ABSTRACT
During the decade of the 1980s, government policy in the United States was guided by an extremely conservative political agenda. In this period, the relationship between women and the state became an issue of critical importance. Many of the major policy debates of the 1980s—welfare reform, equal opportunity and affirmative action policy, reproductive rights—involved explicit and implicit questions about this relationship. Scholars concerned with the social and economic status of women have identified numerous sources of inequality and subordination. They have stressed unequal legal rights and citizenship status, unequal access to education and employment, biological differences, and cultural responses to biological differences as sources of women’s inferior economic status. Power may be defined as the ability to make and implement decisions involving control over others. The concept of power is critical to an understanding of the operation of economic systems and the status of individuals within those systems.
