Theda Skocpol (1993), 'Soldiers, Workers, and Mothers: Gendered Identities in Early U.S. Social Policy', Contention: Debates in Society, Culture, and Science, 2, pp. 157-83.

Protecting Soldiers and Mothers teIls some startlingly new stories about the history of social policy in theUnited States. Few people realize that in 1910 over a quarter of all elderly American men were receiving regular old-age pensions from the federal govemment. How could this have happened so long before the New Deal of the 1930s, when "social security" for the elderly supposedly was enacted for the first time? Most people do not know, either, that some of the most impressive legislative victories ever achieved by U.S. women 's groups occurred during the 1910s - be/ore the 'vast majority of women had the right to vote. At that time, American women organized and spoke not as modern-style "feminists," but as civic mothers concerned to make government more caring. How could women who did not enjoy the rightto vote have persuaded the federal govemment and forty-some U.S. state legislatures to enact laws intended to help mothers, children, and women workers?