ABSTRACT
Feminism and socialism meet in the arena of the Welfare State, and the manipulations of the Welfare State offer a unique demonstration of how the State can prescribe what woman’s consciousness should be. This book attempts to show that only a feminist analysis of the Welfare State that also relates it to a socialist perspective can enable us fully to understand why the conglomeration of legislation and services loosely labelled the Welfare State has come to be as it is. Only feminism has made it possible for us to see how the State defines femininity and that this definition is not marginal but is central to the purposes of welfarism. Woman is above all Mother, and with this vocation go all the virtues of femininity; submission, nurturance, passivity. The ‘feminine’ client of the social services waits patiently at clinics, social security offices, and housing
departments, to beministered to sometimes by the paternal authority figure, doctor or civil servant, sometimes by the nurturant yet firm model of femininity provided by nurse or social worker; in either case she goes away to do as she has been told-to take the pills, to love the baby.
