"At the base of American civilization is the concept of the family, and the perpetuation of that concept is highly important."   – J. Douglas Brown, chairman of the Federal Advisory Council, testifying before the House Ways and Means Committee in favor of the Social Security Amendments of 1939

A curious quality of the recent historical treatment of 1930’s America has been the uniform loathing shown by feminist scholars toward the New Deal. They do not object simply to some of its parts. They indict and condemn the broad domestic policy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration.

The ironies here are large. To begin with, the New Deal gave to American mythology the persona of Eleanor Roosevelt, usually cited as blazing the trail for women in policymaking roles. Husband Franklin, meanwhile, is commonly hailed as the very model of enlightened progressive liberalism. He also holds the role of a chief 20th-Century villain in the American conservative story. All the same, contemporary feminist authors find the couple and their New Deal work loathsome.

These judgments rest on barely contained fury. Historian Lois Scharf emphasizes the "victimizing effects of New Deal" actions, the manner in which "female dependency" was "institutionalized in sweeping federal legislation."1 Mimi Abramovitz deplores the way in which the New Deal "upheld patriarchal social arrangements."2 Gwendolyn Mink argues that the architects of the New Deal "inscribed...gender inequality" in the American welfare state and "codified women’s secondary status."3 Alice Kessler-Harris condemns the New Deal for "locking men and women into rigid attitudes" and for "stifling a generation of feminist thought."4 Suzanne Mettler fumes that "New Deal policies...institutionalized" an array of new discriminations, enshrining them "with political significance."5 And 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."6

These historians are even more troubled by the fact that women in powerful positions–including the sainted Eleanor–were to a considerable extent the architects of the New Deal. Scharf acknowledges this and laments that, in contrast to other reform periods in American history (e.g., Abolitionism, Progressivism, and "the 1960’s"), "visible, vocal, and wide-ranging feminism was not a prominent feature of the New Deal era."7 Mink asserts that these New Deal women "collaborated with masculine policymakers in closing off [for women] the only two avenues for independence in capitalist America: work and education."8 And Jane Humphries charges that the New Deal women were "cyphers for Roosevelt’s policies" and "contributed to the premature deterioration of feminism as a movement and to the subsequent years that American women spent in the wilderness" [by this, she means suburban life after World War II].9

These scholars are sensitive to the assumption that a welfare state requires a sense of national solidarity, or shared normative social values, to succeed. The Swedish political scientist Gösta Esping-Anderson emphasizes in turn how the welfare state serves as an "active force in the ordering of social relations."10 Indeed, the emerging Swedish welfare state of the 1930’s gave highest priority to the social liberty and equality of the individual, especially in matters of gender. In its ideal construct, women and men were to be independent actors, with no bonds beyond those of freely shared affection. Dependency would vanish from human relations. Instead, all persons would be equally dependent on the state. This was a welfare state that a feminist could embrace with enthusiasm.11

But something very different took shape in the American New Deal. Its intellectual roots lay in the Maternalism born in the Settlement Houses of Chicago and New York bonded to the communitarian welfarism centered at the University of Wisconsin. Its principle advocates were a remarkable group of women who rejected equity or liberal feminism as destructive of human bonds. Their theory rested instead on the centrality of the home and the primary power of the breadwinner-homemaker-childrich family. Most of the major New Deal initiatives would build around these assumptions. And the consequences would shape American life and the American identity in profoundly novel and important ways, with echoes into the 21st Century.

