ABSTRACT
In varying degrees, Western industrial societies have developed social welfare programs which protect citizens over the life course. All provide pensions for the aged, income protection for the unemployed, and some form of assistance for impoverished families with children. With the exception of the United States, they also provide national health care systems or insurance. This vast expansion of the state role means that gender relations no longer play themselves out mainly within family and market contexts. State social policy is shaped by gender assumptions and in turn affects women’s degree of social and economic independence from men. Feminists have argued that programs have often been designed which reinforce women’s subordination and, while feminist writers differ greatly among themselves, they have developed a critique both of social welfare policy and of scholarship about it (Nelson 1990; Linda Gordon 1990). It is my purpose in this chapter to extend the analysis to gender and social policy in the educational sphere.
