Rachel Fuchs's Gender and Poverty in Nineteenth-Century Europe seeks to integrate a wide variety of scholarship in women's, gender, and social-cultural history to cast new light on problems of poverty across Europe (including some coverage of Eastern Europe and Russia).

The book consists of six chapters that range over such topics as “population and poverty,” studies of the poor in both rural and urban settings, and institutions for the relief of the poor. Although the chapters are united by the book's common theoretical framework, they can also be read separately with profit as well.

Fuchs establishes her point of view in the Introduction, in which she lays out both her concern for the coverage of gender differences in the study of poverty and her conviction that “the poor survived by fashioning a culture of expediencies” (p. 5). She also cites the “practice theory” of Pierre Bourdieu, which emphasizes the importance of improvisation in poor people's interactions with their institutional environments.

Fuchs taps these and other recent bodies of theory to argue that gender is a social category based on issues of power as well as sex, and to express her concern to emphasize the “agency” of the poor who were forced to operate within a general “climate of calamities.” The book provides better coverage of topics in the lives of working women than the lives of working men, though Fuchs's goal in all chapters is to show the integration of the two at the level of family, neighborhood community, and work. The book is also more complete for trends in Western than Eastern Europe and Russia.

It is useful to contrast Fuchs's work with an earlier volume on a similar topic in the same Cambridge series—Robert Jütte's Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe. Both works provide a history of the daily lives of the poor and an analysis of the poor as they interacted with the state, the workplace, the law, the church. But whereas Jütte focused more on these specific loci of interaction, Fuchs's work is more concerned with discussing major trends in European history, such as processes of industrialization and responses to it. This greater concern for the “master narratives” of the European past occasionally causes the poor as a group to disappear from the text as it pursues the more general context. Moreover, the voice and engagement of the author is much more present here than in Jütte's earlier volume.

It is notoriously difficult for those studying the subject to set clear boundaries around it. Who, exactly, is to be included in the category of the “poor”? Fuchs's volume is no exception, and for its wide range may be considered more or less a study of the history of the European working classes, the majority of whom—at one point or other in their lives—lacked the resources to support themselves and their households in adequate fashion.

Fuchs weaves together the different chapters by reference to the theme of a culture of expediencies, showing how the poor tried to adapt to macrosocial changes that impinged on their lives—for example, through out-migration from rural areas. The book does not present a strong or overarching argument about the improvement or decline in relative living standards over the course of the century. Indeed, to substantiate any such strong interpretation would have been impossible given the long time period covered and geographical extensiveness of Fuchs's study. Rather, the author has chosen to emphasize the abilities of the poor to adapt to changing circumstances.

Particularly successful are Fuchs's chapter on “Work in the Cities,” and the final chapter on “Charity and Welfare.” The former investigates such important themes in gender history as the “male breadwinner model,” conflicts between the working and maternal lives of urban women, and reforms of the industrial workplace both from “above” and through the agitation of the poor themselves. The Charity and Welfare chapter allows Fuchs to trace specific trends more clearly than elsewhere in the volume. Here, she offers an excellent overview and periodization of the development of religious and state-sponsored programs for the poor, drawing a sustained comparative analysis of programs in Britain, Germany, and France. The chapter successfully synthesizes much recent scholarship on the themes of gender and welfare—a body of work to which the author herself has been a leading contributor.

As Fuchs announces from the beginning of the book, she wrote this work for nonspecialists. While it will be used with profit in courses on the social history of nineteenth-century Europe, women's, and gender history, it should also be of interest to historians eager to update their knowledge of classic themes in the comparative history of the poor over the long nineteenth century. The volume is richly illustrated with photographs, drawings, and paintings depicting the poor, and is made even more useful by its lists of further reading organized by chapter.