Dreamers of a New Day (20 page)

Though African-American middle-class reformers placed a strong emphasis on mothers as a vital moral force, they were more likely than the white middle class to accept pragmatically that women had to earn money. Through their women’s clubs, they therefore created a wide range of services for children and young people as well as mothers. These included day nurseries, kindergartens, orphanages, working girls’ lodgings and extra schooling for children.
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African-American women also formed settlements. The pioneering Clotee Scott Settlement in Chicago was founded by women’s club member Clotee Scott, who described the settlement as ‘the living home for the children while the parents are at work’.
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By the early twentieth century, black settlements were inclined to stress the provision of improved social opportunities for children from poor black neighbourhoods rather than moral reform.

In 1912 the establishment of the Children’s Bureau, headed by Julia Lathrop from Hull House, meant there was a small national budget for mothers and babies. Lathrop united conservative and progressive groups by focusing on infant welfare, and these links with people active on the ground enabled the Bureau’s funds to reach out to the local level. In 1916 it launched National Baby Week with the backing of the powerful General Federation of Women’s Clubs. As in Britain, the onset of war helped to bring infant and maternal mortality to the fore, and health clinics were set up. After the war Lathrop played a crucial role in the campaign for the 1921 Sheppard-Towner Act, which established federal
welfare provision for instruction in prenatal and infant health care for mothers. A formidable coalition included the National Congress of Mothers and Parent-Teacher Leagues, the National Council of Jewish Women, the National Association of Colored Women, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, as well as the Women’s Trade Union League. Welfare policy in the United States was profoundly gender-inscribed. However, over the course of the decade the supporters of Sheppard-Towner and the Children’s Bureau would face powerful opposition from the right to the very principle of public provision.
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While it proved particularly difficult in the United States to make the case that the well-being of mothers and children was the responsibility not only of individuals but of society, neither was it easy in Britain. Reformers used a range of ingenious tactics to overcome opposition. When in 1899 Charlotte Despard, serving on the Nine Elms School Board, was told by the Board’s male members that there were no finances to feed starving schoolchildren, she responded with an upper-class form of direct action; bringing in saucepans, a cooking stove, tables and benches and presenting the Board with a fait accompli. She then used similar direct action to introduce medical inspection, providing a nurse from her own self-help baby clinic to diagnose schoolchildren’s bad teeth and rickets.
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British women employed the same approaches to children’s needs that they used around maternal welfare. They mixed voluntary and public provision, they extended their areas of activism from one issue to another, they established local Labour–Liberal alliances, and supported women’s enfranchisement. Margaret McMillan, whose socialism was inspired by Ruskin and Morris, exemplified this strategic flexibility. Between 1894 and 1901 she campaigned as an Independent Labour Party member on the Bradford School Board for a school clinic and meals for schoolchildren. When the Conservatives’ 1902 Education Act dissolved the School Board and assigned control over elementary schools to urban district or county councils which did not yet include women, the pragmatic McMillan worked to secure national School Medical Inspection with Robert Morant, a progressive Liberal reformer whom she knew from the London settlement, Toynbee Hall. Medical inspection became compulsory in 1907, partly as a result of the social panic about working-class health stimulated by the Boer War. However, the diagnosis of illness did not imply that the schools provided medical care, and McMillan agitated next for an Act requiring local authorities to provide treatment. The
compromise was to be a clause in the Education Provisions Act in 1908 which enabled but did not require local authorities to provide treatment. With financial backing from the American soap millionaire Joseph Fels, and support from Robert Morant in the Ministry of Education, McMillan started her own clinic, first in Bow, and then from 1910 in Deptford, South London, by which time local authorities were able to pay for the medical treatment of schoolchildren.
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In combining self-help, state and charitable resources, McMillan was able to make use of national networks. In the case of nurseries, however, the move into the state sector would take much longer than it did for other kinds of educational services, such as medical inspection and school meals. In 1918 it seemed that an Act drafted by the Liberal historian H. A. L. Fisher would ensure nursery schools within the state system of education. But the transfer from the Board of Education to the Ministry of Health made nurseries costly, because of the high ratio of teachers to children, and few local authorities were willing to give grants. Nevertheless, McMillan’s utopian vision of childcare influenced the teachers she trained. In 1928, the Bradford Education Committee accused Mary Chignell from the Deptford Centre of taking socialist propaganda into the nursery. They must have been mystified by her transcendent response, with its echoes of new-life utopianism. The nursery school, she declared, should bring a ‘social rebirth, a reinterpretation of life and society, of human tradition’.
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In both countries, arguments endorsing society’s responsibility for motherhood were being applied to demands for maternity grants, as well as for resources for information and centres. The claim for cash from the state extended to a demand for an allowance or ‘pension’ for mothers who were bringing up children, and this proved to be the most controversial aspect of the social maternalist case. Before World War One, British labour movement women had begun to debate the idea of a weekly payment by the state to mothers for every dependent child as well as payment in kind – free milk and bread – to supplement the work of the welfare clinics. Support for mothers’ pensions also came from feminists and social reformers aiming to secure independence for women and to take low-waged working mothers out of the sweated labour market. The demand became a lifetime’s cause for the feminist Eleanor Rathbone, whose work on the Liverpool Board of Guardians and efforts to organize homeworkers had convinced her that poverty, rather than bad mothering, perpetuated problems in working-class families.
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During World War One the government paid Separation Allowances to the dependents of men in the services.
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Working-class women came to appreciate the regularity of these allowances, which also began to legitimate a mother’s entitlement to resources from the state. In a 1918 letter to
The Times
, Eleanor Rathbone proposed ‘a simple extension of the system which has worked so admirably during the war of separation allowances paid direct to the mother who bears and rears the children, and proportional in amount to their number’.
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Eleanor Rathbone