The American Maternalists of the 1920’s were firm in their worldview. While accepting the inevitability of an industrial order, they endeavored to blunt its dehumanizing effects. As Frances Perkins, then New York Industrial Commissioner, explained:

The Maternalists justified their work by interpreting society as an extension of the home. In turn, they supported the idealized domestic status quo–the bread earning father, the mother-at-home, and children enjoying a true childhood–while attacking the "industrial evils" assaulting this system. As Florence Kelley explained in a critique of child-labor:

Instead of premature immersion into work, "the fundamental rights of children" were "normal home life, opportunities for education, recreation, vocational preparation for life, and moral, religious, and physical development in harmony with American ideals." Julia Lathrop underscored that these children’s rights required "an adequate wage for the father, wholesome and pleasant housing and living conditions, and the abolition of racial discrimination" to succeed. Turning specifically to girls, Kelley added that "the protest cannot be made too strong...against sending future mothers and makers of homes out of the schools knowing nothing of what they should know when they shall have homes of their own."14

Protecting and encouraging the mother-in-the-home was the other thrust of their project. Maternity was the most important of human tasks, a service to the nation, the giving of new life to society. Industrialism, the maternalists held, must not be allowed to intrude. This meant that the mothers of children under age 16 should not be employed. As the U.S. Children’s Bureau explained, "The welfare of the home and family is a woman-sized job in itself."15 The Maternalists argued that the whole economic system needed to be channeled or regulated to shelter motherhood. Florence Kelley, for example, condemned "the monstrous idea of having a night nursery" for the babies of working mothers, adding: "The mothers of young children cannot be sent away from their home to do such work without the gravest social injury."16 Priority must also be given to securing adequate wages for fathers to support the mother and children at home. In families where the male breadwinner had died or become disabled, mothers’ pensions should be provided by the community. As Mrs. G. Harris Robertson of the Tennessee Congress of Mothers explained: "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....She must be given [the] value received by her nation and stand as one honored."17

This respect for the special gifts of women led the Maternalists to reject sexual equality as a dangerous abstraction. "The cry Equality, Equality, where Nature has created inequality, is as stupid and deadly as the cry Peace, Peace, where there is no peace," said Florence Kelley.18 Against the strong opposition of the National Association of Manufacturers and other industrial groups, the Maternalists sought special protections for women working in factories, viewing them as actual or potential mothers. As Perkins explained: "The program of industrial legislation for the protection of wage earning women was initiated because of...the overwork, exploitation and unhealthy surroundings of the working women who crowded into factories in the latter part of the nineteenth century."19

Some contemporary feminist scholars suggest that the Maternalists were simply backward or retarded in their social thinking. Linda Gordon, for example, argues that their "unconsciously conservative" views of family life were based on "the unexamined assumption that women’s full-time domesticity was desirable for all concerned."20 They imply that these women would have been conventional feminists if only given the chance to think about the situation a little more.

This is surely untrue. The Maternalists were well aware of the liberal or equity feminist option. Indeed, they literally had it shoved in their faces on a regular basis through the activities of the National Woman’s Party (NWP), best known as architect of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution in 1923. Founded by Alice Paul six years earlier, the NWP opposed all special labor legislation protecting women, arguing that such laws reduced women "to a special class of incompetents requiring such special care as minors and defectives need."21 They rejected Maternalist attention to motherhood and children as sentimentalism that diverted women from the march to full equality. When the Maternalist-controlled U.S. Women’s Bureau convened The Second Women’s Industrial Conference in 1926, the NWP delegates came to disrupt. In the afternoon session of the second day, they "got up on the floor and started an uproar by all shouting and speaking at the same time....For fully an hour they....rushed up and down the aisles shouting and haranguing and making as much commotion as they could...like children having tantrums."22 Florence Kelley described the NWP delegates as resembling "a pirate band attempting to sink a peaceful boat crew of Quakers."23 Rather than being unaware of equity feminism, the Maternalists watched the NWP work closely with industrial interests to oppose laws against child labor or to sink measures protecting women from industrial abuse. Maternalist Rose Schneiderman of the Women’s Trade Union League reported that "on a number of occasions we charged the Woman’s Party with being [financially] supported by the National Association of Manufacturers, allegations they never denied." Women’s Bureau chief Mary Anderson and Settlement House teacher Eleanor Roosevelt shared this belief.24 Certainly, "the NAM recognized the value of the NWP in defeating labor legislation and endorsed the equal rights amendment in 1923."25

The Maternalists faced a more subtle ideological opponent as well: the "Hoover technocrats." In 1930, Herbert Hoover created The President’s Research Committee on Social Trends, featuring a distinguished list of social scientists. The panel’s final report, Recent Social Trends in the United States, appeared in early 1933. Much like John Naisbitt’s much later and widely touted Megatrends, this official report can be read as a brief to abandon the family completely to the industrial process, for reasons of historical inevitability and efficiency.

The Committee’s chief researcher on the family was William F. Ogburn of The University of Chicago. Well known for his concentration on functions, he compared the old family system–which stood as "the chief economic institution, the factory of the time,...the main educational institution"–with the new order where "the factory [has] displaced the family." Modern America saw a falling birthrate and emptying schools as industrialized families were reduced to "the personality function" alone, providing "for the mutual adjustments among husbands, wives, parents, and children and for the adaptation of each member of the family to the outside world." Ogburn showed that all other tasks–baking, sewing, canning, laundering, cooking, health care, child care, care of the elderly, child protection, security, education, amusement, recreation, and even religious acts–had passed or were passing to industrially organized bodies, be they corporate, state, or charitable in nature. Many American homes had already become "merely ‘parking places’ for parents and children who spend their active hours elsewhere."

But rather than fighting these changes, as the Maternalists were doing, Ogburn essentially urged Americans to go with the trends. He criticized the traditional belief "that women’s place is in the home," arguing that "barriers of custom remain and the community is not making the most of this potential supply of able services." He emphasized that "[w]ives, except when they work outside the home for pay, contribute proportionately less to the family." The frail nature of the family meant that "schools, nurseries or other agencies" would need to enroll "a larger proportion of the very young children in the future," so as "to conserve childhood in the midst of rapidly shifting conditions of family life." Only "society" had the new expertise needed to grapple with "developing the personality of its children." This implied that even this last family function would necessarily be socialized as well. Concern should no longer focus on family strength, Ogburn concluded. Instead, attention should be on "the individualization of the members of the family."26

This apparent rush of social evolution toward atomistic, post-family ends heartened feminists and industrial leaders alike. The former saw the "middle aged married women" of America as "permanently damaged" by the influences of the traditional home. The American Housewife was "a flabby, soft creature of middle age, with no sustained habits of labor and a triumphant incapacity to think straight about any subject." Her home "is notoriously ill-kept, practically negligible as a producing agency, startlingly inefficient as a consuming organization, and seldom worthy of any designation of charm and graciousness." She fed food to her husband that he should not eat and taught her babies "prejudices that will mar their later lives." Better that she move into the labor force, so that experts might rear the children and the "old, materialistic conception of the home" might give way "to one in which the value rests in spiritual assets."27 Business leaders welcomed the remodeling of the family along industrial lines as well. The "new" family would look outward to the marketplace for its values and human bonds. Industry, rather than family and father, would provide sustenance and truth. Family autonomy and parental authority would give way to universal adult employment and a consumption-oriented way of life guided by advertising, one compatible with feminist ambitions. As one analyst has summarized: "...the message of the commodity market dangle[d] before women’s eyes that which the feminists among them were already seeing as a possibility: a society in which the patriarchal yoke might be broken."28

Against these trends and ideologies, the Maternalists chose to stand and fight. Who were these women?

The most representative and influential, perhaps, was Frances Perkins, U.S. Secretary of Labor through the whole Roosevelt administration, 1933-45. According to labor historian Philip Foner, she "was never the radical that conservatives accused her of being."29 Perkins began her career at the Henry Street Settlement in New York. In 1910, she became general secretary of the National Consumers League, which focused on harmful industrial conditions and sought protection for child and female workers. A year later, she directly witnessed the legendary Triangle Shirtwaist fire which saw 146 girls perish in a "sweatshop" with windows and doors locked from the outside. Despite strong opposition by the manufacturers’ associations, Governor Al Smith named Perkins to the New York State Industrial Commission in 1919; Governor Roosevelt reappointed her in 1929, and took her to Washington four years later.30

