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Wives without Husbands: Marriage, Desertion, & Welfare in New York, 1900-1935.

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Wives without Husbands: Marriage, Desertion, & Welfare in New York, 1900-1935. By Anna Igra. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. viii + 175 PP.

Wives without Husbands brings flesh and original scholarship to a previously neglected predicament that bedeviled the Jewish immigrant community in the early decades of the twentieth century: the growing crisis of husbands and fathers who deserted wives and children and the organized efforts of Jewish charities to address it. The heart of Anna Igra's book is based on a trove of case records of the National Desertion Bureau (NDB), which was founded in 1911. Its mandate was to expand on the work of the National Conference of Jewish Charities, which from its beginning had made desertion a high priority. These case records detail the histories of thousands of women who came to the NDB in search of support and include not only notes of social workers and lawyers but also correspondence from husbands and wives and reports of neighbors and children. Based on these primary sources, Igra is able to piece together the operation of the NDB as well as present the personal...

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