From Labor Reform to the Welfare State: The Critique of Capitalism in Three Postbellum Women's Novels

Abstract:This article places socially-concerned novels by Rebecca Harding Davis, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Louisa May Alcott in the context of the beginnings of the American welfare state. It shows that the authors' representations of gender, class, and race forecast the tactics of maternalist political activists, who would translate postbellum labor reform strategies into the Progressive-Era protective labor legislation and social provision that provided some of the first meaningful intervention in the capitalist ideology and practice of "freedom of contract."