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. Anna R. Igra
investigates 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.
Igra taps a rich trove of case files from the National Desertion
Bureau, a Jewish husband-location agency, and follows hundreds of
deserted women through the welfare and legal systems of early
twentieth-century New York City. She 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. Igra analyzes the history of antidesertion
reform from its emergence in social policy debates, through the
establishment of domestic relations courts, to Depression relief
programs. She 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.