Interview with Elizabeth Garner Masarik on her book, The Sentimental State: How Women-Led Reform Built the American Welfare State (University of Georgia Press, 2024)
Lauren MacIvor ThompsonI got the chance to speak with historian Elizabeth Garner Masarik about her new book The Sentimental State: How Women-Led Reform Built the American Welfare State. An assistant professor of history at SUNY Brockport, Elizabeth is a scholar of American women’s history, the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and the administrative state. Her new project is on American spiritualism, and she was also eager to discuss her findings on women and the history of welfare networks, charity, and maternalist sentiment. Dr. Masarik defines “sentimentalism,” or feelings surrounding motherhood and child-rearing, as one of the chief drivers behind the push for women-led public health and social initiatives in the nineteenth century.
Your new book is a fascinating examination of the intersection of women’s state-building and the politics of domesticity. Can you talk a little bit about the origins of the book? Was it part of your dissertation? What new directions did you go in as you wrote?
Yes, this book came out of my dissertation. I took a women’s history course with sexuality, gender and sports scholar Susan Cahn during the first semester of my MA program and was hooked. I really latched on to the U.S. maternalist movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and dove headfirst into learning about the early formation of the U.S. welfare state. Additionally, the primary sources I found where women were speaking about, and grieving over, the death of their infants and young children just hit me; after becoming a mother myself, I couldn’t fathom being able to go on with life if one of my children died. And so, in a way, examining child and infant mortality became a kind of masochistic way for me to study history while also feeling this immense empathy for my subjects. I didn’t set out to focus on infant and child death at the beginning, but the connections between emotions and state-building became so glaringly obvious that I couldn’t look away. It was a subject that spoke to me as a mother and as a recipient of welfare. It felt very personal. When I revised the dissertation into book form I focused more heavily on sentimentalism as a cultural phenomenon of the nineteenth century and how I found that bleeding into the twentieth century.
For those who haven’t had a chance to read it yet, what does the book say about the history of welfare and the associational state? How did gender and race shape the emergent welfare state much earlier than the New Deal?
The Sentimental State is a book that weaves together two nineteenth-century social issues– infant mortality and “fallen” women, i.e.sex work and the sexual double-standard– and shows how these two issues were interwoven into programs that formed the early American welfare state in the first decades of the 20th century. On the surface, infant mortality and sex work might seem to be two completely different moral dilemmas, but they were actually intimately interconnected. That’s where the culture of sentimentalism comes into play, meaning the literary, fashion, and mourning practices that used the concept of sentimentality – or high emotion – to further personal and political ends. I was working within an existing historiography that tracks the growth of the welfare state before the New Deal. Some important works that influenced me are Robyn Muncy’s Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, Maureen Fitzgerald’s Habits of Compassion, a lot of Linda Gordon’s earlier work, Michele Mitchell’s Righteous Propagation, Theda Skocpol’s Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, and Brian Balogh’s A Government Out of Sight. These are some historians and books that really stick out to me as being foundational for how I thought about this project. There was a really great historical discussion going on in the 1990s that examined women’s political organizing and the welfare state before the vote. And this was a conversation that I felt needed a revival, and I wanted to dive back into this rich historiography and add to it. I wanted to know what makes people step out of their comfort zone and into reform work, and I found sentimentalism to be a compelling factor in motivating women to organize on behalf of other women and children outside of their family unit.
What I really wanted to do in this book is show how the American welfare state is built on the backs of women’s labor – that women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries saw a need for reform and cobbled together networks that addressed these issues. So, at its core, this is a book of women’s history, but it’s also a book about state building and politics, particularly political activism in an age before American women had the right to vote. The book also looks at how these women exerted control, exerted agency, built political coalitions, and built networks that really got a lot done in an age in which they had no official political voice, an age before the 19th Amendment gave them the right to vote.
Sentiment and emotion play a huge role in your historical actors’ motivations. Can you say a little more for our readers about what you found regarding the relationship between emotion and policymaking?
I was seeing these really sappy, sentimental writings peppered throughout congressional hearings and magazines that centered on women’s organizing from the 20th century and they seemed so at odds with the political organizing that I had been studying thus far. Furthermore, I was finding that a lot of the activism that happened on behalf of women and children in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries grew out of earlier nineteenth-century reform movements focused on curbing prostitution and the sexual double standard. And all of this was couched in this sentimentality of lost youth, lost angels, lost innocence. I wanted to rectify the “serious” state building (what Robyn Muncy termed the “women’s reform domain”) with this flowery language I was finding. Basically, I wanted to understand the cultural context in which women reformers operated in an America where the expansion of government was creeping and, oftentimes, not visible. Government support of the welfare of people and politics does not act in a bubble. It is driven by the needs, decisions, and actions of people. And so, my book is an examination of the cultural realities of the people who tapped national, state, and local funds to enact the changes they saw as necessary in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era American world.
In the archives, what surprised you the most? Did anything change the direction of your arguments?
I really didn’t expect the sentimentalism part to become such a strong thread in my research but, as I mentioned earlier, I was having a hard time wrapping my head around the connections between the sentimental flowery language I was finding and the solid grassroots organizing that was taking place. It led me into an examination of culture and emotion that I hadn’t set out to explore.
Featured image caption: A woman’s suffrage poster designed by Rose O’Neill, 1915. (Courtesy Missouri Historical Society)
Lauren MacIvor Thompson is a Faculty Fellow in the Georgia State University College of Law's Center for Law, Health, & Society. Her research centers on the forces of law and medicine, and their role in the early history of public health and the birth control movement. She has a background in Public History and before returning for her doctorate, worked for various history museums and state agencies on historic garden preservation, public history projects, and Section 106 federal and state historic resource protection.
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