From Slavery to Poverty : The Racial Origins of Welfare in New York, 1840-1918 / Gunja SenGupta.
2009
HV99.N59 S43 2009
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Title
From Slavery to Poverty : The Racial Origins of Welfare in New York, 1840-1918 / Gunja SenGupta.
Author
SenGupta, Gunja, author.
ISBN
9780814708866
Published
New York, NY : : New York University Press, [2009]
Copyright
©2009
Language
English
Language Note
In English.
Description
1 online resource
Other Standard Identifiers
10.18574/nyu/9780814708866.001.0001 doi
Call Number
HV99.N59 S43 2009
Dewey Decimal Classification
362.509747109034
Summary
The racially charged stereotype of "welfare queen"-an allegedly promiscuous waster who uses her children as meal tickets funded by tax-payers-is a familiar icon in modern America, but as Gunja SenGupta reveals in From Slavery to Poverty, her historical roots run deep. For, SenGupta argues, the language and institutions of poor relief and reform have historically served as forums for inventing and negotiating identity.Mining a broad array of sources on nineteenth-century New York City's interlocking network of private benevolence and municipal relief, SenGupta shows that these institutions promoted a racialized definition of poverty and citizenship. But they also offered a framework within which working poor New Yorkers-recently freed slaves and disfranchised free blacks, Afro-Caribbean sojourners and Irish immigrants, sex workers and unemployed laborers, and mothers and children-could challenge stereotypes and offer alternative visions of community. Thus, SenGupta argues, long before the advent of the twentieth-century welfare state, the discourse of welfare in its nineteenth-century incarnation created a space to talk about community, race, and nation; about what it meant to be "American," who belonged, and who did not. Her work provides historical context for understanding why today the notion of "welfare"-with all its derogatory "un-American" connotations-is associated not with middle-class entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, but rather with programs targeted at the poor, which are wrongly assumed to benefit primarily urban African Americans.
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Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
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text file PDF
Source of Description
Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 18. Sep 2023)
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print 9780814740613
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Table of Contents
Frontmatter
Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Introduction
PART I
1 Subaltern Worlds in Antebellum New York
2 The White Republic and "Workfare"
3 Not White, but Worthy
PART II
4 The Color of Juvenile Justice
5 Celtic Sisters, Saxon Keepers
PART III
6 Black Voluntarism and American Identities
Epilogue
Appendix
Notes
Index
About the Author
Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Introduction
PART I
1 Subaltern Worlds in Antebellum New York
2 The White Republic and "Workfare"
3 Not White, but Worthy
PART II
4 The Color of Juvenile Justice
5 Celtic Sisters, Saxon Keepers
PART III
6 Black Voluntarism and American Identities
Epilogue
Appendix
Notes
Index
About the Author