work

Quit a job to marry: disqualified in 17 states by 1945

“UI acquired a janus-faced character”

Janus-faced = two-faced: a right for some, a barrier for others

Mettler, ch. 6, pp. 154–57, table 5

ADC in practice: it depended on where you lived

Horizontal bar chart of the average ADC grant per family per month in June 1936, in the 17 states with approved plans, from highest to lowest: District of Columbia $37.50, Maine $35.69, New Hampshire $34.92, Maryland $29.50, New Mexico $29.28, Utah $29.07, Wyoming $28.99, Wisconsin $28.21, Arizona $27.98, Colorado $26.87, Washington $26.62, Idaho $25.94, Nebraska $23.26, Vermont $17.31, Alabama $8.86, Oklahoma $8.84, Arkansas $6.98.

Dec. 1937: $10.40 a month in Arkansas, $61.16 in Massachusetts

“Suitable home” rules, caseworkers judging mothers: 31 of 45 states, 1941

Georgia: a racial quota on who got aid

Mettler, ch. 6, table 6, p. 160; pp. 164–72

1939: who moved up, who stayed

Mettler: 1939 “rescued mostly white, middle-class women”

A black-and-white Social Security Board poster headed “More Security for the American Family” shows an older woman seated by a wooden fence above text saying the widow of a qualified worker will receive monthly benefits at age 65.

Social Security Board poster · FDR Library, National Archives

Mettler, ch. 6, pp. 167–69

Mettler’s conclusion

“it was their designs that propelled them toward their separate fates”

UI’s design → the same rules nationwide

ADC’s design → mothers as “vassals” of each state’s politics

Mettler, ch. 6, p. 175

Mettler and Michener, side by side

Mettler, 1935–1950 Michener, 2010–2020
Who gets sorted women from men, and by race by race, and by state
What does the sorting how programs were designed, then run a court ruling, state choices, waivers, appointees
How states got the power written into the 1935 law: who qualifies, benefits, morals rules opened by Sebelius in 2012; widened by waivers
Who is left to the states women, nonwhite men Black and Latino adults in the South
The author’s explanation “their designs” politics undoes policy

Paper 5: the same mechanism twice, or two that only look alike? Mechanism = the way a policy ends up sorting people

Mettler, pp. 5, 23, 175 · Michener, pp. 547, 550–55

Paper 5: draft your position

With a partner, 6 minutes. Write down three things:

  1. Your position, in one sentence: are Mettler and Michener describing the same mechanism, or two different ones?
  2. Your evidence: one page number from Mettler and one from Michener.
  3. Your prediction: if you’re right, where should we see it next? Name a program.

Mechanism = the way a policy ends up sorting people · Paper 5 due Fri 11/20, 11:59 p.m.

Paper 5, and next week

Fri 11/20, 11:59 p.m.: about 600 words

Take a position · cite pages from both readings · say what it predicts

May use Howard ch. 9 and Gilens

11/23–27: Thanksgiving, no class

By 2:15 you should be able to say

How a program is designed and run shapes citizenship

National for white male earners; state-level for women, nonwhite men

Excluded: farm and domestic work

UI and ADC began alike; money and administration split them

ADC: low benefits, different in every state, mothers policed

Mettler and Michener: one mechanism or two?