After the war, labour women’s organizations pressed the Labour Party for a policy of payments to women who were without male breadwinners. This was adopted as Labour Party policy in 1918, although not the extension of ‘pensions’ to unmarried women, which some labour women were advocating. In 1924 Labour was about to draft a bill for Widows’ and Orphans’ Pensions but lost office before it could be implemented. Nevertheless the Conservatives, with an eye on female voters, introduced Widows’ Pensions the following year.
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In her 1925
Hypatia
Dora Russell pressed for a wider allowance, arguing that women needed ‘recognition of their work – the most dangerous of trades’, by
‘endowment from the community’.
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During the inter-war period, Eleanor Rathbone and the Family Endowment Society continued to campaign for allowances for mothers. They were prepared to accept contributions from employers – a proposal opposed by trade unionists, who suspected the allowances would be used by capital as a means of controlling men with families and result in lowered wages. Their fears were not without grounds. In 1926 the Royal Commission on the Coal Industry recommended wage cuts for single men, accompanied by family allowances to supplement the income of men with children.
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Some feminist and socialist women suspected that instead of the greater degree of independence envisaged by Rathbone, Mothers’ Pensions would be used to reinforce the notion that women’s place was in the home. Her proposal also provoked the anxiety that men would vanish and leave mothers to parent alone, while support from a male breadwinner appeared a more attractive proposition to many working-class women than state handouts, which were redolent of the humiliating Poor Law system. However, Eleanor Rathbone and the Family Endowment Society did not give up, and after the General Strike and the miners’ lockout of 1926, poverty was so acute that some of the suspicion of state benefits diminished. Between 1927 and 1930, a Joint Committee of the Labour Party and the Family Endowment Society took evidence; their final report recommended a state payment for children ‘in order to lighten the burden that now falls on the mothers who are trying to bring up a family on a hopelessly inadequate income’. The emphasis had shifted, from women’s autonomy as mothers to the relief of poverty. Nonetheless the report was free of the judgemental condescension which had characterized the Poor Law:

We are convinced that the money so disbursed would be spent both wisely and economically, since it is our view the mothers themselves are best able, because of their experience and training and their overwhelming personal interest, to apportion this expenditure in the way most calculated to secure the well-being of their children. No public authority, can, in our view, make money go as far in the provision of food, clothing and healthy surroundings, as can the mothers who have learned economy in the hard school of experience.
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The Committee wanted the state allowances to be paid through the Post Office, and to include illegitimate as well as legitimate children. In
1945 Family Allowances were finally to be introduced on these terms, as a universal benefit which avoided the shame of Poor Law provision.

Similar debates were taking place in the US. Before World War One, the need for state allowances for mothers and children had been identified by networks of women’s civic groups including the General Federation of Women’s Clubs and the National Congress of Mothers, as well as by Progressive reformers around settlements such as Hull House.
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Their policy proposals drew on direct experience. The social reformer Mary Beard described how observation of the ineffectiveness of charitable relief for widows with young children led to ‘a demand for public aid for mothers’, because otherwise the children would be cared for in a few charitable ‘orphan asylums’ or put to work. She pointed to the cost of orphanage care as well as the social cost of ‘broken-down physiques, undeveloped minds, wrong associations and delinquency’.
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Clara Cahill Park, a member of the Massachusetts Commission on Widows’ Pensions, said she had started out ‘with a blind faith in philanthropic methods’, but had become critical because charitable efforts were ‘not exact, and not careful’, or ‘mitigated by that human sympathy which would atone for human faults’. She added, ‘State aid, to my mind, is an advance, as showing the policy of the nation, to conserve its children and its homes, and in recognizing the mother as a factor in that campaign, for the welfare of all.’
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Although the mainstream feminist organizations did not endorse mothers’ pensions, socialist feminists Crystal Eastman and Harriot Stanton Blatch, who were in contact with British feminists and socialists, pressed for payment for mothers, as did Katharine Anthony, who wrote the introduction to the American edition of Eleanor Rathbone’s 1918 Family Endowment Committee report. Katharine Anthony was also familiar with German and Scandinavian debates, in which state endowment was envisaged as one aspect of a new approach to motherhood. She was among a minority of American reformers who argued for the rights of children born to unmarried women.
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Actual provision was to be circumscribed. Payment for mothers had been put forward as a policy proposal in 1909 at a White House conference on the Care of Dependent Children, with a proviso which was to be of considerable significance: payment was to go to the ‘children of reasonably efficient and deserving mothers who are without the support of the normal breadwinner’.
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Mothers’ pensions were introduced on this limited basis in various states before the war. During World War
One, US women did not get separation allowances, though by 1919 thirty-nine states had created Mothers’ Pensions schemes. These represented a major breakthrough in acknowledging that care for children was the responsibility of society as well as individual families. However, these small payments were to be used as a lever to enforce particular views of motherhood. As Gwendolyn Mink observes, ‘evidence of smoking, lack of church attendance, poor hygiene, male boarders, or faulty budgeting, could result in withdrawal of a mother’s allowance.’
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Social workers exercised considerable power in determining who were fit mothers. The result in practice was that both foreign-born and African-American women were less likely to qualify than women of Anglo-Saxon origin.
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During the 1920s, ‘mothers’ pensions’ increasingly became part of social casework, erasing all traces of earlier concepts of universal entitlement. Even under the New Deal in the 1930s, when mothers’ pensions were replaced by Aid to Dependent Children and administered by Roosevelt’s Social Security Administration, they never acquired the legitimacy of contributory benefits.
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