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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 362.973
EAN num: 9780814756546
ISBN number: 0814756549
Label: NYU Press
Manufacturer: NYU Press
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 864
Printing Date: September 01, 2003
Publishing house: NYU Press
Release Date: September 01, 2003
Sale Popularity Level: 833218
Studio: NYU Press
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View the Table of Contents. Read the Foreword.
'The debate over welfare suffers from lack of historical perspective. Now come Mink and Solinger to transform our understanding with a clearly articulated, carefully organized, and judiciously selected collection of key sources and illustrative documents that illuminates the past and present of aid to poor women and their children. Essential for classroom use, this book also belongs on the desks of policy makers and activists alike.'
—Eileen Boris, Hull Professor of Women's Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara
'A stirringly dramatic narrative of welfare policy history. Through the documents they select, Mink and Solinger bring to life an immensely important human drama, and they do so in a way that paves a path to a higher awareness of the deeply ingrained biases of gender, race, and class that operate in welfare policy.'
—Social Service Review
Federal welfare policy has been a political and cultural preoccupation in the United States for nearly seven decades. Debates about who poor people are, how they got that way, and what the government should do about poverty were particularly bitter and misleading at the end of the twentieth century. These public discussions left most Americans with far more attitude than information about poverty, the poor, and poverty policy in the United States.
In response, Gwendolyn Mink and Rickie Solinger compiled the very first documentary history of welfare in America, from its origins through the present. Welfare: A Documentary History of U.S. Policy and Politics provides historical context for understanding recent policy developments, as it traces public opinion, recipients' experiences, and policy continuities and innovations over time. The documents collected range across more than 100 years, from government documents and proclamations of presidents throughout the 20th century, to accounts of activist and grass roots organizations, newspaper reports and editorials, political cartoons, posters and more.
They enable readers to go straight to the source to find out how public figures racialized welfare in the minds of white Americans, to explore the origins of the claim that poor women have babies in order to collect welfare, and to trace how that notion has been perpetuated and contested. The documents also illustrate how policymakers in different eras have invoked and politicized the idea of dependency, as well as how ideas about women's dependency have followed changing characterizations of poor women as workers and as mothers.
Welfare provides a picture of the government's evolving ideas about poverty and provision, along side powerful examples of the voices too often eclipsed in the public square—welfare recipients and their advocates, speaking about mothering, poverty, and human rights.
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This is a very difficult read. The authors present us with about 187 chapters of documents written between 1884 to 2002 from hundreds of different authors. This may be a fine set of reference for anybody who wishes to write a "good" documentary history of Welfare. However, its presentatation is disjointed. Wonderful history books present us with relevant facts and insights on a particular subject. The chapters of good history books are written by one or two authors which yield a smooth, telling of the story. This is more like a compilation of good raw material and references which must precede a history book. The authors started a promising project. They retrieved valuable reference documents. Afterwards, they simply copied their reference documents. The authors forgot to write a book.
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