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103 Q Between the 1890s and the 1930s, the foundations of the American welfare state began to take shape. The United States created a small governmental safety net, for not only mothers and children but also workers. In that era workers were culturally defined as male, although the female ranks were growing. By international standards, the United States had a sparse welfare structure. Nowhere is this more evident than in the inadequate social policy accessible to mothers and, of course, the people who lived with mothers. The origins of the American welfare state contained grand designs indeed, and reformers’ notions of mother-informed politics, or “maternalism,” strongly infused both the rhetoric and the reality of social policies . This was a much more expansive vision of what social policy could do than nineteenth-century maternalist reformers had foreseen. Undergirding the maternalist social imagination of this generation of new reformers was the idea of dignifying mothers’ work and expanding the opportunities of scientific motherhood. “We cannot afford to let a mother, one who has divided her body by creating other lives for the good of the state, one who has contributed to citizenship, be classed as a pauper, a dependent,” declared Mrs. G. Harris Robertson, president of the Tennessee Congress of Mothers. “She must . . . stand as one honored.” Mrs. Robertson proclaimed her support for state funds, “mothers’ pensions,” for families “shattered by the loss of father, the bread-winner.” Indeed, it was in this era that Woodrow Wilson made official the annual celebration of Mother’s Day, in 1914. He did so in response to a concerted national campaign for the holiday undertaken by Anna Jarvis, who wanted to honor the life of her own mother and all mothers with a day of sentiment and memory. Jarvis’s mother, a pacifist during the Civil War and an activist with fellow mother on issues of health care access and sanitation, had lost eight of her twelve children before the age of seven.1 Mother’s Day’s origins and its conflicted meaning in the early twentieth century reflected the tensions between an individual, sentimental view of motherhood and c h a p t e r 5 Grand Designs uplifting and controlling the mothers 104 Modern Mothers notions of maternal dignity and sacrifice as a catalyst for a broader ideal of a just society. Charlotte Perkins Gilman argued that motherhood was the nation’s highest calling: “A new standard is rising—the woman’s standard. It is based not on personal selfishness but on the high claims of motherhood, motherhood as social service instead of man-service.”The“woman’s standard”could define a society that cared for all, like a mother. Gilman contributed to a rising chorus of demands for progressive public policy for mothers.2 Maternal economic security and dignity were not always so well imagined, especially when it came to mothers working outside the home. For example, Florence Kelley, leader of Progressive organizations to help women workers, and Frances Perkins , Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s secretary of labor during the 1930s, knew well that most mothers were one paycheck—usually one male paycheck—away from poverty. But what these highly educated and compassionate women were not able to imagine was a situation in which the majority of mothers could earn wages by working jobs that took them outside the private sphere of the home. In fact, despite their great sympathy for mothers, some of Progressive-era reformers’ most vocal energy went into supporting a social policy structure that discouraged combining paid labor with motherhood. In public policy—regarding welfare, labor, and in the spotty and relatively unpopular attempts at creating institutional day care—such maternalist assumptions about domestic mothers and breadwinning fathers were pervasive, even among feminist reformers.Architects of the emerging American welfare state offered struggling mothers some critical new resources, but they also installed some longstanding hindrances to women’s ability to claim full economic citizenship. A related limit on these reformers’ imaginations was the “new standard” of motherhood. In an increasingly multicultural society, establishing scientifically influenced mothering norms became the work of energetic reformers, including some within the emerging profession of social work. Social workers’ interventions, however, were sometimes experienced not as uplift, but as cultural imperialism. Middle- and upper-class Anglo American women did not control very much in the public world (after all, they could not even vote until 1920). But an important segment of these women did exercise significant control over the dispensation of charity and...

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