Session Abstract

This panel will discuss how welfare states produce and institutionalize categories of difference.  It considers the larger political, social and cultural dynamics of welfare state formation, while also looking at the daily struggles of state agents and clients in their communities.  Together, these essays explore the role of gender and sexual politics in welfare policies as well as the intertwined histories of developing welfare institutions and imperialism.  These pieces will also bring the particularities of North American and European discourses of welfare and family into trans-Atlantic dialogue.

The policing of behavior and the regulation of domesticity have been important features of welfare state formation.  In “Policing Disorderly Homes: The FBI, the Mann Act, and the Family, 1919-1941,” Jessica R. Pliley explores the theme of “boundary crossing” through the United States Mann Act, particularly state efforts to police domesticity and maintain the racial integrity of families.   Emma Amador’s essay, “Mobile Social Workers and Migrant Domestics: Stretching Puerto Rico's Welfare State Between San Juan and New York, 1955-1965,” discusses the transnational history of Puerto Rican social work practice and the experience of Puerto Rican clients within these programs.  In particular, her paper examines public assistance measures that attempted to control juvenile delinquency and sexual deviance, by encouraging Puerto Rican teenagers to perform more properly “masculine” or “feminine” forms of labor.  In “'We Have the Right to a Home!':  Squatting Families and the Meaning of Welfare in Post-Liberation France,” Minayo Nasiali considers how squatting families from diverse neighborhoods around France negotiated post-WWII plans for reconstruction, articulating as they did so the possibility of a new form of Republican social citizenship.  More specifically, the paper considers the role of women squatters and activists within the movement, and how they re-imagined and negotiated their roles as mothers, workers, and citizens.

The work of creating bureaucracies was also impacted by imperial discourses.  While Emma Amador and Minayo Nasiali respectively situate their studies of social reforms within the larger contexts of United States and French imperialism, Jordanna Bailkin contributes a synthetic discussion of welfare and empire in her essay, “Where Was Welfare? Decolonization and the Making of the Global Welfare State.”  She discusses how ideas about citizenship and social democracy were shaped by the efforts of colonial and metropolitan administrators, as well as the experiences and expectations of colonial subjects and post-colonial migrants.  For Bailkin, the welfare state was never a home grown, domestic product, but the result of a range of global forces.

In Donna Guy’s recent book, Women Build the Welfare State: Performing Charity and Creating Rights in Argentina, she considers the “welfare state not as concept but also historical process” (Guy, 2009, p. 3).  For Guy, the “welfare state became the scaffolding built around earlier social policies  …[that] began to form at the local level, particularly in municipal settings” (Guy, p. 5-6).  Our papers similarly highlight how social policies and practices develop through negotiations between state authorities and ordinary people, thereby underscoring welfare state formation as an historical, dynamic, and ongoing process.