Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 July 2018
This essay examines Theda Skocpol's landmark 1992 book, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, and discusses its influence historians of the U.S. welfare state. The first section summarizes the book's “state-centered” approach and its central arguments and discusses its reception. It pays particular attention to critiques from women's and gender historians, who challenged Skocpol's characterization of Progressive Era “maternalist reform” particularly for its failure to account for racial politics or the limitations of rooting women's claims to social citizenship in mothering. The second section explores Skocpol's influence on historians of the U.S. welfare state in the past twenty-five years. Scholars of women and gender followed Skocpol's call to “bring the state back in,” bringing the insights of two decades of social and cultural history to the arena of state-building. In the process, they illuminated the centrality of race and racial politics to American social policy and citizenship in ways that Skocpol largely elided. Skocpol's discovery of the peculiar forms of American social provision also profoundly influenced welfare state scholars, who uncovered the vast reach of the “hidden” or “submerged state” in shaping unequal citizenship and political identities around race, gender, sexuality, and other axes of difference. Finally, the essay discusses historians’ attention to an aspect largely absent from Protecting Soldiers and Mothers—the voices, perspectives, and actions of participants in welfare state programs and policies—which has deepened and expanded understanding of the processes and effects of welfare state-building in the past twenty-five years.
The author is grateful to Eileen Boris, Felicia Kornbluh, Lisa Levenstein, and Jennifer Mittlestadt for their helpful readings and suggestions.
1 Skocpol, Theda, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The book won multiple awards: the 1993 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award from the American Political Science Association, the 1993 David Greenstone Book Prize from the Politics and History Section of the American Political Science Association, a Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award from the Political Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association, the 1993 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award from the Phi Beta Kappa Society, and the 1993 Allan Sharlin Memorial Award from the Social Science History Association. It also won the 2013 Aaron Wildavsky Enduring Contribution Award from the Public Policy Section of the American Political Science Association. See http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674717664.
2 More recently, Irwin Garfinkel, Lee Rainwater, and Timothy Smeeding made a case for including public education as part of the welfare state, which also places the United States at the forefront of welfare state development. Wealth and Welfare States: Is America a Laggard or a Leader? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.
3 Quoted in Hacker, Jacob S., “Bringing the Welfare State Back In: The Promise (and Perils) of the New Social Welfare History,” Journal of Policy History 17:1 (Jan. 2005): 125Google Scholar.
4 Fraser, Steve and Gerstle, Gary, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990)Google Scholar. Skocpol's analysis has had a broad scholarly impact beyond U.S. history; its insights have influenced sociologists and political scientists as well as historians of state development and policy making across the globe. For a discussion of some of these broader impacts, see Skocpol, Theda, “Bringing the State Back In: Retrospect and Prospect,” Scandinavian Political Studies 31:2 (2008): 109–24Google Scholar.
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6 I will not engage directly or deeply with the prodigious field of comparative welfare states.
7 Robert D. Johnston cites Protecting Soldiers and Mothers as a key marker in “re-democratizing the Progressive Era.” Johnson, Robert D., “Re-Democratizing the Progressive Era: The Politics of Progressive Era Political Historiography,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 1:1 (Jan. 2002): 68–92Google Scholar.
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10 Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, 42–44.
11 Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, 52.
12 Laura Jensen later argued that well before the Civil War, the federal government utilized social entitlements in the form of pensions and land to recruit soldiers and armed settlers to expand and protect the country's growing continental empire. “By the time the Civil War began,” Jensen wrote, “the United States had a firmly established history of national level social provision rooted in the entitlement of certain categories of Americans who served the purposes of the state as it sought to claim, protect, and expand its sovereignty over an immense portion of the North American continent” (205). Jensen, Laura, Patriots, Settlers, and the Origins of American Social Policy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.
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