Public assistance benefits, however menial, were functioning like a social wage for unmarried women—a configuration that had not been envisaged in the Social Security Act, and one that many perceived as a perversion of its original intent. As Stephanie Coontz points out, it was not so much women’s dependence on the state that turned a generation of social reformers against the welfare state tout court; it was rather the growing realization that welfare was making women independent of individual men and freeing them from the obligations of the private family.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 227