The passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) brought about dramatic changes in the ways in which cash-based aid is disbursed in the United States. The program most notably introduced clear time limits for assistance, and shattered the notion that women could remain “on the dole” for extended periods of time without working, even when their children were very young. While the politics surrounding this fundamental shift in policy have been well documented by social scientists and historians elsewhere, Cathy Marie Johnson, Georgia Duerst-Lahti, and Noelle Norton are the first to examine through the dual lens of gender and ideology how this monumental transformation in governmental decision making came about.

Central to their analysis is their theoretical framework, which they deftly describe in the early chapters of their work. They classify welfare policy as falling into three distinct paradigms: complementarity, individuality, and egality. Complementarity is an ideology that rewards traditional, gender-based roles in family life, with mothers caring for children and fathers doing the breadwinning. Individuality, on the other hand, is an ideology that values personal freedom and encourages all citizens to exercise autonomy in pursuing their goals without state interference. Finally, the egality paradigm is a system of beliefs that seeks to provide women and men with a framework of supports for the care of their offspring, and that aims to remove all types of discrimination against the sexes in both public and private life. In outlining these general paradigms, the authors also note that elected officials pursue each of them not simply on the basis of their ideological values on a left–right spectrum, but also through what they call the protoideology of gender, specifically through the concepts of feminalism and masculinism. This simply means that individuals have well-formed ideas about the roles of women and men in society, as well as distinct notions about their preferred distribution of power between the sexes. It is the complex interaction between gender and ideology, the authors maintain, that can help us more fully understand the production of social welfare policy in the United States.

Following the establishment of this theoretical framework, the authors then move on to trace how the confluence of gender and ideology helped form welfare policy throughout recent American history. They maintain that the complementarity paradigm was dominant throughout the birth and life of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program—the precursor to PRWORA—where women were expected to stay at home and care for their children. The individuality paradigm, however, began to assume ascendancy during the 1980s. Policymakers increasingly argued that all mothers should work, and sought to alter welfare rules to promote this emerging idea of the “masculine mother.” At the same time, legislators took a more punitive stance against fathers through enhanced child-support enforcement measures. Fathers, too, would be forced to conform to the individuality paradigm by ensuring that they consistently supported their children economically.

In the final, quantitative chapters of the book, the authors examine the formation of both the W-2 policy in Wisconsin (Wisconsin Works) and the passage of PRWORA in 1996 at the national level. In doing so, they marshal statistical evidence on behalf of the arguments that they have thus far laid forth to show how gender and ideology have recently intersected in support of the individuality paradigm, above all others. At the state level, they collect survey data from Wisconsin legislators and use factor analysis to demonstrate that ideology was not the only influence on the formation of the W-2 program, but that gender beliefs mattered as well.

At the federal level, they examine the PRWORA lawmaking process through a three-stage analysis. They first explore the nature of the votes that took place in the committees with jurisdiction over welfare reform in the House of Representatives, and find that those lawmakers who were most successful in amending the legislation supported the individuality paradigm. Second, they analyze the amendments offered to PRWORA by the Rules Committee in the House, as well as on the floor of both the House and Senate. Here again, the authors find that the individuality paradigm trumped both the complementarity and egality paradigms in terms of defining the form of the final legislation. Third, they demonstrate the unique role that congresswomen played in casting their votes on this piece of legislation. While ideology clearly was significant in influencing voting patterns, gender—and, in particular, feminalist concerns about the needs of mothers – shaped female lawmakers’ policy preferences in similar ways across the political aisle.

Throughout the entire work, the authors astutely note that gender has been severely lacking in social scientists’ accounts of the development of social policy. They make a strong case for its inclusion in further treatments not only of welfare policy but of other policy domains as well. Their innovative and insightful account should encourage others to heed their advice.