The Sentimental State : How Women-Led Reform Built the American Welfare State

Name: The Sentimental State : How Women-Led Reform Built the American Welfare State
Brand: University of Georgia Press

University of Georgia Press

With The Sentimental State, Elizabeth Garner Masarik shows how middle-class women, both white and Black, harnessed the nineteenth-century \u201Cculture of sentiment\u201D to generate political action in the Progressive Era. While eighteenth-century rationalism had relied upon the development of the analytic mind as the basis for acquiring truth, nineteenth-century sentimentalism hinged upon human emotional responses and the public\u2019s capacity to feel sympathy to establish morally based truth and build support for improving the welfare of women and children. Sentimentalism marched right alongside women\u2019s steps into the public sphere of political action. The concerns over infant mortality and the \u201Cfall\u201D of young women intertwined with sentimentalism to elicit public action in the formation of the\n\nThe Sentimental State \u2013 How Women\u2013Led Reform Built the American Welfare State\nHow Women-Led Reform Built the American Welfare State\nFree UK delivery on this i;