Mark Peel. Miss Cutler and the Case of the Resurrected Horse

Comparative histories are by their very nature ambitious projects, requiring the mastery of multiple historiographies and contextual information. In the delightfully titled Miss Cutler and the Case of the Resurrected Horse, Mark Peel compares the development of social work and attitudes regarding poverty and the poor in three different but related countries. He makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of how ideas and people flowed among Britain, Australia, and the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. These countries shared common linguistic and legal structures. Their legal systems largely remained rooted in English common law, although remnants of the Napoleonic code and community property systems influenced some American states. However, Peel contends that divergent national contexts, preoccupations, and value systems shaped charity and welfare structures even within the common frameworks and interchanges of ideas. Peel investigates the similarities and differences of social work in Melbourne, London, Boston, Minneapolis, and Portland. He gives careful attention to the ways in which the impoverished crafted their stories to obtain assistance on their own terms. He demonstrates the richness and the limitations of casework records as a source for historians. Peel shows how the performance of gender by clients, administrators, and caseworkers shaped the outcomes and understandings of social assistance. In all three countries, the gendered ideology of the family wage privileged male breadwinning activity and tended to impoverish the old, ill, infirm, and unmarried women.

Ideology · Political science · Politics · Poverty · Sociology · Underclass · Value (mathematics) · Welfare · Work (physics) · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies