Il faut défendre la société / "Armenpflege"

@Stuart (or anybody who wants to help me out, i am stuck)

My subject is the late Kaiserreich and Il faut défendre la société. (My
discipline is social policy) I supposed the 3. Reich was to risky to
write about. Maybe later....

My subject ist he scientification of "Armenpflege" wich ment some
philantrophic bourgoise effords to help the poor and meanwhile solve
the social question "soziale Frage". They did some structural reforms,
which had to do dealing with the urbanization and the growing numbers of
unemployed. Their tactic has always been to visit them at home and to
controll them on the urban level. They first decentralized then
centralized, they got professional and differentiate their objects. Main
questions are how to get them to work and how to deal with the cildren/
mothers. The conservative woman's movement gets involved, they overcast
society with caring motherhood.

Politicly they where frustrated about few possibilities to participate,
and positioned between right and left. They where influenced by the
socialhygienist discourse, which tried to analyze the living conditions
in order to prevent illnesses and epidemics. They where all very
frightend by deseases, by the poor and of course the social demokracy.

Some say the social question in germany was a safety question. (which is
a major difference to France) After they had supressed the social
democracy in the 80s and invented the health inssurance the social
democracy developed to bet he first mass- party, and it became evident
they could not suppress them any longer. Bismarck lost his job. The
social democracy did some steps towards integration, they conquered the
administration of the health inssurance. Some say this was an important
steps for he social democracy to get bourgeois, because they watched
themselfs going to work (and not beeing ill) and they adopted the
socialhygienist values with their health inssurance. The bourgoise
talked about getting the wage settlements into a law and the labour
unions did not want to.

Bublitz* (see below) says the socialdarwinist discourse opposed the
social policy/ socialhygienist discourse, but the socialhygienist/social
policy discourse also intended to calm down the social question and
where part of the biologization of the human sciences.

Bublitz shows in extensive discourseanalysis that the population- and
gender politics in the Kaiserreich around the year 1900 led in the
discourse of "Kulturkrise" (something like fin de siecle crisis) to a
"Volkskörper" (something like body of the nation) Ist something like the
biologization of human Sciences. She shows that at the crosspoints of
taylorist, raceygienist and sexualhygienist discourse emerges the
socialdarwinist thought of selection.

Although Bublitz does not show extensive power analysis, and focuses on
the early Foucault this sound very much like Il faut défendre la
société. First i wanted to show the diversifying subjectivization of the
poor, then i realized that mainly the womansmovement and bourgoise got a
new subjectivity, i think there was an important change in the gender
relations. I read mostly old fashioned institutional centered analyses
and history of ideas, some social constructivist, i did find very much
"alltagsgeschichte" anthropologist based work fort his period. I feel i
still don't have any information about the poor, but i am running out of
time. I am grateful for any hints. Thank you for reading that far.

*Der Gesellschaftskörper : zur Neuordnung von Kultur und Geschlecht um
1900 / Hannelore Bublitz; Christine Hanke; Andrea Seier. -
Frankfurt/Main [u.a.] : Campus-Verl., 2000




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