suffrage, regulation of child labor, and prevention of white slavery, among others.16 Other groups, such as Settlement House activists and the National Consumer League, railed against conditions of widespread economic deprivation—family poverty, low wages, failing health, and workplace casualties.
Social progressivism raised the economic Hearth approach as a viable solution to growing family problems, its appeal not confined to one party but somewhat dispersed across the two.17 Other cross-party factions invoked Soul family values concerns, emphasizing values such as parental autonomy and the morality of white families, as threatened by increasing immigration and by a more active national state.18 Despite some notable ideological overlaps across parties, this chapter reveals that even in this initial period of modern American politics, there were emerging partisan-sectional differences in how legislators approached family. More Republicans, from northern and midwestern regions, used the economic lens (the Hearth approach) to frame their family policy agenda, while southern (and some western) Democrats were more apt to use values and cultural qualities (the Soul approach) to craft their own policy visions.19
The prevailing strict constitutional division between national and states’ powers significantly influenced the development of the two partisan family agendas at this time. It circumscribed the efforts of more liberal Hearth advocates, who attempted to deploy national state machinery in service of family material well-being. Nonetheless, these legislators laid the groundwork for a more full-blown Hearth position that came to define the New Deal Democratic agenda. The existing constitutional strength of states also engendered a relatively strong Soul position, allowing Soul-leaning legislators to use parochial, localistic family values to resist the interventionism of economic Hearth policies more successfully in the Progressive Era than in later periods.
However, existing constitutional boundaries in the Progressive period did not deter Soul legislators from using family values to also call for positive engagement of the national state (much like in the late twentieth century), to preserve and protect certain values of so-called traditional white family structures. The Progressive Era thus not only reveals the antecedents and origins of late twentieth-century Hearth and Soul family policy ideals and approaches but also demonstrates their mutability and nascent flexibility as they came to be deployed by the two parties to further their own agendas.
The chapter examines the characteristics, contexts, and conditions of the emerging family party alignments in the Progressive Era, demonstrating the developing sectional polarities of northern Republican-Hearth and southern Democratic-Soul alignments at this time.20 The first two sections primarily rely on congressional debates over woman suffrage and miscegenation to assemble legislators’ differential conceptions of family, following which the chapter analyzes the policy configurations advanced to instantiate these family conceptions into legislation; the final section turns to the demographic conditions and characteristics of northern and southern families that underpinned the emerging Hearth and Soul family party coalitions, arguing that the partisan embrace of one or the other family frames was strongly tied to differences in the material lives and values of the parties’ constituent bases.
Emerging Conceptions of Family, Gender, and State as Seen in Debates over Woman Suffrage
This section unpacks the conceptions of family and gender that were widely debated amid the era’s social and political turbulence. How ideational divisions over family and gender interacted to uphold alternative state ideologies is most clearly seen in debates over “woman suffrage,” a prominent policy concern of the time. These disagreements would come to be embedded in the emergent national state and serve as the latent ingredients for future partisan battles to follow.
For all members of Congress at the start of the twentieth century, family inhabited a domestic, private sphere that was in many ways distinct from the public one. The prevailing “separate-spheres ideology” divided public and private spheres by gender: women embodied moral qualities, purity, and nurturing abilities associated with the home, while men possessed physical qualities, aggressiveness, and firmness, seen as essential for the public spheres of work and politics.21 A carryover from the nineteenth century, separate sphere ideals endured in the early twentieth century. However, the traditional separation of male and female gender roles and the exclusivity of their spheres were starting to be strongly challenged, dividing members of Congress accordingly. The more progressive faction applauded new developments in work and family that melded domestic and public spheres, and more conservative delegations opposed them. Underlying legislators’ differences over the shifting boundaries between public and private were their strongly embedded ideas of family as foundationally economic and/or valuational.
Progressive members of Congress who supported women’s suffrage attacked the traditional separateness of domestic and public spheres by using a predominantly economic family framework. They advocated an intertwined relationship between government, economy, and home, arguing that laws should actively intervene to improve primarily economic and, second, valuational conditions of home life. Senator Robert Owen (D-OK), for instance, approvingly recounted a long list of legislation enacted in Colorado when women were allowed to vote, citing “the most highly perfected school system that any State in the Union has,” “laws taking care of defective children, laws punishing those who contributed to the delinquency of a child; laws taking care of the weaker elements of society, of the deaf and dumb, the blind, the insane, the poor; laws beautifying the cities and improving many other conditions of life,” along with more values-laden laws, such as those “establishing the curfew to prevent children being exposed to temptation at night,” also asserting that “women can not be persuaded to favor the liquor traffic, the white-slave traffic, gambling, or other evils of society.”22
However, conservative legislators opposed to women’s suffrage, distinctively many from the South, warned that the progressive conjoining of hitherto separate spheres would result in the degradation of the domestic sphere and debasing of traditional family values, such as the sanctity of marriage. For instance, Senator Nathan Bryan (D-FL) asserted the higher than average incidence of divorce in all the equal-suffrage states,23 claiming, “Pretty soon after woman suffrage came, divorce would be as respectable as marriage.”24 These members opposed the political inclusion of women by extolling the virtues of the antisuffragette as “the woman who yet believes that the home and the child are her sphere and that politics and business are the sphere of the man.”25
In their antisuffrage remarks, conservative southern legislators used a Soul approach to focus policy attention on preserving patriarchy as the dominant family form. The southern patriarchal family structure, they insisted, engendered a “chivalrous attitude” of men, such that women exercised far greater power indirectly through men than they would independently. Senator John Williams (D-MS) claimed to speak for “other Senators from the cotton States” when he asserted that “women have more influence with regard to public measures in Mississippi and those States to-day than they have in any suffrage State in this Union.” When women “put themselves behind anything in the State of Mississippi,” he said, “that thing the men vote for, and the politician who dares oppose it gets defeated by the other men. Let it be prohibition; let it be anything else; if the women of Mississippi say to the men of Mississippi in sufficient tones, so that the men can understand them, ‘we want this thing,’ the men give it to them.”26 Using racially charged language to impugn the virtue of suffragettes, suffrage opponents claimed that these women looked upon the “indissoluble Christian marriage” as a “slave union” and were seeking to upstage it;27 this, they warned, would lead to a precipitous decline in male authority, “a state of society where man will not figure except as the father of her child.”28
For prosuffrage legislators, the conservative emphasis on preserving patriarchal families and hierarchical gender values was an illegitimate, sectional concern, an innate southern “prejudice” against women that must be “overcome.” Senator George Chamberlain (D-OR) offered his own personal story as an example of this,
