Creating Gender: The Sexual Politics of Welfare
Policy. By Cathy Marie Johnson, Georgia Duerst-Lahti,
and Noelle H. Norton. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2006.
261p. $55.00.
Creating Gender compels us to “make ordinary the
analysis of gender in policymaking” (p. 228). As such, the authors
“take up the question of how gender is created when policy is made”
(p. 11) using an intimate and in-depth exploratory analysis of
welfare policy in the United States to make their case. Their
analysis is based on a “compound gender ideology framework” (p.
228), an original construction of the three authors designed to
unravel and reveal gender ideology in the policymaking
arena—specifically, the “adoption and implementation of the PRWORA
(Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation
Act)—welfare reform” (p. 11).