Book Review

Naming the Poor in Late Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia

Susan Traverso
North Central College

Sherri Broder's Tramps, Unfit Mothers, and Neglected Children contributes to an unfolding literature on welfare history. Studying Philadelphia, Broder explores the institutional practices of two late-nineteenth century programs for the poor, one for the prevention of child abuse and another for unwed mothers. Broder's aim, however, is broader than tracing institutional history. Using these programs' records as well as a variety of sources, including labor union publications and popular literature, Broder argues that the labels used to describe the poor were setting normative ideals for economic and family relations while also acting as "sites of cultural contention." Broder's work is an ambitious effort to weave together a social and cultural history of Philadelphia's response to urban poverty.

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Broder begins by establishing "the main characters in the late nineteenth-century family morality tale." Creatively linking literary sources with case records and labor tracts, Broder identifies the tramp, the fallen woman, and the waif as "central representations" of the urban poor. Broder sees a common language emerging in the discourse about the poor but argues that social reformers, labor leaders, evangelical groups, and the poor themselves imbued that language with different meanings. Sharing pejorative terms, all recognized urban poverty and family dissolution as serious social concerns; however, they offered divergent interpretations for the causes of poverty and family difficulties. Labor leaders believed economic injustice underlay family poverty; welfare reformers identified urban social relations, in some cases economic, as the deterrent to family well-being; and evangelical groups considered individual moral failure the explanation. Broder is careful not to present labor leaders as the voice of the poor. In fact, she argues that labor leadership represented a "respectable" working class who considered "rougher" and poorer urban laborers as much a threat to organized labor's vision of social stability as economic inequality. Specifically, Broder highlights the ways labor leaders advanced the ideal of the family wage, criticized women wage earners, and, consequently, contributed to the stigmatizing of poor women, particularly African American women, who had to work for their own survival and the support of their families.

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