During the 1920s, progressive women activists invented welfare to help mothers and their children survive when breadwinning fathers either died or abandoned their families. During the 1930s, the local mothers' pension programs of the Progressive Era became part of the emerging national welfare state, which was conceived to relieve poor single mothers of the necessity of wage earning and allow them to engage in full-time care of their children. Over the years, welfare was viewed less as an alternative to wages and more as a safety net for mothers when wages are not available to them. Across the decades, a principal aim of welfare fixes has been to restore the system's moral levers, and the question of how to induce poor single mothers to conform to patriarchal conventions has been a recurrent theme in legislative debates over welfare policy. The 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act ended welfare by withdrawing the Social Security Act's promise of economic assistance to poor caregivers and their children. The Personal Responsibility Act is more intrusive and patriarchal than any previous national welfare policy. Its provisions repudiate single mothers' caregiving work and impose mandatory work requirements without creating jobs. (Contains 325 chapter endnotes.) (MN)