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This collection of twelve essays represents an important contribution to the understanding of child welfare and social action in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They challenge many assumptions about the history of childhood and child welfare policy and cover a variety of themes including the ...

This collection of twelve essays represents an important contribution to the understanding of child welfare and social action in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They challenge many assumptions about the history of childhood and child welfare policy and cover a variety of themes including the physical and sexual abuse of children, forced child migration and role of the welfare state.

The beginning of the twentieth century witnessed a remarkable growth of corporate welfare programs in American industry. By the mid-1920s, 80 percent of the nation's largest companies--firms including DuPont, International Harvester, and Metropolitan Life Insurance--engaged in some form of welfare ...

The beginning of the twentieth century witnessed a remarkable growth of corporate welfare programs in American industry. By the mid-1920s, 80 percent of the nation's largest companies--firms including DuPont, International Harvester, and Metropolitan Life Insurance--engaged in some form of welfare work. Programs were implemented to achieve goals that ranged from improving basic workplace conditions, to providing educational, recreational, and social opportunities for workers and their families, to establishing savings and insurance plans.

Employing the critical lens of gender analysis, Nikki Mandell offers an innovative perspective on the development of corporate welfare. She argues that its advocates sought to build a new relationship between labor and management by recasting the modern corporation as a Victorian family. Employers assumed the authoritative position of fathers, assigned their employees the subordinate role of children, and hired male and female welfare managers to act as "corporate mothers" charged with creating a harmonious household. But internal conflict and external pressures weakened the corporate welfare system, and it eventually gave way to a system of personnel management and employee representation. With the abandonment of the familial model, the form of corporate welfare changed; but, as Mandell demonstrates, its content left an enduring legacy for modern industrial relations.

Different conceptions of the purpose of charity and the role of the state have long been at the center of the debate over American welfare policy. Yet as Susan Traverso shows in this informative study of early twentieth-century Boston, ethnic, religious, and gender conflicts also have had a ...

Different conceptions of the purpose of charity and the role of the state have long been at the center of the debate over American welfare policy. Yet as Susan Traverso shows in this informative study of early twentieth-century Boston, ethnic, religious, and gender conflicts also have had a significant impact on welfare politics.

Between 1910 and 1940, Boston's growing immigrant population repeatedly clashed with the city's traditional elite over how to provide assistance to the needy. While Yankee politicians and the leaders of Protestant charities argued that relief should be delivered by private organizations, Irish politicians and officials at Catholic and Jewish charities advocated extensive public welfare programs. Competing views of gender roles further complicated these disagreements. The campaign for widows' pensions, for example, won wide popular support even as public welfare programs that would primarily benefit men -- such as unemployment insurance and old age assistance -- failed to gain acceptance.

In the 1920s, the debate over welfare shifted focus as prolonged periods of unemployment brought demands for aid to men who had lost their jobs, particularly those with families to support. Using the rhetoric of the Mothers' Aid campaign, Irish politicians broadened the idea of "acceptable dependency" to include men who needed jobs to provide for their own dependents. By lessening the stigma of male dependency on public welfare, these gendered arguments encouraged the expansion of public aid and set the stage for New Deal welfare programs of the 1930s. During that decade, Traverso contends, the idealized family headed by a male breadwinner became the basis for a sharedvision of gender relations that mediated the political and ethnic debate over welfare policy.