In this pathbreaking history, Donna J. Guy shows how feminists, social workers, and female philanthropists contributed to the emergence of the Argentine welfare state through their advocacy of child welfare and family-law reform. From the creation of the government-subsidized Society of Beneficence in 1823, women were at the forefront of the child-focused philanthropic and municipal groups that proliferated first to address the impact of urbanization, European immigration, and high infant mortality rates, and later to meet the needs of wayward, abandoned, and delinquent children. Women staffed child-centered organizations that received subsidies from all levels of government. Their interest in children also led them into the battle for female suffrage and the campaign to promote the legal adoption of children. When Juan Peron expanded the welfare system during his presidency (1946-1955), he reorganized private charitable organizations that had, until then, often been led by elite and immigrant women.

Drawing on extensive research in Argentine archives, Guy reveals significant continuities in Argentine history, including the rise of a liberal state that subsidized all kinds of women's and religious groups. State and private welfare efforts became more organized in the 1930s and reached a pinnacle under Juan Peron, when men took over the welfare state and philanthropic and feminist women's influence on child-welfare activities and policy declined. Comparing the rise of Argentina's welfare state with the development of others around the world, Guy considers both why women's child-welfare initiatives have not received more attention in historical accounts and whether the welfare state emerges from the top down or from the bottom up.

A study of prostitution necessarily examines questions of power, class, gender, and public health. In "Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires" these questions combine with particular force. During most of the time covered in this provocative book, from the late nineteenth century well into the twentieth, prostitution was legal in Argentina. Fears and anxieties concerning the effect of female sexual commerce on family and nation were rampant.
Donna J. Guy looks at many aspects of the debate that followed an escalating demand for prostitutes by Argentines and European immigrants. She discusses the widespread fear of white slavery, the merits of medically supervised municipal houses of prostitution, the rights of local governments to restrict the civil liberties of citizens and foreigners, the censorship of literature and music dealing with the plight of prostitutes, and the potential criminality of unsupervised working women who might abandon their families. Guy also describes attempts to deal with female prostitution: rehabilitation, modifications of municipal bordello laws, and medical programs to prevent the spread of venereal disease. She makes clear that the treatment of "marginal" women by liberal politicians and doctors helped promoted policies of repression and censorship that would later be extended to other unacceptable social groups. Her study of how both local and national government in Argentina dealt with these women reveals important links between gender, politics, and economics.

"White Slavery and Mothers Alive and Dead" brings together a diverse set of essays exploring topics ranging from public health and child welfare to criminality and industrialization. What the essays have in common is their gendered connection to work, family, and the rise of increasingly interventionist nation-states in Latin America, and particularly in Argentina.
Donna J. Guy first looks at Latin American women from a general and international perspective. She explores which paradigms are most useful in studying gender history in Latin America. She also addresses the evolution of the Pan-American Child Congresses as well as the politics of Pan-American cooperation in relation to child welfare issues. Later essays focus on Argentina in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Guy looks at how women were affected by systems of forced labor, and she illuminates changes in the concept of patria potestad, or the right of male heads of households to control family members' labor. Other essays address such issues as public health, white slavery, and public notions of motherhood in Argentina.