UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Book Jacket: "Welfare Politics in Boston" by S. Traverso

Susan Traverso

Traces the development of the modern welfare system in a major American city

Different conceptions of the purpose of charity and the role of the state have long been at the center of the debate over American welfare policy. Yet as Susan Traverso shows in this informative study of early twentieth-century Boston, ethnic, religious, and gender conflicts also have had a significant impact on welfare politics.

Between 1910 and 1940, Boston's growing immigrant population repeatedly clashed with the city's traditional elite over how to provide assistance to the needy. While Yankee politicians and the leaders of Protestant charities argued that relief should be delivered by private organizations, Irish politicians and officials at Catholic and Jewish charities advocated extensive public welfare programs. Competing views of gender roles further complicated these disagreements. The campaign for widows' pensions, for example, won wide popular support even as public welfare programs that would primarily benefit men-such as unemployment insurance and old age assistance-failed to gain acceptance.

In the 1920s, the debate over welfare shifted focus as prolonged periods of unemployment brought demands for aid to men who had lost their jobs, particularly those with families to support. Using the rhetoric of the Mothers' Aid campaign, Irish politicians broadened the idea of "acceptable dependency" to include men who needed jobs to provide for their own dependents. By lessening the stigma of male dependency on public welfare, these gendered arguments encouraged the expansion of public aid and set the stage for New Deal welfare programs of the 1930s. During that decade, Traverso contends, the idealized family headed by a male breadwinner became the basis for a shared vision of gender relations that mediated the political and ethnic debate over welfare policy.

"Traverso's study of Boston illuminates the history of social welfare in new ways by focusing on the ethnic politics behind the city's policies. Showing that Protestants, Catholics, and Jews differed in their views of social welfare, her innovative analysis moves the debate about American welfare history decisively forward."

Kathryn Kish Sklar, Binghamton University
"Discussions of the origins of the welfare state and the role of gender in public life during this era often lack a sense of place, time, and contingency, hallmarks of good history. By situating the development of social welfare policies in a concrete historical context, Traverso shows how assumptions about gender intersected with class, ethnic, and religious conflicts to shape assistance to the poor."

James J. Connolly, Ball State University

Susan Traverso is assistant professor of history at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois.

American History / Political Science
184 pp.
$34.95s cloth, ISBN 1-55849-378-6
April 2003

A volume in the series Political Development of the American Nation: Studies in Politics and History

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