Women Building Social Welfare Programs in Puerto Rico after 1917 Available to Purchase

This chapter examines the creation of social welfare programs in Puerto Rico under US colonial rule, through a focus on Puerto Rican women social workers and the working-class women and children who became targets of the reform projects they directed. It focuses on the history of the Children’s Bureau of the United States Department of Labor in Puerto Rico and debates over the partial and provisional extension of early US social welfare policies to the archipelago. The chapter also examines the life and work of early Puerto Rican social worker Beatriz Lassalle del Valle and her US collaborator at the Children’s Bureau Helen Bary.