Frances Fox Piven Papers, 1957- : Scope & Contents of the Collection

Scope and Contents of the Collection

The Frances Fox Piven Papers (circa 1957-), extending 72 linear feet, are primarily professional, though they also contain some personal materials.

The collection consists of correspondence with colleagues, editors and publishers, students and friends; teaching materials; organization and subject files; and speeches and writings, reflecting her work as both an academic and activist in the areas of urban social welfare, poverty, and public policy. Taken together, Piven's papers offer a comprehensive critique of the welfare state, from Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty to the present, and ongoing efforts, acute in the late 1990s, to reform it. Other important and related subject areas illuminated throughout her papers include voting and voter registration (see especially SERIES IV. COMMUNITY SERVICE-HumanSERVE); community development (largely in New York City); working-class political activity; housing rights, reform, and homelessness in New York City (see especially course files in SERIES III. TEACHING; SERIES V. WRITING; and SERIES VII. SUBJECTS); campus politics (especially regarding Columbia University, Boston University, and the City University of New York); civil rights; and United States social and economic policies. Papers throughout the collection also pertain to Piven's co-author and husband, Columbia University School of Social Work Professor Richard A. Cloward. Substantial material documents Piven and Cloward's role in the founding and development of Mobilization for Youth and HumanSERVE (see SERIES IV. COMMUNITY SERVICE). Several correspondents are significant both for the extent of their correspondence with Piven and for their prominence on the national stage. These include poet June Jordan, scholars and activists Howard Zinn and Rosalyn Feldberg, and Senator Paul Wellstone. Other correspondence with significant figures throughout the social sciences and national social policy forums is scattered throughout the collection, and includes Chester Hartman, Sam Bass Warner, S.M. Miller, Herbert Gans, Ira Katznelson, Frank Reissman, Todd Gitlin, Nancy Chodorow, Donna Shalala, and Michael Lipsky.