S. J. KLEINBERG. Widows and Orphans First: The Family Economy and Social Welfare Policy, 1880-1939. (Women in American History.) Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 2006. Pp. xiv, 230. $35.00

Abstract

Over the past twenty years, a wealth of publications in several disciplines have reexamined the origins of the U.S. welfare state and offered critical reassessments. New perspectives on the interaction between contemporary race and gender systems and the politics of the Progressive era and the New Deal have led to new interpretations of the meaning of citizenship as well as the interrelationship between labor systems and social provision. S. J. Kleinberg promises to add two elements to the field: the distinctive features of the working-class family economy and an analysis of the development of programs for widows across the life course. How did widows and orphans fare, she asks, during the decades of free-wheeling industrialization, decentralized government, and a transition in the infrastructure of public and private aid? The agency of widows within their specific environments has been overlooked, Kleinberg argues, as the literature has portrayed widows as both helpless and passive. Quickly dispensing with the minority of economically privileged widows, she focuses on those in economic need. Social welfare policy for these widows' families had more to do with the availability of jobs and the charity infrastructure of particular localities than with values such as maternalism, which have received attention in the literature. A comparison of three localities—Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and Fall River, Massachusetts—over six decades reveals more clearly how the family economy operated and how public policy supplanted the family initiative with expectations of age and gender. The sites were chosen for their distinctly different employment opportunities and charity structures.