This book explores the historical evolution of such claims, and their relationship to the rise of women's movements and the emergence of welfare states in Western industrializing countries at the turn of the 19th century.

Introduction: "Mother Worlds", Seth Koven, Sonya Michel; Chapter 1 The Historical Foundations of Women's Power in the Creation of the American Welfare State, 1830-1930, Kathryn Kish Sklar; Chapter 2 Borderlands: Women, Voluntary Action, and Child Welfare in Britain, 1840 to 1914, Seth Koven; Chapter 3 Social Mothers: The Bourgeois Women's Movement and German Welfare-State Formation, 1890-1929, Christoph Sachße; Chapter 4 Woman's Work and the Early Welfare State in Germany: Legislators, Bureaucrats, and Clients before the First World War, Jean H. Quataert; Chapter 5 Depopulation and Race Suicide: Maternalism and Pronatalist Ideologies in France and the United States, Alisa Klaus; Chapter 6 The Power of Motherhood: Black and White Activist Women Redefine the "Political", Eileen Boris; Chapter 7 Catholicism, Feminism, and the Politics of the Family during the late Third Republic, Susan Pedersen; Chapter 8 The Limits of Maternalism: Policies Toward American Wage-Earning Mothers During the Progressive Era, Sonya Michel; Chapter 9 "My Work Came Out of Agony and Grief": Mothers and the Making of the Sheppard-Towner Act, Molly Ladd-Taylor; Chapter 10 Women in the British Labour Part y and the Construction of State Welfare, 1906-1939, Pat Thane; Chapter 11 A Revolution in the Family: The Challenge and Contradictions of Maternal Citizenship in Australia, Marilyn Lake; Chapter 12 Feminist Strategies and Gendered Discourses in Welfare States: Married Women's Right to Work in the United States and Sweden, Barbara Hobson;