In her latest opus, Donna Guy traces the evolution of social welfare policy in Argentina from the 1880s through the first Peronist era ending in 1955. Focusing on child welfare and family law, Guy stresses broad continuities in the approach to social issues not only across the decades but between social groups commonly assumed to be on opposite sides of most questions in Argentine history. While insisting that women’s social work is crucial to the development of welfare states, Guy raises any number of interesting questions about the Argentine case.Of course there were differences in ideas about family and society, and Guy’s subtitle points to the two groups of women deemed most instrumental to the development of the welfare state. On the one hand, middle- and upper-class women performed charity to benefit children in need, and on the other, feminist women sought to create legal and economic rights. Philanthropic women gained status through the large institutions they administered and the number of children they aided. Guy starts from the interesting observation that in nineteenth-century Argentina, these married women had more rights over the orphans in their asylums than over their own biological children. Feminists sought to create rights for mothers and provide education for them and their children as a means to prevent abandonment, delinquency, and institutionalization.While carefully analyzing these differences over time, Guy’s emphasis remains on the role of women in elevating social policy to the national level, and she asserts that “analyzed as a group, their combined activities provided a blueprint of social policies for the subsequent formation of a Peronist welfare state based upon concerns for children and mothers” (p. 57). Her discussion of the performance of charity is important and leads to irresistible comparisons with Eva Perón as the performer of public love. Yet the primary element of continuity throughout the period is the support among all manner of social agencies, public health officials, sociologists, and others from all political parties for increasingly large state subsidies to private benevolent groups to manage the care and feeding of abandoned children, orphans, and delinquents and sometimes their defective relations with parents.Along with the growth of various philanthropic endeavors, Guy documents the shifting political and legislative changes that eventually brought about reform of patria potestad, legalization of adoption, regulation of child labor, criminalization of child abuse, and increasing rights first for single mothers and then married women. The turning point of the Great Depression enabled this transition even as state welfare remained reliant on subsidized philanthropy through the early 1940s. The beginning of the end to massive subsidies came in 1943 with the creation of the National Directorate of Public Health and Social Assistance. As new state agencies began to emerge from the welter of private benevolence, Guy explores the manner in which the work of both philanthropic and feminist women was absorbed and co-opted by Peronism, arguing that the new welfare state was labeled Peronist because that party was finally able to get the legislation passed. The “new Peronist family in fact owed its origins to a composite of conservative, feminist, socialist, and radical plans to reform the civil code” (p. 184). In the end, the Eva Perón Foundation was swept as inexorably as the institutions of the Society of Beneficence into a masculinized welfare bureaucracy.Given the number of complex strands that Guy weaves into her chapters, her book will be most enjoyable to students who bring a familiarity with Argentine history to their reading. One need not be entirely persuaded of all of Guy’s claims in order to derive important insights from her work. Her scholarship combines a sweeping command of the literature on gender and welfare with an intimate understanding of the Argentine particulars based in an incredible wealth of archival research. For these reasons the book may be profitably read by analysts of gender, of welfare states, and of Argentine social politics.
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Aug 27, 2013
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