Social Security removed only standard male workers from family-responsibility poor laws

Evidence

With the passage of the Social Security Act in 1935, the advocates of social insurance claimed a decisive victory. The New Deal introduced comprehensive forms of social insurance against workplace accidents, unemployment, and aging and definitively removed one class of workers (standard, white, male workers) from the poor law system of family responsibility. Hoping to capitalize on this victory, federal administrators on the Social Security Board launched a vigorous assault on state poor laws over the following years and sought as far as possible to limit their use. Yet, many states resisted these intrusions and continued to enforce family responsibility in public assistance programs for the nonworking and noncontributing poor—including, most notably, Aid to Dependent Children or ADC (later renamed AFDC). — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 220

Categorization

• XREF: This two-tier welfare state distinction connects to the chapter’s framing of Reagan-era family-wages ideology in Cooper’s work, and to general critiques of the gendered welfare state. — connects to: Welfare rulings granted poor women a social wage like male workers — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 226; Social Security avoided controversy because it evaded racial and gender politics — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 234