"A Nation's Need—Good and Well Trained Mothers": Gender, Charity, and the New Urban South

In the first decades of the twentieth century Houston, Texas, underwent profound economic and social changes resulting from oil strikes on the Texas Gulf Coast and a subsequent population explosion. In response a unified coalition of reform-minded city builders, yearning for a more orderly community, implemented a host of bureaucratic solutions to ameliorate the dynamics of urbanization. The realization of this community, known universally among reformers as the New South, depended on the effective regulation of the economy, but also control of the social environment in which this new economy would operate.¹ It was within this larger commitment to Southern progress that the modernization of social services and charity developed within Houston. Armed with an unequivocal commitment to New South ideology, a core coalition of reformers—elite boosters, club women, and educated urban clergy—embarked on an ambitious social uplift scheme to bring the city in line with national standards in health, education, and social services. To progressives in Houston social uplift encompassed a number of health and welfare policies included as part of city builders' vision to build Houston into a grand metropolis of the New South. An overriding consideration by reformers as they modernized and centralized social services was guarding family life against the ravages of the city.

Within this context Southern progressives premised their policies on the belief that building a great city and redeeming Southern society depended on a patriarchal hierarchy of healthy children, dedicated mothers, and hardworking fathers. The discussions that emerged among the coalition of reformers flowed from a decidedly class-bound vision of families. Central to these discussions were representations of women and their contributions to civic life. These representations drew upon middle-class discourses that articulated a racialized version of femininity in which the ideal civic function for women was motherhood. The result was a set of welfare practices that defined working-class men and women's public civic capacity by their private paternal and maternal roles. Such representations had real social and economic effects on the lives of working-class women and their families. These gendered concepts of the civic form allowed reformers to set the terms of the debate about the proper place of men and women in a rapidly changing urban society. Hence, as city builders erected the built environment, they wished to construct, simultaneously, good mothers and good fathers as means of mediating the unwieldy dynamics of urbanization.

Constructing representations of motherhood as a way to influence the distribution of limited social welfare resources also constituted a particularly intense struggle around race. As residents of a Southern city, Houston's city builders saw maintaining racial hierarchies amid changing social and economic circumstances as fundamental to the New South's civic culture. Southern views on race emphasized the differences between black and white. But at the dawn of the twentieth century the lines between race and what Americans refer to as ethnicity were not clear. This fluidity in racial thinking was due to large numbers of foreign-born immigrants who had been streaming into American cities for the past several decades. And this fluidity complicated the overly simplistic view of race in Houston. Even though reformers characterized some of their efforts as "immigrant work," when it came to uplifting families, charity workers only seldom racialized their gendered representations of the family in a manner that distinguished foreign-born women from native-born whites. Rather, a shared racial identity between foreign-born and native-born white women crystallized poignantly the necessity, reformers believed, to impress upon all newcomers normative Anglo middle-class ideals—religious faith, good citizenship, an appreciation for hard work, and moral strictness.² Charity workers, however, consistently reproduced racialized narratives about the fitness of Mexican, and especially black, families in social policies that addressed health and hygiene, child care, and settlement work.

Progressive economic and social uplift policies in the New South were foremost predicated on the assumed inferiority of blacks. Jim Crow laws and the traditions of a segregated society meant that any social service provided to African Americans would be...