This particular challenge to the Fordist family wage system was profoundly unsettling to people from right across the political spectrum, and it is fair to say that it crystallized the enormous welfare backlash of the 1970s. It is in this period that you begin to hear the argument—echoed by both neoliberals such as Gary Becker and neoconservatives such as Daniel Bell and Daniel Patrick Moynihan—that public spending on welfare was making women too independent of presumptive husbands and fathers and thus effectively subsidizing the breakdown of the family. Neoliberals and neoconservatives were united in their opposition to the expansion of the welfare state under the sign of "sexual freedom," although their motivations were very different. Neoconservatives feared that the subsidization of non-normative lifestyle choices by the welfare state would undermine the moral foundations of social order. Neoliberals were primarily motivated by economic concerns: if growing numbers of women were now claiming both equal wages and an independent social wage, the resulting expansion of claims on the state threatened to exacerbate the problem of inflation.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 228