Perkins deplored the "attack" being made on family life by industrialism: "I have seen the factory invading and breaking down the home....The poor people have a right to their homes the same as the rich, and we should not be allowed to enslave them to a form of industry which refuses them not only their liberty, but the wage which they ought to have in return for the labor they perform."31 Perkins steadfastly refused to be drug into the equity feminist worldview. When asked, as America’s first female Cabinet member, to speak to the American Association of University Women on "How Women Achieve in Government," she agreed only if she could change her subject to "Social Responsibility Goes With the Privilege of Education."32 As the Depression worsened, she denounced the working middle-class woman with an employed husband as a "pin money worker, a menace to society, [and] a selfish short-sighted creature who ought to be ashamed of herself."33 Meanwhile, she urged policy ideas that would encourage marriage, support large families, and promote population growth.34

Perkins worked with a cast of like-minded women. Molly Dewson, advocate of protective labor laws, became a member of the Social Security Board and consultant to the important Federal Advisory Council of 1937-38. Grace Abbott, forceful advocate for the mother-at-home, served as chief of the Children’s Bureau from 1921 to 1934 and then became a member of the Council on Economic Security which crafted the Social Security Act of 1935. Katharine Lenroot, formerly a research associate at the University of Wisconsin and a strong foe of day care, headed the Children’s Bureau from 1934 to 1945. Mary Anderson guided the Labor Department’s Women’s Bureau from 1933 to 1945. She called day care centers "a stop gap, not a solution to anything," opposed the Equal Rights Amendment for being "vague" and dangerous, and single-handedly prevented the League of Nations from endorsing it.35 Eleanor Roosevelt, a former settlement house worker, political ally of Frances Perkins, and–of course–First Lady, believed "that every girl ought to marry and have a family," that "the first ten years of a girl’s marriage, broadly speaking, should be devoted to the home," and that mothers with children at home should be discouraged from outside employment.36

Finally, Franklin D. Roosevelt himself can be counted a Maternalist. As a young lawyer, he worked for The National Consumers League defending protective legislation in the prominent 1908 case, Muller v. Oregon (modern feminist scholars label his own characterization of women in this case–as significantly different in physical strength from men and as potential mothers–"pathological"). Roosevelt was also closely tied to "The Wisconsin School" of social reform, associated with Professor John Commons at The University of Wisconsin, which sought to use government to protect individuals, families, and communities from predatory "special interests."37 As the NWP leader Harriot Stanton Blanche reported in 1935, Roosevelt "is not with us and never has been."38

More broadly, historian Linda Gordon has identified 76 women and 76 men–a numerical coincidence–who were "national leaders of welfare reform movements from 1890 to 1935." Majorities in both categories were of Protestant, North European backgrounds. "Most took their Christianity very seriously and considered their reform work part of a Christian moral vision." Yet a large minority–nine of the women and a fifth of the men–were Jews of German background. Virtually the whole body looked to social reform ideas taking shape in Europe, "particularly in Germany," for inspiration. And all of them, according to Gordon, adhered to traditional ideas about the family. To her surprise, even that majority of women reformers who were single "did not...contradict the prevailing premises that children and women needed breadwinner husbands, that children needed full-time mothers, that women should choose between family and career."39

Indeed, it is fair to conclude that the concept of "the family wage" stood as the central pillar of the Maternalist vision and of the New Deal. At the Children’s Bureau, Katharine Lenroot underscored "the primary essential of child welfare" as "a living wage for the father."40 At the Women’s Bureau, Mary Anderson emphasized that the whole problem of women’s wages and working conditions "could be taken care of if the provider for the family got sufficient wages. Then married women would not be obliged to go to work."41 Speaking for the labor unions, CIO chief John L. Lewis agreed: "Normally, a husband and father should be able to earn enough to support his family....I am violently opposed to a system which, by degrading the earnings of adult males, makes it economically necessary for wives and children to become supplementary wage earners."42

