Labor, Welfare, and Gendered Citizenship in New Deal Puerto Rico Available to Purchase

This chapter explores the history of social welfare programs as a space of political activism under the expansion of US New Deal policies and programs to Puerto Rico. It focuses on Puerto Rican women social workers and the working-class women who became the clients of New Deal social welfare programs, emphasizing how these women advocated for labor standards, advocated for protections for women workers, and demanded social provisions for women providing reproductive labor in their homes. It also considers debates over the extension of the Social Security Act of 1935 to Puerto Rico and the centrality of women social workers and activists in these debates in the years that followed the act’s passage.