Strategies and Tactics: The Politics of Subsistence in Berlin, 1770–1850

Abstract

The possibilities that poor women and men had for earning a living were oriented not only around income and professional opportunities, but around the practical competencies they possessed in an urban culture of beseeching and begging. The reform policy of the state, which sought to integrate poor-relief officials and members of the almsgiving middle class into the poor-relief administration, was directed against “politics on the street”. The introduction of municipal self-administration promoted an institutionalization of poor-relief policy that excluded woman on the basis of their sex. In the stereotypical discourses of the era, images of the “poor mother” and the “loose wench” became symbols of a new poor-relief policy. As someone who begged, the “poor mother” was the subject of a culture of beseeching and begging; as the wretched mother abandoned by her husband, she became the ideal object of an institutionalized poor-relief policy. The stylization of women as passive victims and the exclusion of women from municipal institutions worked together to establish a new order of charity.