Comments - Faculty Panel - Hillsdale College, 3 February 2010

On Monday, Professor Alan Brinkley noted that the New Deal was a remarkably diverse set of efforts and projects, reflecting eclectic, diverse ideologies:  some “very progressive”; some “highly conservative.”  I want to expand on that comment by exploring a group that have not yet been discussed in these proceeding The Women of the New Deal.

This group controlled the U.S. Department of Labor throughout the Franklin Roosevelt administration.  Frances Perkins, the first woman ever to serve in the Federal cabinet, was Secretary of Labor from 1933 until FDR’s death in 1945.  Other prominent New Deal Women were:

• Grace Abbott, who was chief of the Labor Department’s “Children’s Bureau” in 1933-34, and thereafter a member of the key committee that drafted The Social Security Act,

• Katherine Lenroot, a product of The University of Wisconsin, who succeeded Abbott as Chief of the Children’s Bureau; and

• Mary Anderson, head of the Women’s Bureau at the Labor Department.

These Women shared the assumptions common to other New Deal activists:

• They believed that public policy or political power should be used to reinforce their World view;

• They had a strong belief in the value of experts as policy leaders; and in the application of the social sciences to public policy;

• They thought that state governments were hopelessly backward and corrupt; Federal guidance was necessary to moving forward;

• and they believed the capitalist Industrial Revolution of the 19^th and early 20^th Centuries had fundamentally altered American circumstances, and that its negative consequences needed to be corrected by government.

The intellectual roots of The New Deal Women lay:  in the Settlement Houses Movement of the big cities, where women such as Jane Addams worked to aid immigrant families, in the Scientific Charity movement popular in late 19^th century German universities; in the Social Catholicism associated with Father John Ryan, the leading social ethicist at the Catholic University of America, and in the Home Economies Movement launched by Ellen Richards in 1896.

Now, the latter two references might have confused you.  Most persons, I suspect, on first hearing the label New Deal Women probably imagined a group of dedicated, hard-edge feminists, of the sort found in the contemporary National Organization of Women.  In fact, quite the opposite is true.

Historians have given The New Deal Women another name:  the Maternalists.  Their core belief was that women had been given a great gift the ability to conceive and bear children; the opportunity to be a mother; and that law and public policy should recognize, affirm, and support Motherhood.  This core principle led them to other ideas, some of which sound quite jarring to early 21^st Century ears:

a. For example, they rejected the principle of “equal pay for equal work,” relative to women and men.  Rather, driven from Father John Ryan they embraced an alternative: “equal pay for equal family responsibility”:  the principle of The Family Wage.  Law, custom, and public policy should deliver to a working man a wage sufficient to support himself, his wife at home, and their children.  A married woman with an able-bodied husband should not normally work, if she did, her pay should be less, because it was supplemented.

b.  Accordingly The Maternalists favored homes built on a strict “breadwinner/homemaker” model.  As an earlier Maternalist, Julia Lathrop, had explained:

“The power to maintain a decent family living standard is the primary essential of child welfare.  This means a living wage and wholesome working life for the man, a good and skillful mother at home to keep the house and comfort all within it.  Society can afford no less and can afford no exceptions.  This is a universal need.”

Note the phrase:  no exceptions.  The Maternalists believed that all girls should be trained in scientific homemaking.  One of their early policy victories was the Smith-Lever Act of 1917 → the first program of direct federal aid to elementary and secondary school districts.  It provided funds to hire home economists, who would teach girls the science of running a home:  child care; cooking; sewing; and so on.

c. To young women who wanted careers in, say, the professions of law or medicine, the Maternalists offered their full support; indeed, many of the New Deal Women held law or medical degrees at a time when few women did.  However, they had a second message.  If you choose to pursue a career, you must also choose not to have children.  Motherhood and homemaking was a full-time career; all children deserve a full-time mother.  You cannot have it all.

d. Accordingly, the Maternalists were fierce foes of non-parental day care for infants and pre-schoolers:

e. And the Maternalists were equally fierce foes of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, because they believed that laws should treat men and women differently.  The primary enemy of the Maternalist movement was the National Woman’s Party, which had drafted the ERA in 1923.

Most domestic policy innovations of the New Deal bore the imprint of the Maternalists.  Allow me a few examples:

1. The National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 aimed in part at securing “living wages” for male industrial workers.  NRA relief projects hired only men; “women were ignored.”  A clear majority of NRA Codes fixed minimum wage rates for women at 30 percent lower than those for men doing the same job.  NRA officials explained these differentials as the result of “long established custom.”

