With the relatively recent renovation of the American welfare system, the current dispute over faith-based organizations administering federal aid, and the wanton usage of the term family values in political discourse, few can deny that debate over the family, welfare, and the state remains heated. To add greater depth and nuance to this debate, Sherri Broder has delved into the complex relationships between the subjects and objects of social reform in late-nineteenth century Philadelphia. She explores how wealthy reformers, evangelical rescue workers, the labor movement, and laboring people “all drew on the discourse of the family”—which revolved around contested definitions of what constituted a tramp, unfit mother, or neglected child—“to define themselves variously as gendered members of different social classes, as respected family and community members, as political actors, and as people with claims on the state, the police, and public and private social services”(6). Utilizing local and national labor periodicals, the published works of charity organizations and individual reformers, and the institutional records of the Pennsylvania Society to Protect Children from Cruelty (SPCC) and the pseudonymous “Haven for Unwed Mothers and Infants,” Broder moves topically throughout five chapters dissecting different components of Philadelphia's discourse on the family.

The first chapter provides an overview of the terms of the debate between the labor movement and moral reformers as they quarreled over whom the dregs of nineteenth-century urban America were and who was responsible for their plight. Moral reformers viewed the widespread tramping of workingmen as the abandonment of domestic responsibility resulting from individual moral failing or intemperance. The labor movement countered that workers left their homes in a noble search for work to fulfill their manly obligations as breadwinners, but were forced into an involuntary idleness by the greed of industrial capitalism.(17) The dispute over working women and children was similar, with secular and evangelical reformers casting them as victims of workingmen's moral depravity. Debate focused on prostitution, and where reformers saw the result of feminine vulnerability in a masculine market labor saw the symbol of a condition affecting all wage earners. Such debate over the dysfunctional aspects of working-class family life implicitly constructed a normative model of the working-class family resembling the Victorian middle class. “The late nineteenth-century labor movement had a family policy”(13), Broder writes, and while grounded in an oppositional political culture it was formed out of subtle changes to a dominant discourse that privileged a “paternalistic familial metaphor”(49) as the grounds of respectability.

The remaining chapters are devoted to more honed case studies of these discourses between Philadelphia's laboring communities and reform institutions. Chapters two and three explore the relationships between working-class communities and families with reform intervention, and Broder is here at her best describing the “multiplicity of alternative working-class perspectives on the family”(5). She recounts how organizations like the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (SPCC) believed it entered into worker's lives on its own terms to investigate dysfunctional working-class families, when in fact SPCC entrance was conditional on the information working people provided. Therefore, instead of using the SPCC's records as a catalogue of broken homes Broder views their investigations as open-air venues for the articulation, clarification, and defense of working-class family values.

Broder writes that a central component of working-class community life in the nineteenth-century was its self representation as respectable, and workers went to great lengths to define and enforce these boundaries of respectability. Internal mutual aid was the preferred route for hard pressed families, but when aid was abused by individual family members abjuring the normative roles expected of them the SPCC was called in to address the issue. Broder insists, however, that in these interactions reformers never “monopolize[d] either the representation or labeling of experience”(91). In their negotiations with the SPCC and each other, workers both produced and consumed narrative representations of tramps and unfit mothers that “worked to empower some people even as they targeted others for reform intervention”(124) in a process that determined who could claim the mantle of respectability as a working women or man. As a result, workers viewed the SPCC as both a “prying, intrusive group of meddlesome reformers” and an “effective ally of the respectable working class” that enforced normative gender roles.(85–86)

The final two chapters turn to explore unwed motherhood in nineteenth-century Philadelphia. Chapter four follows the single mothers who entered the Haven for Unwed Mothers and Infants for aid, a pseudonymous Protestant mission home largely staffed by women. The Haven's social programs, Broder writes, reflected the ambiguous position of unwed mothers in the Victorian moral code, lying somewhere between a dangerously sexual prostitute and the victim of male predation. Reformers made their ideal paternal households impossible to attain with a condemned father and suspect mother, which forced the children of these illicit encounters to become the “key to maternal religious as well as social redemption.”(135) This “redemptive maternity”(125) emphasized the outcome of a condemned sexual encounter to be both a symbol of the mother's sin and agent for her deliverance which forever stigmatized single motherhood and thereby policed the line between illicit and legitimate sexual expression for all of Philadelphia's women.

The book concludes with a candid and sometimes graphic survey of child abandonment and baby farming, a term that described both the boarding of infants by poor women for a fee, or women who carried out infanticide of unwanted children for cash. Broder writes that baby farming was by in large “a legitimate occupation that merely formalized the informal childcare arrangements”(159) of laboring women, but also deals frankly with the high incidence of child abandonment as “reproductive strategies”(166) for women who believed they had no viable alternative to provide adequate childcare. Broder contends that the clandestine nature of both these practices highlight the pervasiveness of Victorian ideals among the working class and their willingness to self-enforce them, while underscoring the precarious nature of urban working-class single motherhood. A short epilogue closes the book in which Broder makes explicit connections between the nineteenth century's discourse on welfare and the family with America's current political dialogue.

Ultimately, Broder has written an insightful study which uses sources imaginatively to tease out voices in a discourse that have historically been hard to hear. Unfortunately, this talent is at times narrowly applied. The intense discourse analyses on sources like the SPCC's are made at the expense of providing other sorts of necessary context. Philadelphia as an evolving city and the study's backdrop is swiftly dealt with and then set aside leaving many of the stories she tells to be detached from any real sense of place. Moreover, no thorough examination is made of those who funded or ran institutions like the Haven or SPCC and for what purposes, although in the case of the Haven this may have been for reasons of privacy. More troubling, however, is that these organizations are referenced to have ties to municipal institutions like the police, but rarely does any sort of local or regional government factor into the study. Nonetheless, Broder's analysis of what she does include is both provocative and sound, and her insights should be integrated into larger, more contextual studies of urban workers and social reform. Historians of poverty, urban welfare, or philanthropy will want to be sure to add this book to their personal libraries while scholars of urban, labor, or gender history should make a point to give it a careful read.