The Origins of the Welfare State
Subtitle: Women, Work, and the French Revolution
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: July 9, 2007
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 288
ISBN-13: 9780252030215
Subjects: European history: c 1750 to c 1900; Social welfare & social services; Women's studies; Social Science; Politics / Current Events; Sociology; Labor & Industrial Relations - General; Public Policy - Social Services & Welfare; Women's Studies - General; Social Science / Women's Studies; Western Europe - General; 18th century; France; History; Revolution, 1789-1799; Social aspects; Women
Description: "In May 1790, during the French Revolution, the National Assembly created spinning workshops (ateliers de filature) for thousands of unemployed women in Paris. These ateliers disclose new aspects of the process that transformed Old Regime charity into revolutionary welfare initiatives characterized by secularization, centralization, and entitlements based on citizenship. This is the first study to examine women and the welfare state in its formative period when modern concepts of human rights were elaborated." "In The Origins of the Welfare State, Lisa DiCaprio reveals how women working in the ateliers, municipal welfare officials, and the national government vied to define the meaning of revolutionary welfare throughout the Revolution. Presenting demands for improved wages and working conditions to a wide array of revolutionary officials, the women workers exercised their rights as "passive citizens" capaciously and shaped the meanings of work, welfare, and citizenship. Looking backward to the Old Regime and forward to the nineteenth century, this study explores the interventionist spirit that characterized liberalism in the late nineteenth century, and serves as a bridge to the history of entitlements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."--Jacket.