Theda Skocpol: Protecting Soldiers and Mothers (1995)

[jserraglio]

Theda Skocpol’s Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States is an important book.

Setting out to write about FDR’s New Deal, Skocpol never completed the project because she stumbled instead upon something truly astonishing. The social welfare system in the USA originated not in the leftist, socialist-tinged 1930s but in a mainstream industrial-revolution-era pension program to benefit Civil War vets and their widows. And women were central players, organizing themselves into political action groups to promote this program even before they had the right to vote. The Civil War pension program was later nixed by the Progressives who saw it as pork-barrel federalism. But disenfranchised women continued to organize well into the 20th century, forming voluntary groups to push for even wider government benefits, namely benefits for mothers.

Skocpol suggests that war, even more than ideology, can be a major driver of social legislation. That discovery and her discovery of the potent organizing skill of women citizenry are still playing out today in Biden’s postwar trillion-dollar social welfare proposals. If they pass, women like Nancy Pelosi will be the key.