Widows and Orphans First

The limited attention given widows in women's history publications motivated this careful study of how social policy and economic conditions influenced and diversified widows' family economy in the early twentieth century. S. J. Kleinberg positions the impoverishment of most widows' families at the core of calls for social welfare reform. This explains the book's title, though descriptions of continuing hardship show the irony of being “first.” The author combines national census demographics and manuscript census details from Baltimore, Maryland, Fall River, Massachusetts, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to illustrate that no single model represents widows' family economy. Quantitative and qualitative evidence from these cities describes varying degrees of reliance on working, receiving charity, placing children in orphanages, and residing in old age homes. Attitudes about self-sufficiency, family roles, and race opened opportunities in some places and closed them in others. One of the book's strengths is its attention to race. Selection of Baltimore guaranteed that African American widows' experiences would be part of the analysis. Proportionately, they were more likely than white women to be widowed and less likely to receive help from outside the family

Census · Demographics · Economic growth · Economics · Family economy · Political science · Population · Race (biology · Social policy · Social Welfare · Sociology · Welfare · White (mutation · Demography · Gender Studies · Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics · Grief, Bereavement, and Mental Health · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Law

• Fleeing the Big Burn

  Open Access•Thomas A Krainz•Journal of Policy History•2012

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