Federal welfare reform was enacted in 1996, and as a result, welfare is no longer an entitlement, available in perpetuity to impoverished guardians of children, almost all of whom are single mothers. Now no one may receive welfare benefits for more than five years, and work is expected of recipients after two years on the rolls. The legislation was greeted with consternation on the left. Marian Wright Edelman of the Children’s Defense Fund predicted that it would “leave a moral blot on … our nation.” Her organization forecast that welfare reform would increase child poverty in America by 12%.

As Stephen Pimpare concedes at the outset of “The New Victorians: Poverty, Politics, and Propaganda in Two Gilded Ages” (New Press, 304 pages, $27.95), the results have been much different. There were fewer than 5 million welfare recipients in 2003, and more than 12 million in 1996. Yet the proportion of American children in poverty fell in those same years, from 21% to 18%.

Nevertheless, Mr. Pimpare is convinced that welfare reform is a terrible thing, “a battle in a class war” led by the rich against the poor.

Mr. Pimpare calls on the left to wage a “strong, stirring, unapologetic defense of welfare” as it used to be. Welfare, he says, should be celebrated “as a force that allows men and women to lead their lives and care for their families in ways that are impossible” when they must work at jobs paying low wages. That is an abstract way of saying that unreformed welfare was good because it subsidized women who bore illegitimate children and did not require them to find jobs.

To defend unreformed welfare, “The New Victorians” presents a historical analogy between the late 19th and the late 20th centuries. In both periods cash relief for the poor (in the 19th century it was disbursed by cities, rather than the federal government) was cut back as a result of effective public relations campaigns funded by the wealthy. In both periods, conservative intellectuals promoted specious arguments (through charity organizations then, through think tanks now). And in both periods, the poor suffered calamitous harm as a result of the cutbacks.

Mr. Pimpare notes that cash relief was restored in many cities in the early 20th century, and his book pushes for a comparable restoration today, in which welfare would again become an entitlement, and benefits would be bestowed more generously. The comparison of the two eras is intriguing, but the interest is in the differences rather than the similarities. Both poverty and the government response to it are significantly different now than they were a century ago.

In the 19th century, most poor families were headed by married couples, in which both parents worked. Today, by contrast, poverty is concentrated among families headed by non-workers and unmarried women. To its credit, today’s reformed welfare accordingly aims to aid the poor by encouraging both marriage and work.

To begin with marriage, illegitimate births are now 10 times more common than they were in the 19th century (3% of all births then, 34% now). And poverty is now five times more common among families headed by women without a husband (28% of whom are poor) than among families headed by married parents (5% of whom are poor).

Mr. Pimpare concedes that pre-1996 welfare “may well have discouraged marriage and two-parent households.” He also observes that the “growth in out-of-wedlock childbirth [and] single parent families has slowed” since 1996. Nevertheless, he sees support for welfare reform as a mark of “hysteria over sex and marriage,” with reform targeting women’s “independence from men.”

Mr. Pimpare can celebrate the supposed independence of families headed by single women only because he ignores the harm done to children who are raised in such families. Even when one controls for income, children raised in single-parent families are much more likely than those raised by married parents to drop out of school, to be both out of work and out of school, and to become single parents themselves. In the words of the political scientist James Q. Wilson, the evidence on this score is “now so strong that even some sociologists believe it.” Unfortunately, Mr. Pimpare is not among their number.

Even in the wake of welfare reform, nonwork continues to cause much poverty. Among families in the lowest fifth of the income distribution, less than half had householders who worked at all in 2002, and less than a quarter of the householders worked full-time. Only 11% of the working aged poor worked full-time; by contrast, only 3% of full-time workers were poor. To encourage the work effort of the poor is not to attack them.

And the decrease in welfare payments to the nonworking poor has been balanced by increased subsidies to the wages of the working poor. In fact, as Mr. Pimpare himself notes, government now subsidizes the wages of the poor through the Earned Income Tax Credit, which in effect raises low wages by 40% to 50%. He explains the post-1996 decrease in poverty in part as a result of the EITC: More than 20 million American families are beneficiaries, and they collectively receive some $30 billion. American social policy now aims to get the poor to work by making work more rewarding.

Most people, exercising their common sense, agree that two parents are generally better than one and that life is better as a worker than on a dole. They should therefore consider current government policy to be, on the whole, a good rather than a bad thing. And they will also conclude that Mr. Pimpare, because he wears ideological blinders, has written a bad rather than a good book.

Mr. Schwartz is an adjunct senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C.