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Book Review
Canada and the United States
| Sherri Broder. Tramps, Unfit Mothers, and Neglected Children: Negotiating the Family in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2002. Pp. 259. $39.95.
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| No one in the contemporary United States can be unaware of how the debate on family and family values is being used by all sides of the political spectrum to promote and justify their preferred social legislation. Sherri Broder turns to late nineteenth-century Philadelphia to discover possible origins of the debate over family, how competing "discourses" about the working-class family shaped nascent social welfare movements in that city, and how the participants in these discourses used family to make "claims on the state, the police, and public and private social services" (p. 6). Using institutional records from the Pennsylvania Society to Protect Children from Cruelty (SPCC), the pseudonymous "Haven for Unwed Mothers and Infants," the published work of national and local charity organizations, and the labor press, Broder focuses on the discourse of charity and child welfare reformers, labor activists, and evangelical Protestant women rescue workers, but her book also includes the stories of less privileged Philadelphians who petitioned these groups for help or who contested attempts to control their families. |
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