Page 2: "The United States . . . did not follow other Western nations on the road toward a paternalist welfare state, in which male bureaucrats would administer regulations and social insurance 'for the good' of breadwinning industrial workers. Instead, America came close to forging a maternalist welfare state, with female-dominated public agencies implementing regulations and benefits for the good of women and their children. From 1900 through the early 1920s, a broad array of protective labor regulations and social benefits were enacted by state legislatures and the national Congress to help adult American women as mothers or as potential mothers." Women reformers especially wanted to help families sustain themselves and to develop. Page 3: "Women aimed to extend the domestic morality of the nineteenth century's 'separate sphere' for women into the nation's public life." In other words, maternalist reform sought to extend domestic ideals into public life.