Workers' compensation was the first social insurance program to gain widespread acceptance in the United States, and as such became one of the foundations of the modern American welfare state.The original and more gendered name for this program was workmen's compensation. The term “workers' compensation” did not become common until the 1970s. I will use both names in this article, depending on the context. Most states passed workmen's compensation laws between 1911 and 1920, and all but two states did so by 1935. The other major social policy innovation of this era were mothers' pensions laws, which were targeted at the poor children of single mothers. These laws also spread rapidly in the 1910s and were on the books in virtually every state by 1935.Although minimum wage and maximum hours laws for women also passed in many states prior to the New Deal, they have generally received less scholarly attention than workmen's compensation or mothers' pensions. The major histories of the American welfare stateEdward D. Berkowitz, America's Welfare State: From Roosevelt to Reagan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); Edward D. Berkowitz and Kim McQuaid, Creating the Welfare State: The Political Economy of Twentieth-Century Reform revised ed. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992); Michael B. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (New York: Basic Books, 1986); Roy Lubove, The Struggle for Social Security, 1900–1935, 2nd ed. (1968; Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986; Charles Noble, Welfare As We Knew It: A Political History of the American Welfare State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Theda Skocpol, Social Policy in the United States: Future Possibilities in Historical Perspective (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Walter I. Trattner, From Poor Law to Welfare State: A History of Social Welfare in America, 6th ed. (New York: Free Press, 1999); Margaret Weir, Ann Shola Orloff, and Theda Skocpol, eds., The Politics of Social Policy in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). always acknowledge the importance of workmen's compensation and mothers' pensions in the early twentieth century, and some authorsBarbara J. Nelson, “The Gender, Race, and Class Origins of Early Welfare Policy and the Welfare State: A Comparison of Workmen's Compensation and Mothers' Aid,” in Women, Politics, and Change, ed. Louise A. Tilly and Patricia Gurin (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1990), 413–35. argue that these two programs established the major fault lines of social provision – between social insurance and public assistance, between employed male workers and unpaid mothers – for the rest of the century.