Women and Poverty is a collection of essays, many of which originally appeared in the American journal Signs and have now been reissued as a book. The empirical social trend which underlines the book is the increasing impoverishment of women in the United States. As more American women, alone or with responsibility for children, have been forced to rely upon their own earnings or state benefits for income, they have come to represent more than 65 per cent of all persistently poor adults; one out of every three female-headed households was designated as poor in 1984. The theoretical preoccupation of the book is how women’s poverty in the United States has been produced in the conjuncture of US welfare capitalism, patriarchy, and the liberal state. The essays also suggest that the liberal state can be used to produce welfare and employment policy that will improve women’s position. While most of the essays concentrate on society, economy and politics in the United States in the 1980s, there are also pieces on women in Cuba, India and Kenya.