Public Pensions : Gender and Civic Service in the States, 1850-1937 / Susan M. Sterett.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Sterett, Susan M., author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Local officials and employees--Pensions--United States--History.

Local officials and employees.

State governments--Officials and employees--Pensions--United States--History.

State governments.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (x, 222 pages) : illustrations, map

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press, [2018]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Chapter One.Social Welfare In The States

Chapter Two.Independence And Dependence Under The Public Purpose Doctrine

Chapter Three.Payments To Firemen And Soldiers, 1854-1876

Chapter Four.Military Pensions In The Courts, 1877-1923

Chapter Five.Civil Service Pensions, 1883-1924

Chapter Six.Mothers' Pensions In The Courts, 1911-1923

Chapter Seven.Pensions For The Blind And Workmen's Compensation, 1906-1917

Chapter Eight.Old Age Pensions, 1911-1937

Conclusion State Constitutions And Public Spending

Appendix

Notes

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 20. Sep 2019)

ISBN:

1-5017-1777-4

OCLC:

1080551545