ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the shift in the political beliefs signaled by the gender gap. Women became wage workers on a mass scale. Whatever this actually meant in the lives of women, it clearly meant that women had entered the mainstream of ideas about power simply because most of those ideas are about marketplace power. The relationship of women to the welfare state hardly needs documenting. The welfare state brings together millions of poor women who depend on welfare-state programs. If ideologies are forged in the crucible of memory and experience, then the scale of the institutional shifts lends weight to contention that a major ideological transformation is at work. Ideology was either consensual and axiomatic, in which case it changed little or only gradually; or if the ideas of particular groups changed sharply, then it was the stresses in the social structure that had generated the deviation that deserved scrutiny.
