Miss Cutler and the Case of the Resurrected Horse: Social Work and the Story of Poverty in America, Australia, and Britain by Mark Peel (review)

Miss Cutler and the Case of the Resurrected Horse mines “social work’s case files to explore how the origins and solutions of social problems such as poverty were understood, dramatized, and enacted, largely between women, during a period when many of those who would shape the social welfare system of the midtwentieth century were being trained in, and shaped by, particular forms of investigation and inquiry” (3). Mark Peel offers an imaginative narration analyzing what caseworkers in the interwar period heard poor people say about their conditions and insights. Based on visitations and interviews, investigators during the 1920s and 1930s recorded observations about character and circumstances. They struggled to gather enough facts to distinguish instances of fraud and deception from cases of real need. That visitors often crafted and amended astute documents does not mean that official reports were objective. Peel argues convincingly that case workers presumed that the people seeking relief whom they interviewed lied or were dissembling, thus biasing diagnoses and attempts to mitigate poverty.

Mark Peel appreciates the dramatic possibilities to be found in case files from the period. His book’s title comes from a Depression-period account of a Melbourne charity investigator, Agnes Cutler, who was puzzled by the suspicious disappearance of a horse which Harold and Ada Alderman had purchased three years earlier with money loaned from the Charity Organization Society. Miss Cutler is portrayed as a detective who makes home visits on foot, and trusts her instincts and experience. She finally confronts the Aldermans concerning lies and evasions about a horse in their yard, evidentally neither lost nor resurrected. Peel goes on to invite readers to ponder other questions Agnes Cutler might have asked the hapless Aldermans. He raises the possibility that the poor couple was denied an assumption of innocence. “Miss Cutler wanted to help … but she always thought that she knew best, that the poor didn’t understand their poverty and would need to be told what to do and that it was always best to approach them with a degree of skepticism and even suspicion” (32).

Miss Cutler and the Case of the Resurrected Horse delivers a comparative approach to social welfare history. Peel analyzed files from the Charity Organization Societies of Melbourne and London, the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the Boston Children’s Aid Society, and the Minneapolis Family Welfare Association (FWA)—all of which were transitioning from charity visitations to professional casework. These organizations perceived aims differently from one another in the 1920s and 1930s, however, as workers defined poverty’s causes and remedies. For instance, FWA ascribed destitution and dependency to lack of wise planning by the needy. Boston stressed the need for self-improvement to become “better” people. Agents in London “developed an intricate and somewhat ironic theater of ‘inferior types’” (140). The Great Depression forced visitors everywhere to acknowledge the extent to which social conditions, rather than mainly client pathology, played a role in making people vulnerable.

The gendered nature of social work in the interwar period affected styles and tones of discourse. “In general, shifts in the dramatization of poverty came from women listening to women, normally in a context—such as economic crisis or war—that reinforced structural rather than individual explanations,” Peel concludes. “Female workers better understood the struggles of single women, mothers, and girls, even if they tended to underestimate how unreachable their own journeys into independence and self-reliance were for the great majority of their clients” (278). Conversely, women applicants, less inclined than husbands or sons to offend officials by grandstanding, presented themselves as apologetic and muddled, even to appear “stupid” or “dull” if necessary. Peel underscores this theme by presenting case studies written by male social workers, who were not only few in number and...