The Gender Basis of American Social Policy

Abstract

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, womenthousands of them -became increasingly organized and active in the attempt to promote the general welfare, especially by helping the most vulnerable members of society. As individual leaders and as group participants they were instrumental in organizing and nationalizing movements for public health (mental and physical), poor relief, penal and other institutional reform, education for the previously uneducated, and child welfare. As the nineteenth century waned and the twentieth dawned, women were prominent among proponents of a principle which was hitherto nearly alien to American ideology but which has now, a century later, come to be an accepted part of our political views: the government and, they increasingly argued, the national government, have a responsibility to promote the general welfare actively by providing initiative and support where necessary. The degree and types of support remain, perhaps more now than then, matters of profound political contention, but in the late twentieth century even the most conservative ideologues tend to agree that government must provide a "safety net" for its people. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was also a time during which thousands of women, many of them the same as those involved in the general welfare movements, were agitating to promote women's welfare specifically. I The