The first ladies of the United States are often not thought about as activists. But in fact, many used their political position strategically to advocate for important reforms that benefited minorities and other underrepresented groups. Their activism from the White House helped social and political causes in different eras. Their unsung work contributed to their administration’s public profile and legacy. It also aided larger social justice campaigns going on throughout US history. This chapter explores the frequently unsung efforts of US first ladies in the realm of social advocacy to shed greater light on the significant work done by these women. It challenges the notion that first ladies were simply ornaments or companions for their husbands and highlights the actions that they took to create change.

Florence Boos examines the proliferation of working-class writing in a variety of genres – poetry, fiction, autobiography, and journalism – at a time when there was a significant middle-class interest in forms of working-class culture. This led to the financing and production of publications such as Howitt’s and People’s Journal, Eliza Cook’s Journal, The Literature of Working Men, and the Dundee-based People’s Journal. The broadly class-based nature of the pervasive violence of the period is acknowledged here as a given in works which experiment with form in order to represent the authenticity of the working-class experience. As Boos concludes, ‘an integration of these writings into our conceptions of Victorian authorship can provide a more comprehensive understanding of the latter, as well as greater appreciation of the unique contributions of mid-century British working-class writers to the literary representation of the social issues of their time’.

This chapter compares the living standards provided by sweatshop wages to other alternative living standards in the countries where sweatshops are located. The main finding is that sweatshop pay compares favorably with widespread poverty living standards and agricultural earnings in the countries in which sweatshops operate and often even compares favorably with average living standards.

This chapter introduces the economic perspective on sweatshops and some alternatives available to workers. It explains the ethical standard – the welfare of Third World sweatshop workers and other poor people in the countries where sweatshops are located – that will be used throughout the book, and it provides an overview of what will be covered in the coming chapters.

This chapter shows that child labor is common in most countries with sweatshops but that most children don’t work in manufacturing – most work in agriculture or the service sector. Thus, calls to ban imported sweatshop goods made using child labor ends up shifting even more children into agriculture and services where pay is often lower and work less safe. The chapter argues that the process of economic development that raises average incomes has been the main cure for child labor. Anti–child labor laws typically codify improvements that market competition already achieved.

Wraps up the main message of the book.

After the Civil War, the American South seemed to be the exception to American exceptionalism. As the late British historian Eric Hobsbawm asserted, after the end of Reconstruction, the South remained “agrarian, poor, backward, and resentful; whites resenting the never-forgotten defeat and blacks the disfranchisement and ruthless subordination imposed by whites when reconstruction ended.” Confederate defeat and the emancipation of slaves left the American South faced with the challenge of embarking upon the “Age of Capital” while largely bereft of capital. This chapter focuses on how the southern capital shortage turned much of the rural South into a “vast pawn shop” with financing for planting crops coming from a mortgage on a crop not yet produced. As beggars for capital, the American South became the ragged stepchild of the industrializing American economy, an economic backwater controlled by outside capital. Active economic legacies of the capital-starved South still haunt the region’s economic landscape in the form of underdeveloped human capital.

Since India had been controlled by the British, it regressed to a lower stage. Poverty had been a lived reality for Indians, including for some of the Indian economists, since the late seventeenth century. International trade networks were disrupted by economic crisis and wars. Meanwhile, the Indian subcontinent was experiencing some of the most severe famines in its history. The Indian economists felt these crises sweeping their cities and villages. In particular, Dadabhai Naoroji and Romesh Chunder Dutt would spend most of their adult lives examining the regress that they saw in India. They would explore how it could be measured, how it varied from region to region, and its causes.

Chapter 2 discusses prostitution in Chinese history and provides the context surrounding prostitution in contemporary China. Sex work has presented the state with regulatory challenges throughout most of Chinese history. In Imperial China (361 BC–1912 CE), prostitution policy varied based on the status of the men and women involved. In Republican China (1912–1949), the regulation of sex work was formulated primarily at the local level. Some local governments sought to abolish it, but they were more likely to license and tax it, or to establish state-run brothels. When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came to power in 1949, it moved swiftly to prohibit prostitution nationwide, and in the first few decades of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), prostitution was less prevalent and more hidden. Yet the scarcity of prostitution during the Mao era is best viewed as a brief historical anomaly. Sex work reemerged in the early 1980s, in the wake of Deng Xiaoping’s policy of reform and opening, and it has been integral to many of the country’s major political, economic, and social developments since 1979.

This chapter offers a description of the complex interaction between power and poverty in light of the portrayal of Jesus in the canonical gospels. His message of salvation, example of solidarity with the poor, and presence in the life of the church offer a direct challenge to impersonal systems of societal arrangement that promote injustice. The Gospels provide a striking testimony for and guide to the essential work of solidarity with the poor.

The 1866 banking crisis effectively ended London’s iron shipbuilding industry. Few companies survived, so destitution faced many shipyard workers. Processing industries also changed. Beet sugar replaced cane, soft sugar hard ‘baked’ sugar and production became concentrated in two firms. In contrast, boosted by foreign grain imports, London’s milling industry expanded. South bank maritime communities maintained established industrial patterns. Shipbuilding proved resilient and traditional employment systems persisted in the Rotherhithe docks, but settlements of waterfront wharf labourers, many of Irish origin, were desperately poor. Poverty was also a hallmark of the north bank. Less socially mixed than in the past, mythic undifferentiated images of ‘Outcast London’ obscured the East End’s continuing maritime connections, including the presence of skilled workers and their organisations. Sailors ashore, the subject of State intervention, were an exception.

This chapter discusses Clare’s nature poetry, in the contexts of the politics of land use, then and now. It reads the verse against issues including the introduction of capitalist forms of agriculture and their effects, including the dispossession and pauperization of agricultural labourers and the degradation of ecosystems. It also considers the politics of language and memory in Clare’s poetry, in relation to changes in the agricultural economy.