Women and Gender in the American West

‘Going About and Doing Good’: The Politics of Benevolence, Welfare, and Gender in San Francisco, 1850–1880

 I N keeping with the Progressive era’s faith in solving social problems scientifically, newly founded Stanford University began collecting data in  for an analysis of welfare in San Francisco, California. The published report contained a detailed list of the  public and private agencies providing social welfare services in the city, along with their expenditures for the year.The report revealed that, in  alone,the sum expended on social welfare services in San Francisco came to just over $,,. The amount perplexed author Charles K. Jenness, who considered it “an enormous charity bill for a city so young as San Francisco, and whose entire population numbers scarcely ,.”By comparison,Jenness mused,“Baltimore,with , more inhabitants, expended in  about $, less.” He concluded that “the cost of relieving the poor in San Francisco is undoubtedly more in proportion than any other young and prosperous city.” The Stanford report provides a valuable “snapshot” of San Francisco’s social welfare system in .It is the earliest detailed picture we have of the city’s sprawling, evidently chaotic mass of social services, Jensen-Miller Prize 1999 * Mary Ann Irwin,“‘Going About and Doing Good’:The Politics of Benevolence, Welfare, and Gender in San Francisco, –,” Pacific Historical Review : (). © Pacific Historical Review,American Historical Association, Pacific Coast Branch. Reprinted by permission. ‘Going About and Doing Good’: The Politics of Benevolence, Welfare, and Gender in San Francisco, 1850–1880 Mary Ann Irwin  Going About and Doing Good both public services funded and administered by the city of San Francisco and services funded and managed by private citizens. This “snapshot”quality is also the report’s most frustrating aspect.Because it only captures a moment in time,it neither explains how San Francisco’s welfare system developed nor illuminates the social, economic, and political forces behind that development. This study unravels the complex forces shaping local welfare provision in California during the formative period between  and . Because the key component of local welfare was charity, and because local women were at the forefront of charity work,this history centers on woman-led charities. Studies of nineteenth-century American women’s benevolence have paid relatively little attention to western women; much more is known about women’s associations in the East than the West. Likewise, recent scholarly studies of “maternalism ”focus on women and organizations east of the Mississippi River, despite the keen interest of western women in maternal and infant health,pure food,sanitation,and so forth.This literature,moreover,concentrates almost exclusively on the Progressives and gives little attention to the maternalist activities of nineteenth-century women. In turn, while Western historians have studied the lives and struggles of women in the West, they have emphasized, for the most part, formal politics, especially efforts to gain the franchise. In California, where sixty-two years elapsed between statehood and woman suffrage, focus on the vote misses a potent form of social and political power available to California women—the collection and distribution of public and private funds for social welfare. The very newness of San Francisco offered a space in which benevolent women could influence community politics through pioneering social welfare programs. Examination of women’s charities illuminates the process by which San Francisco’s welfare system emerged and how women’s charities fit—economically, socially, and politically—into the city’s evolving municipal structure.The central fact of poor relief in San Francisco in the period – was the city’s substantial reliance on women’s charities for social services,especially for women and children. Yet, despite the attention historians have given local politics and to the role of private organizations in poor relief,very little has been said about  Mary Ann Irwin the impact of women’s charities on municipal welfare policy and practice . In overlooking the crucial factor of gender, historians miss the critical differences between public and private models of welfare—that is,differences between male and female modes of political action in the nineteenth century. Gender is central to the history of welfare in San Francisco.Gender ideology supported women’s entry into local benevolence work, and it lay at the heart of differences between public and private welfare. Operating at the vague frontier between “public” and “private,” women’s charities served the community at a variety of levels.Poor families relied on benevolent women for services the city did not provide, especially services to women and children...