ABSTRACT
This chapter offers framework tor incorporating the politics of gender into the development of welfare states during an early period of institutional building. It considers how different gendered discourses around home and work shaped social policies in the American and Swedish welfare states during the 1930s. Married women's right to work provides an excellent case study for comparative analysis of the contested nature of social policy around gender-equality issues during this pivotal stage of welfare-state formation. American women active in early settlement-house reform, philanthropy, and civic organizations, referred to in the scholarly literature as "maternalists," helped to shape state policies aimed at women and children and then carved out a niche for themselves in emerging social-welfare institutions. Swedish feminists found a powerful ally in the trade unions that opposed legislation restricting married womens' labor-force participation. American feminists found few allies among unions in their defense of the married women worker.
