Public Pensions: Gender and Civic Service in the States, 1850–1937 - Hardcover

Sterett, Susan M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801439841 ISBN 13: 9780801439841

Verlag: Cornell University Press, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

Book by Sterett Susan M

Über diesen Titel

Críticas:

"Through constitutional analysis that shifts attention away from the federal to the state level, Susan Sterett offers an important correction to the existing literature on pensions. An investigation into the meanings of charity, service, and public purpose, this book complicates our understanding of dependency and independence, work and care, charity and reward, deserving and undeserving. The rich research generates many surprising twists, providing new contexts to understand conservative judicial traditions, now anchored in the common law." -- Eileen Boris, University of California at Santa Barbara "The strength of Public Pensions is Sterett's treatment of some of the early, and relatively obscure, court battles over payments to firemen and soldiers." -- Joanna Short, Augustana College * EH.NET * "Susan Sterett's Public Pensions brilliantly re-creates an American constitutional culture defined by the intersecting bright lines that divided public service from private employment and citizenship from dependence. Her narrative is filled with striking images and arguments. One learns about the constitutional centrality of volunteer fire brigades, about the ways national service as a soldier in the Civil War could be construed as not constituting 'public service' within the state, about the organizational skills of advocates for the blind. This is the best and most thought-provoking recent work on the role of the public-private split in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American constitutional order." -- Hendrik Hartog, Princeton University "Susan Sterett... has given us a meticulously researched and highly informative study of the legal evolution of public pensions from the latter half of the nineteenth to the first half of the twentieth centuries.... Sterett not only investigates a field of law that has been previously neglected, into her analysis of it are woven important questions about gender equity, the political meaning of dependency, the public/private distinction, as well as constitutional issues related to federalism, separation of powers, and judicial review." -- Thomas Shevory, Ithaca College * Law and Politics Book Review * "Sterett applies gender analysis in an interesting way to the legal arguments that distinguished entitlements for 'manly' and heroic work from care of the dependent and weak." -- Joan Smyth Iversen, SUNY Oneonta * History * "Sterett... urges scholars studying the welfare state's history to pay closer attention to state courts and the public purpose doctrine, which held that state funds could be spent only on charity to the intrinsically dependent, on businesses providing general public benefits, or in rewarding people who had served the state.... Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate, research, and professional collections." * Choice * "Public Pensions illustrates how substantially state constitutions shaped the evolution of American social welfare.... This excellent book adds immensely to our understanding of pensions, work, dependency, and American constitutional culture. It constitutes an extraordinary contribution to the scholarship on this very important topic." -- Constance Backhouse, University of Ottawa * Labour/Le Travail * "Susan M. Sterett has added an important perspective to recent social welfare scholarship. Her insight is that state court litigation after the Civil War played a major role in shaping state public pension legislation, especially as new groups were added to the eligibility list." -- Anthony R. Travis, Grand Valley State University * The Journal of American History *

Reseña del editor:

In Public Pensions, Susan M. Sterett traces the legal and constitutional structures underlying early social welfare programs in the United States. Sterett explains the status of state and local government payments for public servants and the poor from the mid-nineteenth century until the Great Depression. The most visible public payments for service in the United States were directed to soldiers, who risked death for the nation. However, firemen, not soldiers, first captured local governments- attention; social welfare programs for soldiers were modeled on firemen's pensions. The dangerous work of firefighting and of combat provided the fundamental legal analogy for courts as governments expanded pensions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nothing about the state court doctrine approving payments for dangerous, local service would allow pensions for indigent mothers and for the elderly, which states began to consider after 1910. Counties and railroads that objected to the new taxes could fight programs based on the old doctrine, established for firefighters, soldiers, and finally civil servants. State litigation provided one of the many grounds for contesting expanded welfare states in the early twentieth-century United States. Sterett demonstrates that state courts maintained a gendered division between the service that marked citizenship and the dependence that marked indigence, even during the promising ferment of the early twentieth century.

Über diese Auflage

• Verlag: Cornell University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0801439841
• ISBN 13: 9780801439841
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 236