Elizabeth Garner Masarik, "The Sentimental State: How Women-Led Reform Built the American Welfare State" (U Georgia Press, 2024)

New Books in African American Studies · Nov 24, 2024 · 1h

With The Sentimental State: How Women-Led Reform Built the American Welfare State (University of Georgia Press, 2024), Dr. Elizabeth Garner Masarik shows how middle-class women, both white and Black, harnessed the nineteenth-century “culture of sentiment” to generate political action in the Progressive Era. While eighteenth-century rationalism had relied upon the development of the analytic mind as the basis for acquiring truth, nineteenth-century sentimentalism hinged upon human emotional responses and the public’s capacity to feel sympathy to establish morally based truth and build support…