Julia Lathrop

Social Service and Progressive Government

Contributors

By Miriam Cohen

Formats and Prices

Price

$22.00

Format

Format:

  1. Trade Paperback $22.00
  2. ebook $14.99

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around March 7, 2017. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

Julia Lathrop was a social servant, government activist, and social scientist who expanded notions of women's proper roles in public life during the early 1900s. Appointed as chief of the U.S. Children's Bureau, created in 1912 to promote child welfare, she was the first woman to head a United States federal agency. Throughout her life, Lathrop challenged the social norms of the time and became instrumental in shaping Progressive reform. She began her career at Hull House in Chicago, the nation's most famous social settlement, where she worked to improve public and private welfare for poor people, helped establish America's first juvenile court, and pushed for immigrant rights. Lathrop was also co-founder of one of America's first schools of social work. Later in life she became a leader in the League of Women Voters and an advisor on child welfare to the League of Nations.

Following Lathrop's life from her childhood and college education through her social service and government work, this book gives an overview of her enduring contribution to progressive politics, women's employment, and women's education. It also offers a look at how one influential woman worked within the bounds of traditional conventions about gender, race, and class, and also pushed against them.

About the Lives of American Women series:
Selected and edited by renowned women's historian Carol Berkin, these brief biographies are designed for use in undergraduate courses. Rather than a comprehensive approach, each biography focuses instead on a particular aspect of a woman's life that is emblematic of her time, or which made her a pivotal figure in the era. The emphasis is on a “good read,” featuring accessible writing and compelling narratives, without sacrificing sound scholarship and academic integrity. Primary sources at the end of each biography reveal the subject's perspective in her own words. Study questions and an annotated bibliography support the student reader.

Genre:

On Sale
Mar 7, 2017
Page Count
192 pages
Publisher
Avalon Publishing
ISBN-13
9780813348032

Miriam Cohen

About the Author

Miriam Cohen is Evalyn Clark Professor of History in the Department of Women's Studies at Vassar College. Her book, Workshop to Office: Two Generations of Italian Women in New York City (1993, Cornell University Press) was a finalist for the Thomas Znaniecki Prize of the American Sociological Association. Her specialties include the history of American women and the history of twentieth-century social reform. She has published numerous articles on the history of social welfare, including “Reconsidering Schooling and the American Welfare State,” which was selected as one of the most important articles published by the History of Education Quarterly in its first fifty years. Miriam was also a senior advisory editor of the Encyclopedia of Women in American History (M.E. Sharpe, 2002).

Series Editor Carol Berkin is a well-known women's historian and the author of many popular and scholarly books, including Civil War Wives. She is Professor of History Emerita at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and she is a member of the Society of American Historians.

Learn more about this author