Sonya Michel, Ph.D., Professor, American Studies and History, University of Maryland. Her research areas include gender and social policy in the U.S. and in comparative perspective, and she is particularly interested in the relationship between the public and private sectors and social provision. Among her publications are Children’s Interests/Mothers’Rights: The Shaping of America’s Child Care Policy; Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (co-edited with Seth Koven), and Child Care Policy at the Crossroads: Gender and Welfare State Restructuring (co-edited with Rianne Mahon). She is a founding co-editor of the journal Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society. In 2005-6, she is a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, where she is completing a study with the working title “Old-Age Insecurity: Instability and Inequity in America’s Public-Private Welfare State.”