Gender, Class, and Social Policy in the 21st Century

We have entered a new moment of negotiation over gender, class, and women's relationship to work at home and for pay that will shape policy formation in coming decades. I argue that underlying such debate is a profound transformation of women's labor. Behind women's alternate paths into the labor force lies the collapse of their older means of support, however partial, within marriage, for reasons far larger than men's loss of income. I outline three moments in such breakdown among white women and women of color in the United States from 1950 to 2000, and their consequences for the current period of prosperity and realization of new social policy. Women's moves from household to wage work, much like men's shifts off the land, are opening struggles to replace lost arrangements for care, while also providing new legitimation and leverage for such rights. However, uneven breakdown of the gender division of labor, accentuating differences of race/ethnicity and class, threatens to derail such efforts. This perspective furthers development of a dynamic historical or temporal dimension in gender and social policy formation.