Valuing Care: Turn-of-the-Century Conflicts between Charity Workers and Women Clients

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the New York Charity Organization Society (COS) often clashed with women clients about placing sick and disabled family members in hospitals and sanatoria. Although the COS has been viewed as cementing the traditional gender division of labor, case files suggest that the organization often encouraged institutionalization in order to free women to enter the labor force. Clients opposed the institutional placements the COS recommended and argued that home care was superior to care provided in medical facilities, institutionalization deprived households of critical assistance and imposed new responsibilities and anxieties, and deep bonds united family members. Despite enormous pressure to couch their arguments in terms of productivity and self-reliance, many clients spoke the language of emotion and intimacy. Caregiving was not just a set of exhausting tasks to them, but also an intensely personal relationship that endowed their lives with meaning.