“Not Designed Merely to Heal”: Women Reformers and the Emergence of Children's Hospitals

2005 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 331-354 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Sloane
Keyword(s):  
Progressive Era ◽  
Industrial Accidents ◽  
Children's Hospitals ◽  
Women Reformers ◽  
Children’S Hospitals ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Special Concern ◽  
Poor Children ◽  
The City ◽  
Harmful Effects

Children were a special concern of women reformers in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Assembling in federations and associations, women were, as Mary Odem has written, “especially active in efforts that aimed to protect women, children, and the home from the harmful effects of rapid urban growth and industrial capitalism.” Poor children were at risk due to industrial accidents, epidemics, and the stress and exhaustion of simply surviving in crowded tenements and polluted cities. Daphne Spain has suggested that women “saved the city” by starting political coalitions, improving neighborhood environments, and fighting for a wide range of protective legislation. Among those reforms was the nationwide movement to establish medical services for children. New pediatric wards and children's hospitals were intended to be places of comfort and cure as well as moral and spiritual education for the “little sufferers” and their parents.

Academic Activism

2019 ◽  
pp. 81-117
Author(s):  
Anya Jabour
Keyword(s):  
Progressive Era ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Chicago School ◽  
Professional Status ◽  
Political Protest ◽  
Women Reformers ◽  
Jane Addams ◽  
Academic Activism ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The University

Chapter 4 examines Breckinridge’s participation in social reform in the Progressive era. In conjunction with Jane Addams and other women reformers associated with Hull House, Breckinridge advocated for a wide range of reforms and formulated the doctrine of a national minimum standard of living that would inform her later participation in the creation of the welfare state. She also fused her participation in social reform circles with her leadership in the emerging social work profession by using social science as the basis for social reform. Through her teaching and research first at the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy and then at the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration, Breckinridge established a niche for herself in Progressive-era reform that relied upon her professional status and her scholarly expertise to legitimize political protest and advance social reform.

scholarly journals THE CASUAL POOR AND THE CITY OF LONDON POOR LAW UNION, 1837–1869

1999 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 183-206 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANDREA TANNER
Keyword(s):  
The Elderly ◽  
Poor Law ◽  
Local Union ◽  
Civic Pride ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Rate Base ◽  
Poor Children ◽  
City Of London ◽  
The City

The City of London Poor Law Union in the early to mid-Victorian period was the richest and least populated of all the metropolitan Poor Law districts. A wide range of parochial, livery, and other charities within the City not only attracted vast numbers of applicants for assistance, but influenced the quality and nature of the care given by the local union. This not only meant that provision for the outdoor poor, children, and the elderly tended to be more liberal than elsewhere in the capital, but that vagrants, many of whom took up winter residence in the City, also experienced a higher standard of pauper treatment than that offered by the surrounding unions. The combination of high Poor Law receipts from a low poor rate base, civic pride, competition from City charities, and the willingness of neighbouring unions to off-load this most troublesome class of pauper on to their rich neighbour gave an unparalleled level of choice to those who were truly at the bottom of the heap in Victorian London.

Death in the City

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn A. Sloan
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Inquiry ◽  
The United States ◽  
Violent Death ◽  
Special Relationship ◽  
Intimate Friend ◽  
Counter Narrative ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
European Heritage ◽  
The City ◽  
The Temple

Popular culture has long conflated Mexico with the macabre. Some persuasive intellectuals argue that Mexicans have a special relationship with death, formed in the crucible of their hybrid Aztec-European heritage. Death is their intimate friend; death is mocked and accepted with irony and fatalistic abandon. The commonplace nature of death desensitizes Mexicans to suffering. Death, simply put, defines Mexico. There must have been historical actors who looked away from human misery, but to essentialize a diverse group of people as possessing a unique death cult delights those who want to see the exotic in Mexico or distinguish that society from its peers. Examining tragic and untimely death—namely self-annihilation—reveals a counter narrative. What could be more chilling than suicide, especially the violent death of the young? What desperation or madness pushed the victim to raise the gun to the temple or slip the noose around the neck? A close examination of a wide range of twentieth-century historical documents proves that Mexicans did not accept death with a cavalier chuckle nor develop a unique death cult, for that matter. Quite the reverse, Mexicans behaved just as their contemporaries did in Austria, France, England, and the United States. They devoted scientific inquiry to the malady and mourned the loss of each life to suicide.

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