The Legal Tender of Gender —— Law, Welfare and the Regulation of Women's Poverty

----- 社会性别法定货币：法律、福利及妇女贫穷规则

ISBN: 9781841133140 出版年：2010 页码：308 Shelley A M Gavigan Dorothy E Chunn Bloomsbury Publishing

This collection of essays, which emerges from an Onati workshop held in 2007, provides an important and timely opportunity for 11 feminist scholars to reflect upon twentieth century welfarism, and its contemporary neo-liberal re-configurations. The aims of the collection are not limited to revealing the precarious position of women as beneficiaries of state welfare and the disproportionate impact on women of its retraction; the collection also seeks to highlight ‘‘the relevance of women’s agency and resistance to the experience of inequality and injustice’’ (p. 3). Welfare scholarship has an understandable tendency to parochialism as a consequence of the specificity and complexity of different regulatory regimes. The multi-disciplinary expertise of the contributors and the variety of jurisdictions represented—Canada, USA and Israel—is therefore to be welcomed. However, there is one caveat; the focus of six out of 10 of the papers is Canadian, perhaps giving too much emphasis to the peculiarity of the Canadian amalgam of social conservatism, constitutional liberalism (especially to be found in judicial responses to the equality guarantee in s 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms) and economic neo-liberalism. Nonetheless, several essays in the book provide an opportunity for readers to ‘catch up’ on the mutating character of specific national welfare programmes. For instance Abramovitz, in ‘Women, Social Reproduction and the Neo-liberal Assault on the US Welfare State’, succinctly describes the emergence of the US welfare state as a response to the Great Depression and its fall in the 1970s following ‘‘third world revolutions, the loss of US world hegemony, reduced access to cheap raw materials from third world nations, mounting international economic competition, and the victories of US social movements’’ (p. 20). She then maps the successes of the neo-liberal assault on state spending on welfare and its differential impact: ‘‘In particular, it undercut women’s capacity for care work by reducing benefits and/or shifting the costs of social reproduction from