Edward Dickinson traces the story of German child welfare policy over an extended period of conflict and compromise among competing groups-progressive social reformers, conservative Protestants, Catholics, Social Democrats, feminists, medical men, jurists, and welfare recipients themselves.

This book explores Weimar and Nazi family policy to highlight the disparity between national policy design and its implementation at the local level.

This is the first comprehensive study of the turbulent relationship among state, society, and church in the making of the modern German welfare system during the Weimar Republic. Young-Sun Hong examines the competing conceptions of poverty, citizenship, family, and authority held by the state bureaucracy, socialists, bourgeois feminists, and the major religious and humanitarian welfare organizations. She shows how these conceptions reflected and generated bitter conflict in German society. And she argues that this conflict undermined parliamentary government within the welfare sector in a way that paralleled the crisis of the entire Weimar political system and created a situation in which the Nazi critique of republican "welfare" could acquire broad political resonance. The book begins by tracing the transformation of Germany's traditional, disciplinary poor-relief programs into a modern, bureaucratized and professionalized social welfare system. It then shows how, in the second half of the republic, attempts by both public and voluntary welfare organizations to reduce social insecurity by rationalizing working-class family life and reproduction alienated welfare reformers and recipients alike from both the welfare system and the Republic itself. Hong concludes that, in the welfare sector, the most direct continuity between the republican welfare system and the social policies of Nazi Germany is to be found not in the pathologies of progressive social engineering, but rather in the rejection of the moral and political foundations of the republican welfare system by eugenic welfare reformers and their Nazi supporters. Originally published in 1998. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

While welfare has been subject to pronounced criticism throughout the twentieth century, social insurance has consistently enjoyed the overwhelming support of European policy makers and citizens. This volume argues that the emergence of social insurance represents a paradigmatic shift in modern understandings of health, work, political participation, and government. By institutionalizing compensation, social insurance transformed it into a right that the employed population quickly came to assume. Theoretically informed and based on intensive archival research on disability insurance records, most of which have never been used by historians, the book considers how social science and political philosophy combined to give shape to the idea of a "social" insurance in the nineteenth century; the process by which social insurance gave birth to modern notions of "disability" and "rehabilitation"; and the early-twentieth-century development of political action groups for the disabled. Most earlier histories of German social insurance have been legislative histories that stressed the system's coercive features and functions. Making Security Social, by contrast, emphasizes the administrative practices of everyday life, the experience of consumers, and the ability of workers not only to resist, but to transform, social insurance bureaucracy and political debate. It thus demonstrates that social insurance was pivotal in establishing a general attitude of demand, claim, and entitlement as the primary link between the modern state and those it governed. In addition to historians of Germany, Making Security Social will attract researchers across disciplines who are concerned with public policy, disability studies, and public health. Greg Eghigian is Associate Professor of History, Penn State University.

The first history of German drug culture in the psychedelic age

The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World provides an important overview of the main themes surrounding the history of childhood in the West from antiquity to the present day. By broadly incorporating the research in the field of Childhood Studies, the book explores the major advances that have taken place in the past few decades in this crucial field. This important collection from a leading international group of scholars presents a comprehensive survey of the current state of the field. It will be essential reading for all those interested in the history of childhood.

In the final decades of the nineteenth century, the French Third Republic attempted to carve out childhood as a distinct legal and social category. Previously, working-class girls and boys had labored and trained alongside adults. Concerned about future citizens, lawmakers expanded access to education, regulated child labor, and developed child welfare programs. They directed working-class youths to age-segregated spaces, such as vocational schools or juvenile prisons. With these policies, they distinguished the youthful worker from the adult worker and the juvenile delinquent from the adult criminal. Through their emphasis on age, these policies defined childhood as a universal stage of life. And yet, they also reproduced inequalities in the experience of childhood. In An Age to Work, Miranda Sachs considers the role of the welfare state in reinforcing class and gender-based divisions within childhood. She argues that agents of the welfare state, such as child labor inspectors and social workers, played a crucial role in standardizing the path from childhood to the workforce. By enforcing age-based rules, such as child labor laws, they attempted to protect working class children. But they also policed these chidren's productivity and enforced gender-specific labor practices. An Age to Work also enters the streets and apartments of working-class Paris to examine how the laboring classes envisioned and experienced childhood. Although working-class parents continued to see childhood as a more fluid category, they agreed with state actors that their offspring should grow up to be productive. They too mobilized the welfare state to ensure this outcome. By interrogating these diverse perspectives, An Age to Work reveals that the same sort of welfare system that created social hierarchies in France's colonies reinforced the class system at home.