2. The Works Progress Administration employed over 2.5 million persons by early 1939.  WPA regulations limited enrollment to one breadwinner per household, adding that “a woman with an employable husband is not eligible for referral as the husband is the logical head of the family.”  Even so, about 15 percent of WPA workers were women.  Still, maternalist assumptions shaped the program.  Over half of WPA women worked in “sewing rooms” where they repaired clothing or made new items from scrap.  All WPA women also took mandatory instruction in child care, home health, and food preparation.

3. The Social Security Act of 1935 also presumed a very traditional family structure.  The new system covered only industrial workers, overwhelmingly male.  So-called “female jobs” – including teaching, nursing, and work for charities – were all exempted.  Indeed, have argued women gained Social Security benefits primarily through their ability to conceive and bear children, including Title V measures providing pre-natal and maternal programs and the Aid to Dependent Children provision.

4. Finally, the Social Security amendments of 1939 – sometimes called the crown jewel of the New Deal – impressed family values deeply onto the emerging American welfare state.  Specifically, the 1939 Amendments directly incorporated the family responsibilities of men into the four-year-old system:  first, aged women married at least five years to eligible men would now receive an extra “homemakers” pension equal to 50 percent of their husbands’ benefits; divorced women were excluded; second, widowed mothers with children in the home were removed from ADC, receiving instead a generous monthly survivors benefit; the pension their husbands would have received, as did surviving children, would have received.  Overwhelmingly popular, passed with strong bipartisan support, the 1939 Amendments firmly established marriage, the “family wage,” the stay-at-home mother, and the large family as the favored objects of public policy.  Any deviation from these values – divorce, illegitimacy, working mothers, deliberate childlessness – faced financial disincentives.

Listen to what feminist historians have to say about the New Deal:

• Lois Scharf emphasizes the “victimizing effects” of New Deal actions, the way in which “female dependency” was “institutionalized in sweeping legislation;”

• Mimi Abramowitz deplores the way the New Deal “upheld patriarchal social arrangements;”

• Gwendolyn Mink grouses that “the 1939 Amendments spelled out the gendered basis of social insurance and spread gender bias throughout the welfare state.”

• Winifred Wandersee laments the “damage that must have been done to this generation of women” – a catastrophe so great that it “can never be measured.”

• And Alice Kessler-Harris condemns the New Deal for “locking men and women into rigid attitudes” and for “stifling a generation of feminist thought.”

Judged in terms of the Maternalist worldview, their program could also be termed a success – in the Short and Middle Run.  While surely a departure from past American assumptions, the new Social Security system actually worked pretty well for about 25 years:  it was supplemental; it was limited; and it was fairly cheap (the employee portion of the payroll tax in 1950 was only 1.5 percent – at most, a small nuisance).  There is also evidence that Old Age pensions worked as intended in this era:  federal checks to the elderly allowed younger adults to invest instead in having children.  Several researchers have documented that a limited, modest program of state pensions for the elderly encourages higher fertility.

Indeed, the period 1945-1964 is notable for its seemingly strong family system:  the marriage rate rose; the average age of first marriage fell to near record lows; age 20 for women, age 22 for men; the divorce rate actually declined after 1946; and marital fertility nearly doubled in the celebrated baby boom.  Moreover, the career of Homemaking enjoyed the apogee of its influence out in the spreading suburbs.  It is fair to conclude, I think, that the Maternalist project, solidified during the New Deal, contributed to these results.

THE PROBLEM TURNED OUT TO BE THE LONG RUN:  TWO QUICK POINTS –

FIRST, it proved difficult to keep the new Amreican welfare state limited.  In the mid-1960’s, during the heady days of the Great Society, Congress abandoned all discipline.  In 1965, it immediately raised Social Security payments by 20 percent, abandoning residual attachment to actual contribution.  Using wildly inaccurate projections of future cost, Congress also crafted Medicare, socializing medical care for the elderly.  Other programs, expanded as well.

A modest welfare-state, heavily focused on the needs of young, conventional, breadwinner/homemaker families became over the next fifteen years a system with strong anti-family incentives.  But a discussion of that will have to wait for another time.

SECOND, a long-term reality of any welfare state is that it is by definition, a SUBSTITUTE for voluntary, family-centered solution to social problems.  The Maternalists argued that they were not creating programs that replaced family functions; they were instead helping families to function better and more efficiently.  Viewed from a different angle, though, measures such as internal benefits, old-age insurance, and widow’s pensions did represent a partial socialization of the natural family economy.  The rule is simple:  As welfare benefits grow, the family as an institution shrinks.