Download or read book Our Sisters' Keepers written by Jill Bergman and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2005-08-28 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American culture has long had a conflicted relationship with assistance to the poor. Cotton Mather and John Winthrop were staunch proponents of Christian charity as fundamental to colonial American society, while transcendentalists harbored deep skepticism towards benevolence in favor of Emersonian self-reliance and Thoreau's insistence on an ascetic life. Women in the 19th century, as these essays show, approached issues of benevolence far differently than their male counterparts, consistently promoting assistance to the impoverished, in both their acts and their writings.