Women's Associations and the Emergence of a Social State: Protection for Mothers and Children in Buenos Aires, 1920–1940

This paper examines the women's association movement in Buenos Aires between 1920 and 1940, and its connection with the emergence of a social state. Subsidised by the state, associations led by upper-class women provided a significant number of social assistance services to mothers, working women and children, and had a notable impact on the design of social policy. While historiography concurs that by 1930 the significance of this charitably oriented women's movement had started to decline, being replaced by public welfare services, this paper seeks to question such a conclusion by analysing three of the most important women's social welfare associations in the period and showing how, having become the maternal face of the state, they retained a central role in the provision of social assistance until well into the 1930s, thus helping to prevent the state from becoming a ‘colossal bureaucratic machine’.