Beneficient Maternalism: Argentine Motherhood in Comparative Perspective, 1880-1920

This article places an important Argentine voluntary association, the Beneficent Society, within the international context of women's maternalist activism. Mead focuses on the efforts of elite women's associations to influence government assistance to poor women and children, arguing that such influence depended not only on governmental structure, but also on women's ability to take advantage of prevailing cultural and nationalist concerns. Comparing Argentina with France and the United States, Mead weighs the importance of Catholicism, medical corporations, immigration, and differences among local groups of maternalists in explaining the success of the Beneficent Society before 1920 and its subsequent marginalization.