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Reviews
| Wives without Husbands: Marriage, Desertion, and Welfare in New York, 1900–1935. By Anne R. Igra. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. xiii + 175 pp. Photos, notes, bibliography, and index. $49.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).
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In 1911 the National Conference of Jewish Charities founded an offshoot agency, the National Desertion Bureau (NDB), to combat acts of male abandonment in New York's Jewish immigrant community. The American Jewish elite who funded this organization believed that by forcing male deserters to reunite with and provide for their families, they could both acculturate Jewish immigrants into the prevailing middle-class male breadwinning culture and simultaneously dissolve what the elite perceived to be a societal ill that threatened the reputation of the Jewish community as a whole. However, as Anne Igra demonstrates in this excellent study, the goals of the NDB were quite different from those of the deserted families they hoped to help. |
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Gender expectations of both sexes held by the workers of the NDB were heavily influenced by Progressive Era politics and not necessarily in touch with the reality of the Jewish immigrant population. For example, the NDB maintained that the ideal Jewish family operated with a sole male breadwinner and his wife and children as his dependents. However, almost all immigrant households centered around a "family economy," with all able family members contributing to "one pot." These men, overwhelmingly garment workers, found seasonal employment and relied on their wives and older children to contribute in the form of taking in boarders for the former and factory work for the latter. Therefore, as Igra demonstrates, NDB expectations focused on creating a family situation that would rarely materialize. |
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In addition to her focus on the beliefs and actions of the NDB staff, Igra also includes the voices of the women who applied for assistance through the NDB and other charitable agencies. In chapter 4, which provides the most fascinating material of this study, Igra traces the reasons why most women turned to the NDB for assistance and how the NDB workers in turn viewed these petitioners. Few women who petitioned the NDB as "deserted wives" sought their missing husbands because of lost love or affection. In fact, many tried keeping themselves and their families afloat after their husbands' departures, deciding to seek assistance only after they found themselves unable to make ends meet financially. This, of course, led to clashes with the NDB workers, who wanted to find the male deserters in order to reconcile a family unit and to make sure that these men fulfilled their social "masculine" role as breadwinners. Igra reports that in over 60 percent of the cases that she studied, the NDB applicants waited over three months after their husbands' desertion before deciding to petition for assistance. Only when illness or finances became dire would most women begin to hold their husbands accountable for contributions. The female applicants, on the whole, preferred receiving financial assistance from the NDB and other charities in order to continue supporting their families themselves rather than assisting the NDB in reuniting with their husbands. |
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Igra's final chapters turn to the courts and the battles over how to prosecute the deserting husbands and how to treat their deserted families. On the whole, Igra finds that the NDB was able to find deserted husbands and enforce these men's support of their families at a rate of only 3 percent. Yet while appearing to fail in reaching its goal, Igra argues that the work of the NDB and other reform agencies was successful in setting the stage for debates over anti-desertion and welfare reform still raging in today's judicial system. Here, it would have added valuable dimension to the study if Igra had included a comparison with how other ethnic groups conceptualized deserted women within their own communities and how these women, in turn, encountered the courts. |
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Igra's study on deserted women and anti-desertion reform offers an excellent glimpse into the social welfare debates of the early twentieth century and how Progressive Era rhetoric clashed with the daily realities of the working class. She achieves this by highlighting the class and gender dimensions of this struggle within New York's Jewish community. This book is a welcome addition to anyone in the fields of American Jewish history, legal history, and women's studies.
Shira Kohn Levy
New York University
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