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The very character of the women must be changed.
The focus must be on changing and saving people.
The lazy, shiftless, sauntering or swaggering, ill-conditioned, irreclaimable, incorrigible, cowardly, utterly depraved savage . . . will outrage an unprotected female, or rob a defenseless child, or burn an isolated barn, or girdle fruit trees, or wreck a railway
train. . . .
The New Victorians
Poverty, Politics, and Propaganda in Two Gilded Ages
hardcover
$27.95 / £16.95
—FRANCES FOX PIVEN
During the economic boom of the 1990s, arguments about the moral failings of the poor were used to pass welfare reforms heralded as the solution to a system that had failed everyone. Yet, as historian Stephen Pimpare demonstrates in this revealing social history, remarkably similar arguments were used to disastrous effect in campaigns against aid to the poor in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
In The New Victorians, Pimpare reveals the disturbing parallels between the anti-welfare propagandists of the nineteenth century and the elite actors and well-funded policy research organizations of today. Alarmingly, he shows how the New Victorians of today often invoke the rhetoric of their predecessors while ignoring the complete failure of nineteenth-century reforms. The New Victorians goes on to uncover the elite and grassroots resistance in the Gilded Age that paved the way for the counter-reforms of the Progressive Era, revealing urgent lessons toward renewing support for broader state defense of the poor today.
A former director of Artists to End Hunger and the Food & Hunger Hotline, Stephen Pimpare currently teaches politics and history at Hunter College, City University of New York.
hardcover
5 1/2 x 8 1/4, 320 pages
978-1-56584-839-9
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