Emily K. Abel

The ambiguities of social support: Adult daughters caring for frail elderly parents

Abstract This article explores the types of support adult daughters caring for frail elderly parents receive from various sources (husbands, children, siblings, friends, and support groups) as well as the barriers they encounter in seeking additional help. Previous studies, based on quantitative methods, have asserted that social support buffers caregivers from stress. This study, based on in-depth interviews using both open-ended and close-ended questions, found that family and friends exacerbated stress as well as alleviated it. Renewed contact with brothers and sisters frequently reignited sibling rivalries. Friends who trivialized caregiving undermined the women. Moreover, although some daughters received critical assistance, concern for the well-being of others compelled these caregivers to submerge their own needs. Rather than Impose on their husbands, they renounced social support and attempted to absorb the costs of caregiving themselves. Many sought to shield their children from exposure to illness and death.

Only the best class of immigration: public health policy toward Mexicans and Filipinos in Los Angeles, 1910-1940.

Public health officials contributed to the early 20th-century campaign against Mexicans and Filipinos in Los Angeles. In 1914, the newly established city and county health departments confronted the overwhelming task of building a public health infrastructure for a rapidly growing population spread over a large area. However, for several years public health reports focused almost exclusively on the various infectious diseases associated with Mexican immigrants. Although the segregation of Mexicans was illegal in California until 1935, county officials established separate clinics for Whites and Mexicans during the 1920s. With assistance from state officials, local health authorities participated actively in efforts to restrict Mexican immigration throughout the 1920s and to expel both Mexicans and Filipinos during the 1930s.

From Exclusion to Expulsion: Mexicans and Tuberculosis in Los Angeles, 1914-1940

Even before the influx of Mexicans, public health officials in Los Angeles constructed very sick and very poor tubercular people as an illegitimate presence who not only endangered others but also represented weakness and failure and imposed intolerable economic burdens. The identification of tuberculosis with Mexicans during the 1920s hardened the perception that they did not belong in Los Angeles. Because Mexicans lived and worked in dangerous surroundings, it is likely that they bore a very high burden of tuberculosis. Contemporary statistics, however, tell us less about the prevalence of disease than about the attitudes of health officials. Most were convinced that Mexicans had an innate susceptibility to tuberculosis. Concerns about the cost of supporting tubercular Mexicans figured prominently in efforts to restrict their immigration in the 1920s, and in the deportation and repatriation drives of the 1930s.

Representations of Caregiving by Margaret Forster; Mary Gordon, and Doris Lessing

This article examines three novels in order to provide a new perspective on traditional gerontological studies of caregiving and the public policies they generate. All three novels challenge the model of caregivers as rational calculators and the fixed, static notion of caregiving that underlies cross-sectional research. The novels also highlight the importance of paying greater attention to the particularities of individual experience.

Man, woman, and chore boy: transformations in the antagonistic demands of work and care on women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Because the population is aging when increasing numbers of women are entering the labor force, policy makers stress the problems of reconciling the conflict between work and care. This conflict has a long history, especially for poor women and women of color. During the nineteenth century, caregiving was more likely to clash with domestic work than with paid employment. The expansion of the health care delivery system between 1890 and 1940 removed some responsibilities from the home. But rather than disappearing, many caregiving obligations changed. The growth of womens labor force participation altered the relation between work and care. Some women quit jobs they desperately needed when family members fell ill. Others left serious sick or disabled family members unattended.

Medicine and Morality: The Health Care Program of the New York Charity Organization Society

The New York City Charity Organization Society (COS) previously has been viewed exclusively through a welfare lens. Relying primarily on COS case files between 1888 and 1918, this article demonstrates that the organization also played a central role in the delivery of health care to the immigrant poor. It hired visiting nurses, mediated between clients and various providers, and collaborated when the New York City Department of Health launched a pioneering program of tuberculosis control. By linking welfare and medical history, the article seeks to enlarge our understanding of both. One explanation for COS involvement in health care is that the organization was simply responding to the needs it identified. Another explanation, however, may lie in the advantages medicine offered to an organization preoccupied with social classification.

Introduction: The Uses and Evaluation of Qualitative Research It's Not What You Do when You Don't Have Data or Don't Know Statistics

If ever there was an area of inquiry that should be approached from the perspective of interpretive social science, this is one. It is apparent even to the most casual observer that aging has multiple biological, psycho- logical, and sociological components; that neither the behavior of older people nor the status of older people can be understood otherwise; and that the primary need is for explication of contexts and for multiplicity of methods. It should also be apparent that attention to change over time is fundamental in lay disciplinary approaches to the study of aging, whether it be change in the individual or historical change in social, economic, and political institutions. (p. 294)

Appealing for Children's Health Care: Conflicts between Mothers and Officials in the 1930s

In this article, I examine problems facing mothers seeking health care for sick and disabled children between 1929 and 1940. The article is based on letters written to government officials and reports of investigations conducted by caseworkers and public officials. By appealing to Washington, the letter writers actively rejected their denigration. Many complained about the dehumanizing treatment they received from welfare officials, and some reminded the federal government what a humane social policy should look like. Nevertheless, only a tiny fraction of the women received the help they wanted.

Benevolence and Social Control: Advice from the Children's Bureau in the Early Twentieth Century

This essay examines the correspondence in 1914-15 between Julia Lathrop, chief of the Childrens Bureau, and a working-class woman in order to help illuminate a growing debate about the effect of state welfare programs on women. Although Lathrop imposed her own definition on her clients needs, helped to undermine womens confidence in their own knowledge and skills, and perpetuated the gender division of labor, she also responded to this correspondent as a unique individual and helped to restore the dignity other members of the community had eroded.

In the Last Stages of Irremediable Disease: American Hospitals and Dying Patients before World War II

After a brief discussion of early- and mid-nineteenth-century hospitals, this article focuses on the years between 1880 and 1939, when those facilities underwent a major transformation and the proportion of hospital deaths steadily increased. During both periods, private hospitals refused admission to many seriously ill people and discharged others when death approached. City hospitals dumped poor patients with advanced disease on chronic care facilities and especially on almshouses. With each transfer, the quality of care sharply declined. And trips from one institution to another often inflicted additional suffering; some accelerated death.