Episode #46: Michelle Bezark
Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy.
You can’t talk about modern child and family policy without referencing the Social Security Act.
For nearly a century, thinking about these issues has meant thinking through the architecture and assumptions of that framework.
But today’s guest points to the road almost taken, and what it reveals about the policy architecture we inherited instead.
Michelle Bezark is a social welfare policy historian and early childhood policy researcher.
Her new book, Making Babies Count, unpacks the history of the Sheppard-Towner Act.
It’s the less well-known maternal-child health law that forged the modern administrative state, shaping the federal-state framework for social policy upon which the New Deal would later build.
We talked about what becomes possible when policy makes families and government legible to each other, and what that means for anyone working to shape what comes next in child and family policy.
The successes, setbacks, and contradictions in Sheppard-Towner underpin much of what we take as given in safety net policy.
Understanding this history does not offer tidy lessons. But it does surface new ways of seeing the central tensions child and family policy continues to grapple with, a century later.
