Over the last few decades, the position of women vis-à-vis the welfare state has changed dramatically. Welfare states have adapted to women's increased labour force participation and to the “new social risks” that characterize postindustrial societies. In this paper, we examine gendered policy developments in the US, focusing on conceptions of vulnerability that inform policies meant to mitigate gendered social risks. Focusing on three policy areas: parental leave, domestic violence and disability, we show that policies increasingly target women's integration into the workforce and self-regulation as strategies to mitigate gendered social risk. We also discuss how these policies rely on individual interventions implemented by what we call punitive therapy practitioners, who encourage women's workforce participation and psychological self-regulation. Finally, we argue that enduring gendered conceptions of vulnerability have shaped the specific designs of policies that emerged in the 1960s–1970s, intensified through the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, and persist today.

I contend that we should remake conceptions of power and politics, taking off from the project of remaking “modernity.” Here, I perform a similar move for “power and politics,” core concepts for history and the human sciences, building on the foundational work of the 1970s and 1980s and bringing in key elements of institutionalist and culturalist critiques. The theories of the early days of social science history were usually materialist, and the character of state policies and political structures was understood to reflect the “balance of class forces,” interests to flow from class position, and power to work in a juridical vein, as “power over.” By the 1980s these common understandings were widely criticized. There were new emphases on the multiplicity of identities and structures of inequality, new questions about the adequacy of materialist accounts of politics. Dissatisfactions were also stimulated by “real-world” developments. However, we see a parting of the ways when it came to addressing these new political conditions and analytic challenges. Moves to “bring the state and other political institutions back in” have been focused on politics, while the scholars taking the various cultural turns have focused on power. The conceptualizations of power and politics have been sundered along with the scholarly communities deploying them. I address both communities and argue for new ways of understanding power and politics emerging from renewed encounters between institutionalist and culturalist analyses. Such encounters and the conceptual work that they will produce can help us reforge a productive alliance between history and the social sciences.

In the social-scientific literature on the welfare state, scholars have long argued that the quality and extent of support available to workers outside the market—the citizen's wage—has a direct impact on their standard of living and an indirect effect on the bargaining position of labor within market relationships. In a parallel way, recent feminist scholarship on social policy has pointed out that how—if at all—the state steps in to assist women in their role as mothers when marital relationships break up or never form has a direct impact on the standard of living within motheronly families, and an indirect effect on women's bargaining position within two-parent families by (at least partially) setting the terms on which they will live should they want to exit relationships. Thus, just as analysts have argued that the level of the citizen's wage is revealing about the effect of policy on class inequality, a focus on what the state does for single mothers and their children is analytically strategic for assessing the relationship between policy and gender inequality. The situation of mother-only families reveals the inherent social and economic vulnerability of all women that exists due to their childrearing and domestic responsibilities and their low earnings, which is usually masked when women are in households with wage-earning men.

With respect to modernity and women's place in it, Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris and Iris Marion Young are sharply at odds. Young sees a rending and tearing of the social fabric, and no determinate relationship between gender equality and modernity, while Inglehart and Norris think modernization and women's rights are seamlessly joined at the hip. We think that neither of these analytical stances will do. Our assessment extends from a concept of modernity that embraces a relational complex of features and tendencies—one that is analytical, not normative, and that must always be historically situated. Modernity is a vulnerable achievement rather than the secure culmination of automatic social processes. When called to its defense, we have argued, feminists and small-d democrats may sometimes have to endorse means and modes of coercion controlled by imperfectly democratic states.For their criticisms and suggestions, we thank Rachel Epstein, Bonnie Honig, David Weakliem, and Linda Zerilli. They bear no responsibility for the substance of our rejoinder, even if their arguments with us did help us think it through.