Search Results for: child labor

Settlement Houses: An Introduction

Written by John E. Hansan, Ph.D. ” The establishment and expansion of social settlements and neighborhood houses in the United States corresponded closely with the Progressive Era, the struggle for woman suffrage, the absorption of millions of new immigrants into American society and the development of professional social work.”

Origins of the State and Federal Public Welfare Programs (1932 – 1935)

The history of public welfare in the United States has been one of continuing change and growth. Prior to the 1900’s local governments shared with private charitable organizations major responsibility for public assistance or as it was often termed, “public relief.” As the nation’s economy became more industrial and the population more concentrated in urban areas, the need for public relief often grew beyond the means, and sometimes the willingness, of local public and private authorities to provide needed assistance. During the Progressive Era, some state governments began to assume more responsibility for helping the worthy poor. By 1926, forty states had established some type of public relief program for mothers with dependent children. A few states also provided cash assistance to needy elderly residents through old-age pensions.

The First Department of Public Welfare in the U.S.

In 1909, the Mayor of Kansas City, Missouri appointed a body of prominent community leaders with experience in dealing with social problems in the city and asked them to visit large cities all over the country and learn what was being done in those cities to deal with poverty and the unemployed. From the findings of their reports and their own ideas about what to do, the commission then set out to devise a plan to create a new agency: The Kansas City Department of Public Welfare.

Poor Relief in the Early America

Poor Relief in Early America by John E. Hansan, Ph.D. Introduction Early American patterns of publicly funded poor relief emerged mainly from the English heritage of early settlers. The policies and practices of aiding the poor current in England when the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, Massachusetts were shaped primarily by the Elizabethan Poor Laws of…

The Widows’ Pension Movement and its Connection to Orphanages

Widows and Waifs: New York City and the American Way to Welfare, 1913-1916 by June Hopkins, Ph. D. Associate Professor, Armstrong Atlantic State University Background In New York City, during the early decades of the 20th century, progressive reformers made deliberate use of the child-saving impulse to initiate a new welfare methodology. This had a…

Adoption

Written by Professor Ellen Herman, University of Oregon. “Since ancient times and in all human cultures, children have been transferred from adults who would not or could not be parents to adults who wanted them for love, labor, and property. Adoption’s close association with humanitarianism, upward mobility, and infertility, however, are uniquely modern phenomena.”

Founders

Founding Scholars Advisory Committee These distinguished scholars worked with John E. Hansan to shape the original Social Welfare History Project that launched in 2010. Their expertise as researchers and educators helped create the conceptual framework for the site, along with the scholarly articles they contributed. Allida Black, Ph.D., is a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at…

Burns, Eveline

As a staff member of the Presidential Committee on Economic Security in 1934, she helped formulate the specifics of the Social Security Act as it was eventually passed by Congress. She was later director of research for the Committee on Long-Range Work and Relief Policies of the National Resources Planning Board. The committee’s report published in 1942, shaped the public assistance and work programs as they developed throughout the 1940’s. Through her teaching at Columbia of comparative social security systems, she helped educate a generation of scholars in the United States who carried on important research in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Among the honors received by Dr. Burns, was a Florina Lasker Social Work Award in 1964 contributions “as an outstanding authority on social security systems throughout the world.”