Beier: For Their Own Good

For Their Own Good

The Transformation of English Working-Class Health Culture, 1880–1970

Lucinda McCray Beier

In For Their Own Good Lucinda McCray Beier examines the interactions between working-class health culture and official provision of health services and medical care in three English communities between 1880 and 1970. Based on 239 oral history interviews of laypeople and annual public health reports, this book considers gender, class, political, economic, and cultural aspects of the mid-twentieth-century shift in responsibility for illness, birth, and death from the informal domestic and neighborhood sphere to the purview of professional, institutionally based authorities.

For Their Own Good is a case study, located in a particular place and time, of a phenomenon that has occurred in all Western nations and is now happening worldwide. As in Barrow, Lancaster, and Preston, in most circumstances, the transition from traditional to modern medicine is stimulated and enforced from the top down. Current global struggles with AIDS, overpopulation, malaria, malnutrition, and other killers offer powerful reminders that elite knowledge and strategies rarely result in success unless laypeople are engaged and invested in solutions. Furthermore, as this book demonstrates, the desired transition to Western medicine carries the twin burdens of the loss of lay ability to prevent and manage ill-health, on one hand, and the demand that political elites and medical professionals meet proliferating health care needs and demands, on the other.

http://www.ohiostatepress.org

Morton: And Sin No More

And Sin No More

Social Policy and Unwed Mothers in Cleveland 1855–1990

Marian J. Morton

In this compelling study, Marian J. Morton traces the development of public and private health-care policies for single mothers and identifies the ways in which attitudes about religion, race, and cultural definitions of womanhood affected their treatment.

Focusing on the history of the public hospital and four private maternity homes in Cleveland, Morton considers the care of unwed mothers in the context of developing American social policy from the mid-nineteenth century to today. While social policy has taken on a growing responsibility for health care of dependent people, the perception of unwed mothers as “sinful” by the Christian church and “undeserving” because their situation was brought about by moral failure has differentiated them from other dependent populations. Government provides unmarried mothers with the least support, and private maternity homes, run mostly by churches, have remained committed to the nineteenth-century notion of spiritual reclamation. As Morton shows, regardless of the time period, women pregnant out-of-wedlock have been the dependent population most easily disciplined by private agencies and the most resented and politically vulnerable recipients of public assistance.

This vital work sheds new light on the current controversies over public assistance and legalized abortion and offers a powerful appraisal of the uncertainties and inequities of American social policy as it applies to women who fail to conform to social definitions of womanhood.

http://www.ohiostatepress.org