Many of us grew up hearing our parents exclaim 'you are driving me to the poorhouse!' or remember the card in the 'Monopoly' game which says 'Go to the Poorhouse! Lose a Turn!' Yet most Americans know little or nothing of this institution that existed under a variety of names for approximately three hundred years of American history. Surprisingly these institutions variously named poorhouses, poor farms, sometimes almshouses or workhouses, have received rather scant academic treatment, as well, though tens of millions of poor people were confined there, while often their neighbors talked in hushed tones and in fear of their own fate at the 'specter of the poorhouse.' Based on the author's study of six New England poorhouses/poor farms, a hidden story in America's history is presented which will be of popular interest as well as useful as a text in social welfare and social history. While the poorhouse's mission was character reform and 'repressing pauperism,' these goals were gradually undermined by poor people themselves, who often learned to use the poorhouse for their own benefit, as well as by staff and officials of the houses, who had agendas sometimes at odds with the purposes for which the poorhouse was invented.
David Wagner is professor of social work and sociology at the University of Southern Maine. He is the author of five books, including Checkerboard Square: Culture and Resistance in a Homeless Community, winner of the 1993 C. Wright Mills Book Award.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 Poorhouse, Almshouse, Poor Farm: Buried American History Chapter 2 Scenes from the Poorhouse Chapter 3 What the Forefathers Had in Mind: The Purpose and Contradictions of the Poorhouse Chapter 4 Undermining the Poorhouse: Long and Short-Term Inmates in the Late Nineteenth Century Chapter 5 Inmates, Overseers, and the Politics of the Poorhouse Chapter 6 The Long End: Inmates in the Twentieth Century Poorhouse Chapter 7 Matrons, Doctors, Staff, and the End of the Poorhouse Chapter 8 The Ironies of History: The Return of the Poorhouse
What People are Saying About This
Howard Zinn
David Wagner's extraordinary journey through the history of 'the poorhouse' in the United States is meticulously researched and brings alive, in eminently readable prose, the lives of those human beings who were both victims and overseers of this much-neglected part of American life. This is an important contribution to our social history.
