In this book, Donna J. Guy analyses the role played by female philanthropic groups and feminists in the development of the Argentinian welfare state between 1880 and 1955. Focusing on the activities of these two different groups of women in the field of child welfare programmes and family reform, she argues for the importance of adopting a gendered perspective in the ongoing debates about the historical development of social policy, both in Argentina and in Latin America in general. In addition, she claims that in order to understand the historical process of welfare state formation in Argentina, it is essential to look beyond national policies and to include the local (municipal and provincial) levels of the state.

Guy's book is based on previously inaccessible archival records of the Consejo Nacional de Niñez, Adolescencia y la Familia (National Council for Childhood, Adolescence and the Family, CNNAF) and therefore brings to light previously unknown primary source material concerning various child welfare institutions, including the better-studied Society of Beneficence, as well as copious information on children who entered state institutions. With access to a wide range of letters, including correspondence between parents and children, social workers' reports and letters concerning the role of philanthropic women and their social workers in general, this book manages to render a particularly vivid account of the human aspect of institutions.

Although the book's stated intention is to examine ‘the complex interrelationships between female philanthropic groups and feminists in their advocacy of child welfare programmes and family reforms in Argentina in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth’ (p. 1), the author devotes considerably more attention to the female philanthropic groups than to the feminists. Indeed, the author's juxtaposition of feminists with female philanthropists in the development of child welfare is not persuasive. While it is true that feminists did advocate family reform by way of demanding stronger legal rights for mothers over their biological children, their agenda was mainly concerned with women's rights rather than child welfare. To say that they ‘performed child welfare indirectly as proponents of new socially encompassing laws empowering mothers’ (pp. 65–6) is too much of a stretch.

Nonetheless, Guy's account of the female philanthropic groups and their involvement in a range of charitable activities in the field of child welfare is both captivating and wonderfully rich. It is also wide in scope, as it not only covers the better-known Society of Beneficence, but also documents the work of immigrant community organisations, Catholic and Jewish religious groups and the Patronato de la Infancia, among others. It is one of the strengths of the book that it shows what a wide variety of actors were involved in charity work directed at children. In this respect, Guy also makes a very important point about local government institutions providing basic welfare services long before these were offered on a national level. Since so much of the history of Argentinian state building has centred on the national government, Guy's analysis of the interplay between local and national forces in the field of child welfare provides an often neglected perspective in the general debate about state formation in Argentina.

Last, but not least, we should turn to a discussion of Guy's main argument: that women built the welfare state in Argentina through performing charity and creating rights. Her claim rests on the assertion that subsidies to charities, which by the late nineteenth century had become a fixture of both local and national politics, qualify as social policy. Through subsidies, the female-led child welfare organisations that are the subject of Guy's study became linked to the state in an arrangement that the author suggests qualifies as a proto-welfare state. In her own words: ‘I argue that in Argentina what emerged as a Peronist welfare state became the scaffolding built around earlier social policies that offered a disjointed but rather effective edifice comprised of national subsidies to philanthropic groups’ (p. 6). In this reader's opinion, however, while subsidies might be characterised as social politics, they fall short of constituting social policy, which by definition is a set of officially agreed ideas or a (legislative) plan for how to achieve certain articulated social ends. Subsidies to charities and child welfare organisations were, as Guy herself shows, erratic, unpredictable and often more dependent on the particular political influence of an institution than on any sort of coherent purpose from the government's side. In this respect, Guy's argument for continuity between the late nineteenth/early twentieth century and the development of a welfare state in the 1930s and 1940s is unconvincing. These women did not build the welfare state, but rather – as women often do – covered for its absence.

That being said, Guy's study is a wonderful contribution to the historical literature on many other levels. Through her groundbreaking archival work, she gives the reader an all-too-rare glimpse into what childhood was like for some in Latin America at this time. Also, through her rendering of women's efforts in the field of child welfare and the interplay between private charities and official institutions, she shows how this understudied field helps our general understanding of the relationship between state and society in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. For these reasons alone, this book deserves a wide readership.