Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States.

Isenberg, Nancy; Ginzberg, Lori D.

doi:10.2307/2071810

Cited by 16 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…Julian Butterworth of Cornell and Elmer Holbeck of Teachers College are representative of these school leaders who, by the 1920s, sought to regulate PTA activities by backing the commonly held notion that reform efforts by clubwomen should not focus on raising money but instead on cooperation and other educational ventures. 51 Butterworth argued that parent-teacher associations could potentially endanger schools if they continued their policy of contributing money and purchasing supplies for schools as they saw fit. 52 Holbeck drew similar conclusions.…”

Section: Gender and The Congress Of Mothersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Race, Gender, and the Early PTA: Civic Engagement and Public Education, 1897–1924

Woyshner

2003

Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education

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This article examines the origins of the National Parent-Teacher Association and questions its current image as a white, middle-class women's association. Founded as the National Congress of Mothers in 1897, the association was wedded to late-nineteenth century maternalist ideology that held that all women were united across race, class, and religion in their particular obligation to ensure the proper rearing of all children. The author considers this maternalism and its role in the development of the organization. First, she argues that the emphasis on woman-as-mother allowed for the rapid expansion of a national organization, which by 1920 created considerable tension between women volunteers and male school administrators. By the 1920s, male administrators succeeded in containing the influence of the PTA by employing a rhetorical strategy that separated fundraising from volunteers’ educational work. Then, the author investigates the NCM's racially inclusive policy, a central component of maternalist thinking unique for this era, and argues that it posed the greatest challenge to the organization. This historical study raises questions about the role of civic voluntary associations in public education in a democracy.

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Section: Gender and The Congress Of Mothersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Race, Gender, and the Early PTA: Civic Engagement and Public Education, 1897–1924

Woyshner

2003

Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education

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“…The social position of women was also influential. As market forces separated work and home, religion exalted women as morally superior to men but confined them to a "women's sphere" of "domesticity"-ostensibly to protect and nurture their special sensibility (Cott 1977;Ginzberg 1990;Ryan 1981). Confessional protest presented women with the opportunity to exercise moral power outside of the home and against the sins threatening it.…”

Section: Cultural Schemas and The Making Of National Social Movementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Confessional Protest: The Religious Birth of U.S. National Social Movements

Young

2002

Am Sociol Rev

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Western forms of protest were fundamentally altered in the early nineteenth century. Scholars from a “contentious politics” perspective have identified this rupture in protest forms with the emergence of the “national social movement” and explain the rupture as the result of interactions with national states. Scholars from a “life politics” perspective argue that the paradigmatic movements of today have moved beyond the political struggles of the nineteenth century and toward a new form of protest that unfolds within civil society and fuses matters of personal and social change. Protests in the United States in the 1830s, however, raise serious doubts about both of these claims. The first U.S. national social movements were not a heritage of the state and they engaged in a form of life politics. The temperance and antislavery movements emerged in interaction with religious institutions—not state institutions—and pursued goals that mixed personal and social transformation. A cultural mechanism combining the evangelical schemas of public confession and the special sins of the nation launched sustained and interregional protests. The intensive and extensive power of these confessional protests called individual and nation to repent and reform, and mobilized actors and resources within a national infrastructure of religious institutions to challenge drinking and slavery.

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“…Yet, the history of charity and philanthropy in the region remains surprisingly understudied, given its relevance and analytical contributions to adjacent subfields. The formation of philanthropic institutions, as the scholarship on charity in the European and U.S. contexts demonstrates, provides rich insight into histories of political economy, science and medicine, gender and sexuality, nationalism and imperialism, and religion and identity (Adam, 2004; Davidoff & Hall, 1987; Ginzberg, 1990; Koven & Michel, 1990). British scholarship, for instance, considers how philanthropy during the 18th and 19th centuries coincided with shifting gender and class formations in the United Kingdom and influenced new governance structures, policing mechanisms, and national welfare systems (Andrew, 1989; Moore, 1997; Prochaska, 1980).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Charity and philanthropy in Middle East history

Fallas

2023

History Compass

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Until the late 20th century, few studies focused on the history of charity and philanthropy in the Middle East from the medieval to modern periods. The work that explored this subject largely concentrated on the ideals of charitable practices, such as the faith-based tenets of social welfare as an Islamic communal practice and the religiously mandated form of almsgiving (zakat). But during the late 1990s, a new generation of scholars challenged the assumption of charity across the region as only a pious act and sought to address the dearth of literature on the subject. They shifted critical focus onto the history of philanthropy to consider and account for the social, economic, and political structures that shaped a wide range of charitable practices, activities, institutions, benefactors, and recipients. They also interrogated how communities determined the parameters of need, developed notions of the "deserving poor," and mediated the relationship between the ideals and practices of beneficence. Overlapping fields such as social history and women's studies as well as analytics of gender, class, and national identity informed and advanced historical studies of charity and philanthropy across the Middle East.The subfield continues to innovate with new work across academic disciplines and new publishing venues for further studies of charity in the region across time periods.

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Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States.

Cited by 16 publications

References 0 publications

Race, Gender, and the Early PTA: Civic Engagement and Public Education, 1897–1924

Race, Gender, and the Early PTA: Civic Engagement and Public Education, 1897–1924

Confessional Protest: The Religious Birth of U.S. National Social Movements

Charity and philanthropy in Middle East history

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