and women, and especially with regard to night work. But in the 1920s, while it can be assumed that a small proportion of women had now irreversibly entered the labor market, and that capitalist restructuring tended to maintain female employment at the compressed levels given, state focus was leaning rather toward the strengthening of the family.
State interest in strengthening the domestic role of women, and motherhood in particular, by providing financial support in the absence of male wages was significant. This interest was developed by individual states with efforts such as legislation on mothers’ pensions. This legislation began in 1910 and extended to all but four states by 1930.
This legislation was aimed primarily at insuring the children of “deserving widows” but in some cases its application was extended to include the children of women who had been abandoned or divorced by their husbands, or whose husbands were in prison, hospitalized for mental illness, or permanently disabled. The movement for mothers’ pensions was supported by women’s organizations, and also by the courts that dealt with juvenile delinquency and noted the high percentage of children of single mothers among the cases submitted. Even at that time, the development of legislation on mothers’ pensions was considered a phenomenon which more than any other testified to the “irresistible development of social insurance principles in the United States”—even though it was influenced by “moral and economic considerations” rather than by insurance criteria.39 The problem increasingly tended to be inscribed in a definition of poverty as a widespread phenomenon that could not be entrusted to voluntary charity.
In the spirit of “justice” and “democracy” that animated reformers, one could feel the urgency of making the transition from private charity to responsibility of the individual state, or even, as some demanded, the federal government. In correspondence with the awareness of the “environmental” origins of poverty, many felt that in order to face the problem it was necessary to mobilize the financial, organizational, and intellectual potential of the community that only state administrations, and not volunteer agencies, could have. The mothers’ pensions were born together with the Board of Public Welfare (BPW), which tried to discredit the philanthropic practices of volunteer agencies and which redefined governmental welfare functions in an urban-industrial context.40 There were two pivotal principles around which the debate on the mothers’ pensions grew: (1) the individualization of assistance, and (2) the superiority of home life. This superiority was seen as providing an advantage economically as well as in the quality of child-rearing.
In 1909, at the Conference on the Care of Dependent Children, a principle that would become the cornerstone of welfare policy in this field was formulated: “Home life is the highest and finest product of civilization. Children should not be deprived of it except for urgent and compelling reasons.”41 President Theodore Roosevelt agreed that “poverty alone should not disrupt the home.”42 Therefore, during the Conference on the Care of Dependent Children, a series of directives were formulated so that in cases where it was not possible to keep the natural mother and child together, one got as close as possible to a similar relationship. For example, adoption was suggested whenever practicable, and where recourse to public institutions was necessary, the construction of “cottage units” was recommended, with no more than twenty-five children per assistant so as to safeguard the possibility of interindividual attention.
Again, I assert that the family remained the fundamental social institution. Nevertheless, the awareness that the new conditions of life related to industrialization and the urban context, to the extent that they often took away the family’s ability to meet individual needs, started to make inroads in the political establishment. Accordingly, the state increasingly sought to carry out projects toward integrating family income. The legislation of mothers’ pensions can be considered a very significant step with regard to the enactment of the Federal Maternity Law in 1921 which, G. Bock and B. Duden observe, may hardly be considered less significant than women’s suffrage in 1920.43
In the era of mass production—not just in the material sense but also its reproduction on a psychic level, including its discipline and socialization—in which the correlate production of a new labor power required a specific relationship between the family and the labor market, the state needed to both regulate the labor market and strengthen the family. Its new interest and activity with regard to the mother, the family, childhood, and educational institutions foreshadowed the imminence of the passage from “residual” to planned intervention in the area of social assistance. That meant that the new profile of the welfare state could be defined only in carrying out the state role of planner that would recompose and refound, in a different relation, the production of commodities and the production and reproduction of labor power. This would redefine the relationship between the centrality of the family and above all the woman in it, the labor market, and the state.
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