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Description
Title: | A pregnancy test: women workers and the hybrid American welfare state, 1940-1993 |
Author(s): | Fairbanks, Ruth L. |
Director of Research: | Pleck, Elizabeth |
Doctoral Committee Chair(s): | Pleck, Elizabeth |
Doctoral Committee Member(s): | Barrett, James; Boris, Eileen; Reagan, Leslie |
Department / Program: | History |
Discipline: | History |
Degree Granting Institution: | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign |
Degree: | Ph.D. |
Genre: | Dissertation |
Subject(s): | pregnancy discrimination
Maternity leave childbirth maternity benefits health insurance working mothers Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) Cold War Emergency Maternity and Infant Care (EMIC) Red Scare Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) parental leave welfare state fringe benefits Martha May Eliot Mildred Fairchild Coal Employment Project Charlotte Silverman International Labour Organization Maternity Convention Rhode Island Cash Sickness Compensation work-family balance Ruth Weyand Ruth Young Donna Lenhoff Young v. UPS LaFleur v. Cleveland Board of Education Cohen v. Chesterfield County School Board Gilbert v. GE Geduldig v. Aiello Turner v. Department of Employment Security of Utah Patricia Schroeder California Savings and Loan v. Guerra |
Abstract: | This dissertation shows that the US developed the outlines of a maternity policy at least by WWII. Rarely were the needs of pregnant workers or new mothers at the top of social policy initiatives. However, when European countries were developing their plans, reformers and bureaucrats sought to establish similar plans in the United States and, for a while, seemed like they might. Politics intervened in the form of the Cold War. With a few state level exceptions, the experiences of WWII were largely dismantled in the wake of political changes, business and medical opposition and the Red Scare. Subsequent policies that emerged grew largely in the private sector where women’s disadvantages in the workforce constrained maternity in the blossoming system of employee fringe benefits. Where they could, unions defended women’s access to contractual benefits, but this effort was hampered by the marginalization of maternity in the private system. Finally, with the emergence of a rights framework in the 1970s, feminist lawyers forced the inclusion of pregnancy into the central operating welfare state of private workforce relationships and benefits, leading to the current national maternity policy. However, conservatism and globalization limited this approach and indicate the necessity of public social supports for maternity, or family, benefits. |
Issue Date: | 2015-12-03 |
Type: | Thesis |
URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/2142/89031 |
Rights Information: | copyright 2015 Ruth L. Fairbanks |
Date Available in IDEALS: | 2016-03-02 |
Date Deposited: | 2015-12 |
This item appears in the following Collection(s)
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Dissertations and Theses - History
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Graduate Dissertations and Theses at Illinois
Graduate Theses and Dissertations at Illinois