The Sentimental State charts the ways that nineteenth-century sentimentalism influenced reformers and aided in the creation of the American welfare state. Elizabeth Garner Masarik argues that sentimental descriptions of motherhood and infant mortality undergirded women’s local, state, and, ultimately, federal reform efforts. In the process, women’s reform organizations helped construct the associative welfare state that emerged in the twentieth century. The Sentimental State expands the chronological and theoretical constraints of much scholarship on the American welfare state. Masarik draws on and confirms Robyn Muncy’s description of a women-led reform movement in the creation of the welfare state, as well as Gwendolyn Mink’s depiction of the impact of middle-class moralism on poor women.Footnote ¹ Masarik, though, begins her story earlier. The Sentimental State also effectively weaves together literary sources such as the novel Iola Leroy (1892) and the magazine Women’s Journal with the records of reformers like Kate Waller Barrett and social reform organizations including the National Florence Crittenton Mission (NFCM), leading to a fresh approach to understanding social welfare.

Over ten short chapters, The Sentimental State introduces readers to an impressive number of mother/child-centric reform organizations and their champions. A good bulk of the book (chapters three through six) center on New York City’s Florence Crittenton Night Mission and the related National Florence Crittenton Mission, which Masarik demonstrates were driven by nineteenth-century sentimentalism and then influenced progressives such as Jane Addams and the National Council of Women. Masarik then devotes two chapters to Black reformers and racial uplift, spotlighting Sarah Malone, who ran the Colored Florence Crittenton Home in Topeka, Kansas, and Lugenia Burns Hope, who founded the Neighborhood Union in Atlanta, Georgia. It is admirable that Masarik brings in Black reformers when studies of progressive reform often treat race as a separate topic, although her analysis of race and welfare focuses mostly on local efforts. It would be interesting to hear more about how these local Black organizations shaped federal reform efforts, a potentially fruitful avenue for future research. The final two chapters and the conclusion highlight state reform efforts, most notably mothers’ pensions, the Children’s Bureau, and the Sheppard-Towner Act. Throughout the book, Masarik engagingly details reformers’ backgrounds and motivations and navigates the complicated dynamics of reform organizations and movements like the social purity movement and the Children’s Bureau.

Masarik establishes that the women-led reform of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries developed and expanded the associative state “by creating organizations that eventually became associational arms of local and state governments, which later fed into national government entities” (10). The notion that the American welfare state is a mix of private and public dimensions echoes Michael Katz’s description of the “semiwelfare state.” Masarik impressively identifies the many and incremental ways that reformers connected to the state.Footnote ² Whether it was by securing a congressional charter for the NFCM in 1898, establishing liaisons with local courts in 1906, acquiring state funds for the Colored Florence Crittenton Home, or using federal investigations to spark local legislation, women’s organizations created relationships with local, state, and federal institutions to broaden their reform work. “The work of women reformers dating back to the early nineteenth century,” Masarik argues in the conclusion, “ensured that private social welfare endeavors were never entirely separate from state power” (169).

Key to Masarik’s argument is the claim that sentimentalism, which “prioritized feeling and emotion over rationality” and encouraged “the act of feeling another’s emotional pain,” influenced reform work in the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era (14). Understandably, in The Sentimental State, this argument is most visible and salient in the early chapters, which focus on sentimental literature like Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (1791); infant mortality and grief in the Victorian era; and creation of the Florence Crittenton Night Mission (often called “Mother Mission”). As Masarik demonstrates, Gilded Age social reform was driven and shaped by sentimental notions of the intense bond between mothers and their children, as well as the need to protect children by also protecting their mothers. Sentimentalism becomes less visible and less central in the book as the story moves into the Progressive Era, a time famously known for reformers’ commitments to research, data, and rationality. At times, the book’s shift out of the nineteenth century and away from sentimentalism prompts more questions than answers: Was every reference to the pain of child death sentimental, or were some merely emotional? To what extent was sentimentalism an intentional strategy among federal reformers? Did sentimentalism show up in other aspects of politics in the Progressive Era, or were women’s groups most likely to make use of it? As much as anything, though, these questions indicate the salience of examining sentimentalism in studies of politics and the welfare state.

Masarik makes the strongest case for the impact of sentimentalism in the conclusion, where she contends that the associational state depended on sentimentalism to survive. “‘The state,’ in this case meaning local, state, or national government, never footed the full price of any welfare programs because much of the internal work and organizing was performed freely by women, their labors overshadowed by the sentimental elements of motherhood, childhood, grief, and love that were not, and are not, valued as worthy of true compensation or accolades” (170). What a powerful claim about the ongoing impact of a nineteenth-century literary genre—that it simultaneously paved the way for the welfare state of the twentieth century, and perpetuated women’s (both reformers’ and mothers’) second-class status. Scholars and students of women’s history, women’s work, and social welfare history will all benefit from Masarik’s thoughtful work.