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105: The Sentimental State episode artwork

Oct 7, 2025 1 hr 9 min

105: The Sentimental State

from The Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Today Cathleen interviews Elizabeth Garner Masarik, about her book, The Sentimental State: How Women-Led Reform Created the American Welfare State (University of Georgia Press, 2024), which is the 2025 winner of SHGAPE's H. Wayne Morgan Book Prize. For more information about the Society's three book awards (deadlines in October) see https://www.shgape.org/prizes-awards/ Books mentioned by Dr. Masarik in today's interview: Katherine G. Aiken, Harnessing the Power of Motherhood: The National Florence Crittenton Mission, 1883-1925 (University of Tennessee Press, 1998) Brian Balogh, The Associational State: American Governance in the Twentieth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) Regina Kunzel, Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890-1945 (Yale UP, 1993) Rickie Solinger, Wake up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe v. Wade (Routledge, 1992) Molly Ladd Taylor, Raising a Baby the Government Way: Mothers’ Letters to the Children’s Bureau, 1915-1932 (Rutgers University Press, 1986) Jane Tomkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (Oxford UP, 1985)

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105: The Sentimental State

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