| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Tramps, Unfit Mothers, and Neglected Children: Negotiating the Family in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia. By Sherri Broder. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. viii, 259 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-8122-3654-8.)

In late-nineteenth-century charitable institutions such as the Pennsylvania Society to Protect Children from Cruelty (SPCC) and the Haven for Unwed Mothers and Infants (pseud.), working-class families and wealthy charitable elites came together to negotiate over ideology and material resources. Agency case records supply richly detailed descriptions of those negotiations, and the historian Sherri Broder has used these records, along with a significant amount of reform literature, to produce a book that will rank among the best microstudies of social provision in Victorian urban America.

Although she read "roughly 10,000 cases" in SPCC records, Broder's purpose was not to calculate the impact of aid on working-class budgets. "My strategy was to read closely rather than to quantify," she explains (p. 208, n. 6). What interests her are the complicated reverberations of reform and charitable intervention in poor families and neighborhoods.

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