Social Welfare History Project Poverty

Edelman, Marian Wright

By SWHP staff, 2022. Marian Wright Edelman has been recognized and celebrated for her talents and tireless advocacy on behalf of children and families. Edelman was founder and president of the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF).

Economic Inequality: An Introduction

By Steve Greenlaw, Ph. D., 2020. Brought up on the Declaration of Independence and the idea that all people are created equal, Americans have traditionally described themselves as living in a classless society. This classless society meant that individual effort and talent contributed to one’s place in society. The vast majority of Americans, it has been believed, are middle class. Looking at the data, however, it’s clear that economic inequality exists. But what is it? Economic inequality is the unequal distribution of income (earnings) or wealth (net worth or savings) in a society.

Food Assistance in the United States

By Laura Crouch, 2020. In the United States, millions of people face hunger and food insecurity each day. Unable to provide for themselves and their families, they turn to food assistance programs for both short and long term needs. The USDA defines food insecurity as “a household-level economic and social condition of limited or uncertain access to adequate food” (USDA, 2019). About 40 million Americans struggle with food insecurity each year.

Segregation. Color Pattern from the Past–Our Struggle to Wipe it Out. Survey Graphic, January 1947

This item may also be read through the Internet Archive. Materials related to this topic may also be found in the Social Welfare History Image Portal.

Tenement House Reform

Primary sources related to tenement house reforms in the State of New York and the passage of the New York State Tenement House Act of 1901.

Seventeenth Street Mission, Richmond VA

In 1911, Murray Grey and other students from Union Theological Seminary in Virginia (later, Union Presbyterian Seminary) started The Seventeenth Street Mission, a settlement house and urban ministry outreach program in Shockoe Bottom, the most impoverished neighborhood of Richmond, Va.

Children Who Labor – film (1912)

“Children Who Labor” was a collaboration between the Edison Company and the National Child Labor Committee, the nonprofit organization founded in 1904 and chartered by Congress to promote the rights of “children and youth as they relate to work and working.”

Tuberculosis

By Alice W. Campbell and Catherine A. Paul, 2017. Tuberculosis has been known by many names throughout history, among them “consumption,” “the white death,” and “the great white plague.” Tuberculosis remains one of the world’s most deadly diseases.

Poverty: An Anthropologist’s View – 1961

This means that we must give money in amounts generous enough to be really constructive, to people who have done nothing to earn or deserve it. This brings us back to the barrier of the relative values prevailing in our society. The necessary generosity will be forthcoming only when our society really accepts the premise that people are deserving simply because they are people; that is, because they are fellow human beings.

To be realistic, this acceptance will not develop magically or through appeals to conscience. Power rests in the middle class. And we in the middle class are notoriously anxious and defensive in the presence of people whose way of life is more primitive and violent than our own. We are threatened, and hence our response is rejection, not acceptance.

Indoor And Outdoor Relief (1890)

A Report of the Committee by F. B. Sanborn, Chairman, at the Seventeenth Annual Session of the National Conference of Charities And Correction, 1890. “Both indoor relief…and family aid, or outdoor relief, as properly practiced, are both indispensable in any comprehensive plan of public charity. Wherever and whenever one of these methods has been wholly given up, accidentally or purposely, evils have followed which only the introduction of the omitted method could wholly remove.”