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Public Pensions: Gender and Civic Service in the States, 1850–1937

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2005

Michele Landis Dauber
Affiliation:
Stanford University

Extract

Public Pensions: Gender and Civic Service in the States, 1850–1937. By Susan Sterett. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. 240p. $39.95.

Susan Sterett's book is a useful, although flawed, history of litigation in the states over municipal and state pensions for civil service employees. In particular, Sterett examines the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century history of state-level efforts to expand the scope of permissible state and local pensions, from firefighters and police officers to other civil service employees and finally to such groups as mothers and the elderly. Generally, state courts interpreted their constitutions to permit pensions for employees but not for the broader public, despite scattered efforts to argue that all labor should count as “service” to the public, meriting reward by state governments.

Type
BOOK REVIEWS: AMERICAN POLITICS
Copyright
© 2005 American Political Science Association

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