The Business of Benevolence

By incorporating the perspective of gender, labor, business, social, and political history, Tone adds significantly to our understanding of the development of welfare capitalism.

* Journal of Interdisciplinary History *

Tone's panoramic analysis of welfare capitalist programs across the industrial landscape of Progressive era America challenges all previous works even as she acknowleges her debt to them.... Tone has written a compelling history... and a first-rate study which goes a long way to helping us understand why the American welfare state is so weak and so easily eviscerated today.

-- Daniel J. Walkowitz * Journal of Social History *

A splendid book.

-- Michael B. Katz * American Historical Review *

Andrea Tone's refreshing new volume deftly combines business, labor, cultural, and gender history to resituate walfare capitalism in its contingent historical setting.... Tone's work is thought-provoking and adds complexity to the historiography of welfare capitalism.

-- John Williams-Searle * Annals of Iowa *

Fluent and well-researched... This impressive work locates itself neatly in the existing literature and makes its own contribution by offering a sense of the structures, nuances and forms of early welfare work.

* Labor History Review *

Tone's basic thesis is that 'welfare work' provided a means for firms to forestall government regulation of working conditions and to improve their public image and relations with workers.... A thorough and thoughtful survey of an important episode in the development of corporate labor policy.

* Choi