Creating Gender compels us to “make ordinary the analysis of gender in policymaking” (p. 228). As such, the authors “take up the question of how gender is created when policy is made” (p. 11) using an intimate and in-depth exploratory analysis of welfare policy in the United States to make their case. Their analysis is based on a “compound gender ideology framework” (p. 228), an original construction of the three authors designed to unravel and reveal gender ideology in the policymaking arena—specifically, the “adoption and implementation of the PRWORA (Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act)—welfare reform” (p. 11).

The authors' stated intents are twofold: to raise awareness of how policymaking processes mask gender, and to provide a framework to investigate and “measure the presence of gender ideology in policymaking” (p. 220). An analysis of PRWORA provides an important opportunity to look at gender constructs and the debates and presumptions behind them because as a “national policy (it) … redrew gender with new ideas about mothers, fathers, work, and family” (p. 220). Importantly, they contend, “(s)truggles over welfare policy constitute ongoing battles over gender” (p. 19) that also determine who in this society is valued and cared for and how care is provided.

To begin, the authors situate the complexity of gender through a review of seemingly disparate family court cases focused on a myriad of aspects of parental rights, among them burial site decisions, freedom of expression, and future parenting rights. This introductory excursion is essential to demonstrating how patterns that “shape gender … become part of the strictures that govern people's lives,” shaping “what people can and cannot do or be …” (p. 4–5). Hence, what the authors uncover and help us to understand is that it is precisely “[w]hen the behaviors, roles, and actions at stake determine the types of gender that people may adopt or ‘perform,’ (that) government creates gender through policy” (p. 220).

Chapters 4 through 6 provide an intimate look into the unfolding of PRWORA using the framework of analysis developed in Chapter 3 and foregrounded in Chapter 2. Chapter 7 employs the framework, using Wisconsin as a case study to examine implementation of welfare reform at the state level, and in Chapter 8, the framework is put into practice to measure “gender's influence in Congressional policymaking” (p. 187). The authors conclude that “[a]s political actors debate public policies, … they employ gender ideologies …” (p. 20), and that these gender ideologies permeate debates about welfare policy in the United States and reinforce structures of gender inequality.

The gender ideology framework developed by the authors is, I believe, unnecessarily complex and layered. The authors first classify social welfare policies into three gender paradigms—“normative models about the way men and women should live their lives and the kinds of choices that should be encouraged and discouraged through public policy” (p. 20). The three gender paradigms are complementarity, individuality (civic and corporative), and egality. For each of the gender paradigms, there is a Guiding Gender Principle (notions about biological essentialism and sex and social roles) and a corresponding Welfare Policy Orientation (kinds of behavior desired within a society). They then identify six “gender strands” (from left to right) and link them with six political ideologies (left to right). Out of this emerges a complex framework for analyzing policymaking processes and outcomes.

The difficulty with this framework is that, although its findings about gender and policymaking are rich, it is not easily reproducible, and a number of feminist policy analysts have explored gender and ideology in less cumbersome ways with similar outcomes. That said, I appreciated the power of their analysis of the gendered debate over PRWORA. Having also conducted an ideology-based analysis of previous welfare policy (The Family Support Act of 1988: A Case Study of Welfare Reform in the 1980s, 2002), I was intrigued by the overlay of gender strands onto political ideologies and the emergence of Welfare Policy Orientations from the Guiding Gender Principles and gender paradigms. The case study of Wisconsin's implementation of national welfare policy provides the reader with a detailed look at its harsh and punitive impact on women's lives.

Two other concerns arise from my reading. One is the authors' introduction of new and idiosyncratic words such as “feminal” and “feminalist orientation.” The authors pioneer the word “feminale”—“the quality of being female” (pp. xiii, 14–15)—as a substitute for currently used words such as feminine and feminist. They are confident that feminale, when employed on a more universal basis, can move us beyond the seemingly restrictive understandings of feminist and feminine and broaden the conversation to include the concerns of women writ large, as biologically not socially constructed. Even though they defend this change at length in Chapter 3, I find it dubious.

My second concern regards the authors' contention that requiring women on welfare to work made them “masculine mothers” and breadwinners (Chapter 5). In 1996, welfare reform did require women on welfare to work. Unfortunately, this requirement undermined prior welfare policy that recognized both job training and postsecondary education as essential pathways to meaningful work. However, in PRWORA, meaningful work was not of concern to its architects. Of paramount importance was a job, any job, and women were forced into the marketplace to work, often for meager benefits. My concern here is that by describing women who work as masculine mothers and breadwinners, the authors presume that women who work do so only involuntarily and not for personal or professional aspirations and gain.

The kind of work women on welfare often do affords neither them nor their families security or stability; therefore, it is wrong to associate work with the “masculine role of breadwinning” (p. 117). In doing so, the authors set up an either-or dichotomy that belies the desire of (single) women, with or without children, to be the sole source provider. This categorization also assumes that all women on welfare wish to devote themselves exclusively to the role of stay-at-home mother. When women on welfare were, under prior welfare policy, able to enroll in postsecondary education, thousands did so with the intent of pursuing professional positions for themselves as well as seeking future financial security and stability for themselves and their families. Women have fought for too long and too hard to enter and achieve meaningful positions in the labor market to now see themselves as merely embracing masculine roles.

None of this is meant to minimize the book's well-documented exposure of harsh, retaliatory attitudes toward mothers in need of government assistance, attitudes that led to significant changes in the ways in which government supports poor families. Dependency, albeit often brief, is mistakenly seen as the antithesis of the unwavering American belief in independence, self-reliance, and individualism. Yet as Virginia Sapiro so aptly reminds us, “the goodness or badness of dependency depends on who is depending on whom” (“The Gender Basis of American Social Policy,” in Linda Gordon, ed., Women, the State and Welfare, 1990, p. 45).

Welfare scholars will discover rich findings in this book that supplement the increasing volume of work seeking to counter prevailing presumptions that current welfare policy is a success.