Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T05:09:12.087Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Social Welfare History in the Age of Diversity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 December 2021

EDWARD D. BERKOWITZ*
Affiliation:
George Washington University, USA

Abstract

This policy perspective discusses three important social welfare programs—Social Security Disability Insurance, Medicare, and Temporary Aid to Needy Families—and offers an explanation of how they have expanded over time.

Type
Critical Perspective
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1. I have developed the arguments in this essay further in Berkowitz, Edward D., Making Social Welfare Policy in America: Three Case Studies since 1950 (Chicago, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. Katznelson, Ira, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York, 2013).Google Scholar

3. Mary Poole, The Segregated Origins of Social Security: African Americans and the Welfare State (Chapel Hill, 2006).

4. Deborah Stone, The Disabled State (Philadelphia, 1984); Robert Haveman, Victor Halberstadt, and Richard Burkhauser, Public Policy Toward Disabled Workers: Cross-National Analyses of Economic Impacts (Ithaca, 1984); Jennifer L. Erkulwater, Disability Rights and the American Social Safety Net (Ithaca, 2006); Erkulwater, “Constructive Welfare: The Social Security Act, the Blind, and the Origins of Political Identity among People with Disabilities, 1935–1950,” Studies in American Political Development 33 (April 2019): 110–38; Erkulwater, “How the Nation’s Largest Minority Became White: Race Politics and the Disability Rights Movement,” Policy History 30 (2018): 367–69; Kornbluh, Felicia, “Disability, Antiprofessionalism, and Civil Rights: The National Federation of the Blind and the ‘Right to Organize’ in the 1950s,” Journal of American History 97 (2011): 1023–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Richard Scotch, From Good Will to Civil Rights: Transforming Federal Disability Policy, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia, 2001).

5. “The law of 1956 bore many marks from its long and intensely political passage.” Martha Derthick, Policymaking for Social Security (Washington, DC, 1979), 308.

6. DeWitt, Larry and Berkowitz, Edward D., “Health Care,” in A Companion to Lyndon B. Johnson, ed. Lerner, Mitchell R. (Malden, MA, 2012), 163–86Google Scholar; Eugene Feingold, Medicare: Policy and Politics: A Case Study and Policy Analysis (San Francisco, 1966); Richard Harris, A Sacred Trust (New York, 1966); Theodore Marmor, The Politics of Medicare (Hawthorne, NY, 1973); Herman Somers and Ann Somers, Medicare and the Hospitals: Issues and Prospects (Washington, DC, 1967); Sheri David, With Dignity: The Search for Medicare and Medicaid (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1983); Allen Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York, 1984), 228; Jonathan Oberlander, The Political Life of Medicare (Chicago, 2003).

7. Chapin, Christy Ford, Ensuring America’s Health: The Public Creation of the Corporate Health Care System (New York, 2015), 1, 3, 78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8. Hoffman, Beatrix, Health Care for Some: Rights and Rationing in the United States Since 1930 (Chicago, 2012), xii, 127–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9. Gilens, Martin, Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy (Chicago, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mimi Abramowitz, Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present (Boston, 1996); Martha Davis, “Welfare Rights and Women’s Rights in the1960s,” Journal of Policy History 8 (1996): 144–65; Joanne Goodwin, “‘Employable Mothers’ and ‘Suitable Work’: A Reevaluation of Welfare and Wage-Earning for Women in the Twentieth-Century United States,” Journal of Social History 29 (1993): 253–74; Linda Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (New York, 1994); Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (New York, 2001); Premilla Nadsen, “Expanding the Boundaries of the Women’s Movement and the Struggle for Welfare Rights,” Feminist Studies 28 (2002): 271–301; Barbara Nelson, The Origins of the Two-Channel Welfare State: Workmen’s Compensation and Mothers’ Aid,” in Women, the State, and Welfare, ed. Linda Gordon (Madison, 1990), 123–51; Jill Quadagno, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty (New York, 1994); Rickie Solinger, Wake Up Little Susie: Race and Single Pregnancy Before Roe v. Wade (New York, 1993).