Abstract

Subject to debate

Contrary to popular stereotype, feminists have always maintained that motherhood is socially valuable labor that deserves collective support and recognition. Welfare is a feminist issue because it weakens women's dependence on men. It means that pregnant women can choose to give birth and keep their babies even if abandoned by their boyfriends and families, it means that battered women can leave abusive men, and miserable working-class wives, like their middle-class sisters, can get a fresh start without reducing their children to starvation. It protects women at a time when the patriarchal family is disintegrating, and that is why family-values conservatives hate it, even though opposition to welfare forces them to laud employed mothers. It's true that welfare rights lacks tile cross-party political appeal of abortion rights.