The Legal Tender of Gender: Law, Welfare and the Regulation of Women's Poverty

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Extensive welfare, law and policy reforms characterised the making and unmaking of Keynesian states in the twentieth century. This collection highlights the gendered nature of these regulatory shifts and, specifically, the roles played by women as reformers, welfare workers and welfare recipients, in the development of welfare states historically. The contributors are leading feminist socio-legal scholars from a range of disciplines in Canada, the United States and Israel. Collectively, their analyses of women, law and poverty speak to long-standing and ongoing feminist concerns: the importance of historically informed research, the relevance of women's agency and resistance to the experience of inequality and injustice, the specificity of the experience of poor women and poor mothers, the implications of changes to social policy, and the possibilities for social change. Such analyses are particularly timely as the devastation of neo-liberalism becomes increasingly obvious. The current world crisis of capitalism is a defining moment for liberal states a global catastrophe that concomitantly creates a window of opportunity for critical scholars and activists to reframe debates about social welfare, work, and equality, and to reinsert the discourse of social justice into the public consciousness and political agendae of liberal democracies.

Reviews

...an important and timely opportunity for 11 feminist scholars to reflect upon twentieth century welfarism, and its contemporary neo-liberal re-configurations. ...the essays are thoughtful, illuminating and well researched, providing a rich resource for further interrogation of this significant, if unglamourous, area of feminist scholarship. Helen Carr Feminist Legal Studies Volume 18 This volume makes a substantial contribution to the scholarly literature on the welfare state, elucidating the socio-legal forms of neo-liberalism and their adverse effects on poor women in Canada, Israel, and the U.S. The book is well organized, the chapters show painstaking research, and the authors make powerful arguments. Commendably, the contributors connect the material and the discursive aspects of the changing welfare state. Another strength is the volume's coherence and cohesiveness. ...the volume should be of particular interest and value to law and courts scholars. ...an intellectually rich volume, both theoretically and empirically, that deserves to become a staple of scholarly research and graduate courses across several disciplines. Elizabeth Bussiere Law and Politics Book Review September 2010

Author Bio

Shelley AM Gavigan, BA, LLB (Sask.), MA (Toronto), LLM (Osgoode/York), SJD (Toronto), is Professor of Law at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto, Canada, and a member of the Bars of Saskatchewan and Ontario. Dorothy E Chunn, MA, PhD (Toronto), is Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Feminist Institute for Studies on Law and Society at Simon Fraser University. She is co-editor (with Susan B Boyd & Hester Lessard) of Reaction and Resistance: Feminism, Law, and Social Change (UBC Press, 2007).]