Book: Wives without Husbands: Marriage, Desertion, and Welfare in New York, 1900-1935

Shedding new light on contemporary campaigns to encourage marriage among welfare recipients and to prosecute "deadbeat dads," Wives without Husbands traces the efforts of Progressive reformers to make "runaway husbands" support their families. This book is an investigation into the interrelated histories of marriage and welfare policy in the early 1900s, revealing how reformers sought to make marriage the solution to women's and children's poverty.

Sources include a rich trove of case files from the National Desertion Bureau, a Jewish husband-location agency. The book follows hundreds of deserted women through the welfare and legal systems of early twentieth-century New York City. It integrates a broad range of topics, including Americanization as a gendered process, breadwinning as a measure of manhood, the relationship between consumer culture and social policy formation, the class dimensions of family law, and the Jewish community as a source of welfare policy innovation. It analyzes the history of antidesertion reform from its emergence in social policy debates, through the establishment of domestic relations courts, to Depression relief programs. It also shows that early twentieth-century reformers, by attempting to make instrumental use of poor people's intimate relations, anticipated welfare policies in our own time that promote marriage as an answer to poverty.

Selected Publications

• "Desertion," in Hasia Diner, ed., Women in American History: An Encyclopedia (Facts On File, 2009)
• "Marriage as Welfare," Women's History Review 15 (September 2006), pp. 601 -610.
• "Feminism," Encyclopedia of Women in American History, Vol. 3 (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2002), pp. 29-32.
• "Likely to Become a Public Charge: Deserted Women In New York, 1910-1935," Journal of Women's History, January 2000
• "Male Providerhood and the Public Purse: Anti-Desertion Reform in the Progressive Era," ed. Victoria de Grazia, The Sex of Things: Essays on Gender and Consumption (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996)

Selected Book Reviews

• Alan M. Kraut and Deborah A. Kraut, Covenant of Care: Newark Beth Israel and the Jewish Hospital in America, Journal of American Ethnic History, Winter 2009
• Bluma Goldstein, Enforced Marginality: Jewish Narratives on Abandoned Wives, American Jewish History, September 2008
• Thomas A. Krainz, Delivering Aid: Implementing Progressive Era Welfare in the American West, LABOR: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, Spring 2008
• Maureen Fitzgerald, Habits of Compassion: Irish Catholic Nuns and the Origins of New York's Welfare System. 1830-1920, The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, Winter 2007
• Susan M. Sterett, Public Pensions: Gender and Civic Service in the States.1850-1937, American Historical Review, Fall 2005
• Stephanie Carpenter, On the Farm Front: The Women's Land Army in World War II. Business History Review, Winter 2003
• Debra L. Schultz, Going South: Jewish Women in the Civil Rights Movement, Journal of American Ethnic History, Fall 2002
• Allison Hepler, Women in Labor: Mothers. Medicine. and Occupational Health in the United States. 1890-1980, Business History Review, Winter 2001
• Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood, 2nd. ed., Labor History, January 1999

Annette Igra Home Page