Almost Worthy, livre ebook

Rationalizing poor relief in Victorian America

In the 1880s, social reform leaders warned that the "unworthy" poor were taking charitable relief intended for the truly deserving. Armed with statistics and confused notions of evolution, these "scientific charity" reformers founded organizations intent on limiting access to relief by the most morally, biologically, and economically unfit. Brent Ruswick examines a prominent national organization for scientific social reform and poor relief in Indianapolis in order to understand how these new theories of poverty gave birth to new programs to assist the poor.

Acknowledgments
1. Introduction: Big Moll and the Science of Scientific Charity
2. "Armies of Vice": Evolution, Heredity, and the Pauper Menace
3. Friendly Visitors or Scientific Investigators? Befriending and Measuring the Poor
4. Opposition, Depression, and the Rejection of Pauperism
5. "I See No Terrible Army": Environmental Reform and Radicalism in the Scientific Charity Movement
6 The Potentially Normal Poor: Professional Social Work, Psychology, and the End of Scientific Charity
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index