Welfare provision presupposed unpaid female care work that made benefits possible

Evidence

Implicit in welfare state policies was a typical recipient who was male, married, and head of a household with children. Clearly, the wife/mother provided (unpaid of course) child care, health care, and often services to aged parents in addition to basic household duties. — Gary Goertz, Social Science Concepts, 584

Categorization

• SHARE: Send to anyone working on care-economy or feminist political economy — it’s the clean statement of the implicit subsidy.
• XREF: Relates to social reproduction theory and to Nancy Fraser’s work on the ‘care crisis’.