Women, the State, and Welfare

2. The Gender Basis of American Social Policy

CHAPTER 2 The Gender Basis of American Social Policy VIRGINIA SAPIRO During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, women- thousands of them -became increasingly organized and active in the attempt to promote the general welfare, especially by helping the most vulnerable members of society. As individual leaders and as group participants they were instrumental in organizing and nationalizing movements for public health (mental and physical), poor relief, penal and other institutional reform, education for the previously uneducated , and child welfare. As the nineteenth century waned and the twentieth dawned, women were prominent among proponents of a principle that was hitherto nearly alien to American ideology but that has now, a century later, come to be an accepted part of our political views: the government and, they increasingly argued, the national government, have a responsibility to promote the general welfare actively by providing initiative and support where necessary . The degree and types of support remain, perhaps more now than then, matters of profound political contention, but in the late twentieth century even the most conservative ideologues tend to agree that government must provide a "safety net" for its people. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were also a time during which thousands of women, many of them the same as those involved in the general welfare movements, were agitating to promote women's welfare specifically .1 The suffrage movement, aimed at providing women with what we now regard as the basic right of citizenship and the basic means of leverage within a democratic political system, is only the best-known facet of the women's movement of that era. As many historians have demonstrated, a large proportion of nineteenth-century feminists came to their concerns for women through their charitable and political efforts aimed at the needy.2 Moreover, many nineteenth-century feminists conceived of their woman-directed activi36 The Gender Basis ofAmerican Social Policy 37 ties as means to improve the lot not just of women but of women's families and communities.3 The development of American social welfare policy was heavily influenced by women, who often saw themselves acting on behalf of women. These women- many of them feminists- were instrumental in the development of the American social welfare state, such as it is: the efforts in the 1840s of Dorothea Dix to get Congress to provide money and land for the construction of mental institutions (the bill passed but President Franklin Pierce's veto was sustained); the establishment of the United States Sanitary Commission ; Josephine Shaw Lowell's New York Charity Organization Society and its counterparts; the settlement movement; Florence Kelley's National Consumers ' League; many Progressive leaders; the instigators of the Children's Bureau; and the authors and primary promoters of the 1921 Infancy and Maternity (Sheppard-Towner) Bill. The history of movements for women's welfare and for the general welfare are virtually inseparable. But we can go further and argue that it is not possible to understand the underlying principles, structure, and effects of pur social welfare system and policies without understanding their relationship to gender roles and gender ideology. Three examples suggest how important understanding this relationship is: widows' or mothers' pensions, protective labor legislation, and the Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921. In 1911, Missouri became the first state to provide for cash assistance to widows with dependent children. By 1935, the date of the nationalization of this policy through Title IV (Aid to Dependent Children) of the Social Security Act, all states except South Carolina and Georgia had acted similarly. As Walter Trattner argues, "Widow's pension laws marked a definite turning point in the welfare policies of many states. In theory at least, they removed the stigma of charity for a large number of welfare recipients. They also broke down the nineteenth-century tradition against public home relief." 4 Before the advent of widows' pensions, public pensions were limited to military personnel or civil servants, people whose willingness to work for limited public salaries would be rewarded with security.5 Widows' pensions were different in that they provided for needy private persons. The Social Security Act, through Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), did the same at the federal level. Protective labor legislation offers another example ofthe role that gender differentiation played in promoting social welfare ideas within the United States. At the tum of the century, efforts to provide for public regulation of working conditions advocated by both trade unions and groups such as the National Consumers' League were...