Woodslane | Book - 9780252035470

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Poverty, Charity, and Motherhood

ISBN-13: 9780252035470
Publisher: UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Imprint: UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
By Christine Adams
Price: AUD $102.00
Stock: 0 in stock
Availability: This book is temporarily out of stock, order will be despatched as soon as fresh stock is received.
Local release date: 13/09/2010
Format: Hardback 280 pages Weight: 0g
Categories: Child welfare [JKSB1]

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Google Preview: This far-reaching study of maternal societies in post-Revolutionary France focuses on the philanthropic work of the Society for Maternal Charity, the most prominent organization of its kind. Administered by middle-class and elite women and financed by powerful families and the government, the Society offered support to poor mothers, helping them to nurse and encouraging them not to abandon their children. In Poverty, Charity, and Motherhood, Christine Adams traces the Society's key role in shaping notions of maternity and in shifting the care of poor families from the hands of charitable volunteers with religious-tinged social visions to paid welfare workers with secular goals such as population growth and patriotism. Adams plumbs the origin and ideology of the Society and its branches, showing how elite women in Paris, Lyon, Bordeaux, Rouen, Marseille, Dijon, and Limoges tried to influence the maternal behaviour of women and families with lesser financial means and social status. A deft analysis of the philosophy and goals of the Society details the women's own notions of good mothering, family solidarity, and legitimate marriages that structured official, elite, and popular attitudes concerning gender and poverty in France. These personal attitudes, Adams argues, greatly influenced public policy and shaped the country's burgeoning social welfare system. Christine Adams is a professor of history at St. Mary's College of Maryland and the author of A Taste for Comfort and Status: A Bourgeois Family in Eighteenth-Century France.; ''Poverty, Charity, and Motherhood enables a fuller understanding of women's participatory activities in building civil society and provides a critical building block in our knowledge about the development of the welfare state. This book is essential for understanding the role of women's organizations and public policy.'' Rachel G. Fuchs, author of Contested Paternity: Creating Families in Modern France; Google Preview content

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Poverty, Charity, and Motherhood