| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Maureen Fitzgerald. Habits of Compassion: Irish Catholic Nuns and the Origins of New York's Welfare System, 1830–1920. (Women in American History.) Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 2006. Pp. x, 298. Cloth $50.00, paper $25.00.

This book looks to further our understanding of the gendered origins of American social welfare practice. Maureen Fitzgerald demonstrates how Roman Catholic religious sisters in New York challenged the ideology and practice of Protestant reformers embarked on a mission to save the children of the poor, and admonishes her readers to rethink their understanding of social welfare reform. New York sisters critiqued a Protestant model of dependent child care that sought to remove needy children from the presumed dangers of city streets and their own families by placing them out in "good" families to learn another kind of life. With a completely different ideology and agenda, sisters built institutions for the children they deemed theirs and received public money to run them. Sisters made real what Fitzgerald emphasizes was a distinctive Catholic conceptualization of family. "Catholic championing of the parental rights of the poor proved the foundation for a child-care system (and a means of combating poverty in its entirety) that was fundamentally at odds with Protestantism" (p. 79).

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