many southern men had of antagonism to the propriety of enfranchising women.” Yet, he said, he was able to “overc[o]me the prejudice, which was inborn in me, and which still lurks in the bosom of nearly every southern man, I am sure,” and became “an ardent supporter of the doctrine of equal suffrage.”29
Illustrating the gender liberalism that would come to persist within the Hearth family approach, prosuffrage legislators instead emphasized the desirability of moving toward egalitarian gender ideals. They presented an egalitarian family view, centered on companionship, nurturing, and affection, instead of on chivalry and hierarchy—a family ideal that could be best realized, they said, if women were granted suffrage. Senator Everis Hayes (RCA), for example, celebrated “the ideal of a home where human nature can develop to the full,” saying, “you who have never enjoyed the privilege of going to the polls, our most sacred shrine, in company with your mother and your wife, as I have done, can not realize the supreme pleasure of sharing with your nearest and dearest the highest of privileges, that of full American citizenship.”30
Yet, their support for progressive gender relations and more active participation of women in politics did not stop those in favor of suffrage, like their colleagues on the other side, to continue to view the domestic sphere as feminine and women as first and foremost mothers. For them too, women’s moral capacities flowed from their familial roles, interests, and qualities, as mothers, wives, and daughters and not as independent actors. Far from being gender neutral, the Hearth family economics approach in the Progressive Era specifically targeted women as mothers and housewives. In numerous policies for the encouragement of “American” dietary norms, food and clothes consumption, and family health-related practices, mothers were seen as central to family behavior, and Hearth policies devised to improve material family practices were expressly directed at them. In so doing, legislators were echoing the prevailing ideologies of “maternalism” and “civic housekeeping” advocated by prominent female reformers of the time. Jane Addams, founder of the Hull House settlement in Chicago, popularized “civic housekeeping,” arguing that a city ought to be conceived as a household needing continuous housekeeping, cleanliness, and caring to rectify social problems, tasks for which women were especially suited.31 Characterized as “maternalists,” female reformers used their position as mothers to seek social reform of primarily Hearth (but some Soul) problems such as increasing poverty, full female citizenship, labor unrest, runaway crime, high levels of child mortality, and public health issues such as increasing workplace injuries and spread of epidemic diseases—all while seeking more egalitarian gender relations and the political inclusion of women as bureaucrats, administrators, and voters.32
The Soul-aligned conservative faction in Congress, however, viewed such modern women reformers as women who chose to abandon the hearth and their domestic responsibilities. For instance, Representative Jerome Donovan had the following exchange with maternalist witness Lillian Williamson, from the National Federation of Women’s Clubs, who was testifying before the Committee on Education in favor of Federal Aid for Home Economics. Doubting the need for federal government programs in home economics, Congressman Donovan (D-NY) asked, “How was it that the mothers whom you have so pictured … that were the ideal mothers and were the ideal home builders, how was it that they did not have the advantage of these things: and yet that they attained a great strength of attainment which they did as home builders and mothers?” To which Ms. Williamson replied by emphasizing the economic transformations in family lives, saying, “The mother that trained her children 200 years ago had different processes to deal with … there was no great number of things that engaged her outside of the home. All the household tasks were in the home.” Congressman Donovan used Williamson’s words to instead extoll traditional separate-sphere motherhood, saying, “In other words, her life and duties were concentrated upon her home, were they not? She attended to what was her business.”33
In addition to gender, the debates over women’s suffrage also reveal diverging, often sectional, ideologies of state, which were deeply imbricated with the gender and family ideals of the Hearth and Soul family approaches. Illustrating a more conservative ideal of state, conservative legislators opposed to women’s suffrage condemned reformers’ faith in government as a cure for social ills. One such example can be found in the words of southern Senator Nathan Bryan (D-FL), deriding the position of suffragist Senator Henry Ashurst (D-AZ) in this way: “[According to Ashurst] just so surely as at midnight there is a centrifugal force which in due time will whirl the world into the gladsome presence of the morning, just that surely in the fullness of time will poverty be abolished. Sweatshops, crowded slums, and starving children will be only a horrid memory … the extension of the ballot to women will be a helpful influence in assisting to solve this great problem in the future.” “Politicians who promised the negroes of the South, immediately after the war, that they, each one, should have 40 acres and a mule,” said Senator Bryan, “were pikers alongside the Senator from Arizona.”34 Opposing a redistributionist state, Bryan challenged the support given to the suffrage movement on the basis that such “people have actually believed that the Government will fix the wage they shall receive; that the independent, upstanding citizen, who has heretofore relied upon his own intelligence and brawn and muscle, and asked no favors of the Government or of anybody, will pass away, and, instead, the State will support everybody and will fix the wages by law.”35
Antisuffrage opposition to government involvement in home involved upholding certain traditional and laissez-faire values over state assistance: parental independence and (male) individual autonomy above all else. In several committee hearings, particularly on regulatory issues such as vaccination and disease control, child labor regulation, compulsory schooling, and the establishment of juvenile courts and other state institutions, witnesses and members of Congress using a Soul family values framework used language reminiscent of late twentieth-century neoliberalism to argue that “no one has such vital interest and concern in the welfare of the child as the parents themselves.”36 Witnesses espousing parental autonomy and responsibility often testified in favor of business and industries. They even testified against federal censorship of the budding motion picture industry, chiding parents for shirking their responsibilities and placing an “impossible undertaking” on the federal government “by having it attempt to look after the proper upbringing of their own and everybody else’s children and grandchildren.” The federal government, they said, “would not only be required to keep the children from all contamination while the parents allowed them to wander about the community but it would have to come closer home and take up the matter of the wearing of Indian suits by children and the playing with toy pistols and pop guns.”37
Progressive arguments for intertwined domestic and political spheres among suffrage supporters were part of the emerging social-progressive faith in an interventionist state. These legislators asserted a Hearth family framework insofar as they claimed that the national state had a legitimate responsibility in child (and therefore family) economic welfare, particularly when parents were incapacitated; they used the state’s interest in child welfare to justify regulatory measures directed at employers and industry, as well as delinquent parents, and to provide assistance to dependent families, all of which sought to re-create the “ideal of home life” for vulnerable children.38
During congressional hearings, the Hearth family economics framework was thus referred to in many more examples of lower-income rather than higher-income families, a large proportion of the former also cited as single-mother families. Moreover, in 23 percent of family examples that focused on family economic conditions, legislators raised family health and living conditions as well as child labor regulation in 19 percent of these cases, women’s equality in 10.5 percent of cases, and juvenile institutions such as work homes and orphanages in 9 percent of such Hearth family cases.39
Progressive legislators championed enhanced federal government involvement on grounds that unlike individual parents, local communities, and even state governments, the federal government alone could conduct large-scale investigations, gather data, coordinate policy efforts, and thereby stimulate state action on several issues, critical to
