|
|
|
Book Reviews
The Limits of Progressive Era Welfare Reform
| KLEINBERG, S. J. Widows and Orphans First: The Family Economy and Social Welfare Policy, 1880–1939. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. xiv + 230 pp. Introduction, notes, index. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-252-03020-8.KRAINZ, THOMAS A. Delivering Aid: Implementing Progressive Era Welfare in the American West. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. xiv + 325 pp. Introduction, illustrations, appendix, notes, index. $37.50 (cloth), ISBN 0-8263-3025-8.
|
|
Taken together, S.J. Kleinberg and Thomas Krainz offer a useful corrective to the literature on the Progressive Era welfare state. They argue that the Progressive Era does not represent as big of a shift as has been previously claimed.1 Most significantly, by looking at the local-level implementation of state welfare reform policies, the authors find many inconsistencies and gaps between the mandated aims of the programs and how they were implemented (or not). In spite of the sweeping nature of many states' mothers' compensation laws, for instance, they find that county officials withheld funding, blocked implementation, or incompletely followed the provisions of the laws. Furthermore, biases against white mothers working for wages starkly contrast with officials' insistence that minority women continue to work. These biases allowed those who crafted Progressive Era and then New Deal laws to create a structure of unequal wages and inadequate work relief for those women and minorities who did need to work for wages. Consequently, white male wage-earners remained privileged above all others, in spite of reformers' claims to be working on behalf of all women and children. |
1
|
|
S. J. Kleinberg uses Baltimore, Pittsburgh and Fall River, Massachusetts, as her three case studies of the implementation of widows' pensions. Widows' pensions (often called mothers' pensions) were based on the notion that mothers should not have to have wage-earning jobs but should instead stay at home with their children. Kleinberg shows how local conditions shaped women's access to these pensions. In Pittsburgh, where women's employment rates were low and men dominated the steel industry (and died more often in work-related accidents), the city provided more and relatively more generous pensions than did Fall River, a textile mill city where women had far greater opportunities to find wage-earning work and were expected to do so. Kleinberg argues, "In theory pensions subsidized poor families, permitted children under the age of fourteen to attend school, and allowed mothers to concentrate on domesticity. In practice,...inadequate funding and restrictive acceptance criteria accelerated the trend toward younger mothers' participation in the labor force and the substitution of maternal for child labor....Policy makers viewed family stability as being in the interest of the state, but their opposition to maternal employment did not extend to African Americans or other people of color" (9–10). |
2
|
|
Baltimore serves as Kleinberg's example of a southern border city with a comparatively large (16 percent) proportion of African Americans. White Baltimore city officials took advantage of the fact that Maryland's 1916 Mothers' Assistance Act allowed cities and counties to opt out of the program. Eager to keep black women in the labor market as a cheap pool of labor, Baltimore's mayor steadfastly refused to spend any tax dollars on services that might be accessed by black women as well as white; to ensure this, he did not distribute any widows' pensions at all. |
. . . |
There are about 1482 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
