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Private values, public policy and poverty in America, 1890-1940
Abstract
Recent welfare histories highlighting reformers, bureaucrats, and recipients of aid have added immeasurably to our understanding of welfare policy formation, but have ignored the extent to which the parameters of change were set by public opinion. Public opinion, informed by cultural values, constrained state action in ways that have been little explored. Examining the periodicals and newspapers of the mainstream, union, and African American presses as well as film, oral histories and autobiographies, I find differences by class and race, but also widespread and repetitive expressions of concerns shared by both races and by both the middle and lower middle classes. These included a strict standard of neediness, impatience with long-term aid, and a hierarchy of worthiness that privileged the previously middle-class over the working poor and families over unattached adults. In the broadest generalization, the story of is one of discontent. Ambivalence and discontent were present in the Progressive era with the inception of mothers' pensions and continued in the 1920s as social work professionalized and public and private aid increased. Discontent continued in the 1930s as public aid took on a complex and bureaucratized structure and as unprecedented need forced difficult decisions regarding worthiness and need. Throughout these changes the middle classes both created and reacted to the changing structure of welfare as they accepted or rejected programs based on a rough consensus of what constituted worthiness, need, and effective response. Many remained convinced that programs did not aid the right people sufficiently and aided the wrong people too much. Increasingly they felt estranged from those who ran the programs, the social welfare professionals. Assumptions, based in class, proved more powerful than idealogies such as gender (or maternal) solidarity and their stigma on poor adults equally as powerful as racial assumptions would come to be.
Subject Area
American history|Social work
Recommended Citation
Orelup, Margaret, "Private values, public policy and poverty in America, 1890-1940" (1995). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9606546.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9606546