Last year, a number of social commentators, concerned about welfare and soaring illegitimate birth rates among the poor, began a rash of attacks on the unwed, uneducated, unemployed mother.

Cancel her stipends, they said. Take her children and offer them for adoption if she can't provide a suitable home once her government checks are cut off. "The child deserves society's support," explained Charles Murray in a Wall Street Journal article. "The parent does not."

In Linda Gordon's "Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare," we learn that these are not new arguments. Similar ones were made--and acted on--as early as the beginning of this century. We also learn that blaming the mother tends to worsen the very problems we wish to solve.

Gordon, a professor of American history at the University of Wisconsin, recounts the groundbreaking political and professional histories that propelled the "mothers' aid" movement, an organized campaign that sought public assistance for destitute single mothers. At the same time, she exposes the gender and racial biases embedded in those histories, cultural biases that have crippled our efforts to help the most needy of American families--female-headed households.

Until the New Deal Era, the mothers' aid movement was essentially a white women's affair led by well-intentioned, well-to-do feminists, Gordon writes. Once Franklin Roosevelt funded a national public assistance program, though, white male politicos wrested control of the movement away from their white female counterparts.

Before the Social Security Act of 1935--the law that federalized social provisions, including public aid to single mothers and children, now known as AFDC--the feminists had gained considerable influence, having virtually shaped what became the welfare state. They had also created the social-work profession.

Yet the public assistance programs they developed for their poorer sisters were paltry, far less generous than those in most other Western nations. America's female elite, Gordon tells us, shortchanged America's less privileged women.

Women in the mothers' aid movement were victims of a culture supported by a number of obdurate beliefs about race, class and the role of women in society. Largely because these feminists could not transcend these beliefs and were thus willing to accept a subordinate view of women, we are now living with their legacy, a two-tier system of public assistance.