The Sentimental State

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This book shows how middle-class women, both white and Black, harnessed the nineteenth-century "culture of sentiment" to generate political action in the Progressive Era. Sentimentalism marched right alongside women's step into the public sphere of political action. The concerns over infant mortality and the "fall" of young women interconnected with sentimentalism to elicit public action in the formation of the American welfare state. Elements of the associational state were built by the voluntary and paid work of female reformers working in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Women saw a need, filled it, and cobbled together a network of voluntary organizations that tapped state funding and support when available. Their work provided safeguards for women and children and created a network of female-oriented programs that policed and aided women of child-bearing age at the turn of the twentieth century. This book demonstrates the strength of the connection between the nineteenth century sentimental culture and female political action, defined as government support for infant and maternal welfare, in the twentieth century"--