Sample Classifications of the Poor Essay
Words 1,200
This is an essay on classifications of the poor. Public perceptions and understandings of poverty have changed significantly over the years. In the seventeenth-century world where scarcity was commonplace, the survival of poverty was regarded as natural, inescapable, and divinely sanctioned.
Describe the various classifications of the poor (the worthy poor, the able bodied poor and the dependent children).
Public perceptions and understandings of poverty have changed significantly over the years. In the seventeenth-century world where scarcity was commonplace, the survival of poverty was regarded as natural, inescapable, and divinely sanctioned. The poor–meaning the overtly needy and dependent–were to be aided and pitied, but their poverty did not essentially reflect on their characters, nor was their presence an emblem of societal failure. Only in the nineteenth century did a more secular, moralistic view of poverty become widespread; as urban industrial poverty became more common, so too did the conviction that people became poor because of personal flaws. As progressively able-bodied men and women began to show up in the ranks of the poor, public outlook hardened: paupers were regarded as improvident, drunken, lazy, or promiscuous thus able bodied poor. Poverty, in most but not all cases, was interpreted as a sign of individual failure; the distinction between the “worthy” and the “unworthy” poor became a vital one in middle-class perceptions of the working class. While dependent children were those families which had young dependent children who needed support from the government and society.
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