“If the charity that one practices for adults honors and gratifies, that which one engages in for children redeems and glorifies,” wrote Juan de Dios Peza, poet and playwright, in his journalistic chronicle of public welfare under the government of Porfirio Díaz. Peza elaborated: “If charity is beautiful when exercised in favor of adults, it is a divine reflection, a smile of God, when given to children.” Peza's imagery evoked religious charity of the colonial era, when giving alms and pious bequests earned the salvation of the donor. But Peza wrote in 1881 to celebrate the achievements of General Porfirio Díaz's first presidential term in the realm of public welfare, principally bringing welfare administration under federal jurisdiction.

On October 8, 1930, on her way to the Plaza Hidalgo in Mexico City to purchase alfalfa for her employer's poultry, Elvira C. was forced into a police truck. Despite her protests, she was taken to a detention center known as El Carmen. The 28 year old widow from Puebla was arrested for begging and placed in the custody of Mexico City's Public Welfare Agency. After four-and-a-half months in welfare institutions, a social worker recorded Elvira's work history, inquired into her living situation and drinking habits, and visited her place of residence and her place of work. The social worker finally concluded that Elvira was not a beggar and should be released. On March 18, 1931, over five months after being detained, Elvira was ordered released.

Brazilian hygienist Dr. Alfredo Ferreira de Magalhães proclaimed his view of child welfare to an elite audience of medical, legal, political, military, and business leaders during the opening ceremonies at the 1922 First Brazilian Congress for the Protection of Childhood held in Rio de Janeiro. For the first time in Brazil, children had become a distinct focus of teachers, lawyers, military leaders, politicians, police, priests, judges, journalists, and novelists who struggled to incorporate liberal and positivistic ideas into public policies and institutions. Members of all classes of Brazilian society had cared for children and had lamented high rates of infant mortality well before the turn of the century. The 1920s movement, however, differed significantly from previous approaches to child welfare in Brazil. This was the first time that elites from such a wide variety of professions and positions of power insisted that the state assume responsibility for funding, implementing, and enforcing child welfare legislation and institutions.

Between 1880 and 1916, elite women engaged in social welfare and transformed the politics of subordination in Argentina as they brokered a new accommodation between the Catholic Church and the Argentine state. Without ever claiming equality, women made it clear that the progress of the new nation—as male intellectuals and statesmen conceived it—could not be accomplished without their assistance. By stressing what they considered to be their essential contributions to social peace and national integration, elite women completely ignored both traditional and liberal ideas of the divisions between public and private responsibility without appearing to challenge gender norms.

In 1910, the Uruguayan Public Assistance Law established the concept of universal poor relief, declaring that “anyone … indigent or lacking resources has the right to free assistance at the expense of the state.” Nothing better than this law qualifies Uruguay for its distinction as the ‘first welfare state’ in Latin America. As in other countries, much of the first social assistance legislation targeted poor women and children and relied on elite women for much of its implementation. In the Uruguayan case, the primary intersections between public assistance and private philanthropy were the secular “ladies’ committees” (comités de damas), charitable organizations without direct ties to the Catholic Church. These organizations were also an important catalyst for liberal feminism in Uruguay, whose chronology—from the foundation of the National Women's Council in 1916 through the women's suffrage law of 1932—closely parallels the history of the early Uruguayan welfare state. Following a discussion of the formation of the National Public Assistance and its significance for class and gender politics in Uruguay, this article will summarize the evolving relationship between the Uruguayan social assistance bureaucracy and one of these groups, the Sociedad “La Bonne Garde,” an organization that worked with young unmarried mothers. It then discusses how a formal and direct relationship with the state helped make the Bonne Garde and other groups like it a principal point of entry for many elite women in the early phases of Uruguayan liberal feminism. Finally, this article shows how processes set in motion in the 1910s resulted in a relative marginalization of elite women from both state welfare and organized liberal feminism in the 1920s. Through an examination of the history of these ladies’ committees, we gain new insight into both welfare state formation in its earliest Latin American example as well as some of the elements and circumstances which helped shape liberal feminism in Uruguay.