The new historians of the New Deal concur. Gordon reports that "[a]lmost all welfare activists, male and female, endorsed the family-wage principle and considered that women’s employment was a misfortune or a temporary occupation before marriage." Both "tracks" of the emerging American welfare system–universal social insurance and means-tested assistance–"were designed to maintain the family wage system."43 According to Mink, "The New Deal assumed that men paid for their families while women raised them." The child’s welfare required "a competent domestic mother" and "a living wage for the father."44 Mettler underscores how New Deal officials, "still adhering to the family wage ideal," presumed that "policies directed toward male breadwinners would directly benefit women as well as children."45

The companion role to the breadwinning father was the mother-at-home. Maternalists would use the New Deal to reward the domestic woman and discourage the working mother. They expanded and nationalized existing state programs that protected mothers and created "new ones to deliver social benefits to the wives and widows of wage-earning men." They "prescribed domesticity to unemployed women in vocational programs that trained [them] for housekeeping and parenting," and they urged "counseling services for mothers tempted to work outside the home." Linking truancy, incorrigibility, and emotional disorders among children to a "mother’s absence at her job," the Maternalists mounted campaigns to bring working mothers home. Most modern feminists denounce these "strenuous [New Deal] efforts to expel married women from the labor force" as an overt defense of "patriarchy."46 Only Linda Gordon, it appears, acknowledges the way a Maternalist, circa 2003, would explain her legacy: "[We] attempted the difficult and perhaps counterhistorical task of defending the value of women’s traditional domestic labor in a capitalist-industrial context."47

By March 1933, when the Roosevelt Administration took office, one-third of the labor force was unemployed: 15 million persons. This economic collapse was primarily industrial in nature. Since women workers were disproportionately crowded in service sector (e.g., nursing, domestic work) and white collar (e.g., clerical) posts, and since they worked cheaper (average annual income for men: $1,027; for women: $525), they actually suffered less job loss in the 1929-33 period than did men. Viewed from the household level, the economic crisis of 1933 was concentrated among once "breadwinning" men. Meanwhile, marriage and birth rates were tumbling; each declined by 20 percent during the Hoover years.48 In this sense, the deep economic downturn was also a crisis of the family. How did the New Dealers try to restore families and their home economies?49

(1) The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA). Roosevelt believed that the nation’s business leaders had wrecked the economic system through reckless speculation and ruthless competition. He questioned the legality of any firm that continued to exist by paying heads-of-households less than a living family wage. His NIRA attempted to restore industrial production and employment in the U.S. through a series of industry-wide codes that would regulate competition, wages, and working conditions. Specifics included a fixed 35-hour work week and the banning of overtime. In announcing the measure, Roosevelt also declared that the proposed National Recovery Administration (NRA) codes would "guarantee living wages" to American workers. "By living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence living–I mean the wages of decent living."50

By January 1934, NRA codes covered 90 percent of all industrial workers, and they raised real income standards substantially. Yet because such codes were restricted to industries engaged in interstate commerce, over half of working women stood excluded from any help at all. NRA relief projects hired only men; "women were ignored." And by September 1934, 135 of 233 NIRA codes directly and indirectly fixed minimum wage rates for women from 6 to 30 percent lower than those for men doing the same job. NRA officials explained these differentials as a result of "long established custom." It is true that Frances Perkins, Mary Anderson, and Eleanor Roosevelt did oppose these open discriminations in NRA wage rates. But they and the system cheerfully left in place sex-defined job categories ("men’s jobs" and "women’s jobs"), also inscribed in custom, which carried much larger real differentials.51

(2) The Subsistence Homestead Program. This openly reactionary project, a favorite of Eleanor Roosevelt’s, sought to deindustrialize and decentralize American life. It grew directly out of the Back-to-the-Land movement promoted in the 1920’s by Bernarr McFadden of Liberty Magazine and Ralph Borsodi, an apostle of family self-sufficiency and home production. Before his inauguration, Franklin Roosevelt spoke among aides of his desire to put a million families into subsistence farming. Senator John H. Bankhead of Alabama successfully included a $25 million appropriation for subsistence homesteads in the NIRA measure.52 During the next eight years, the Federal government launched over 200 projects under the "homesteading" banner. Commonly, the government built homes on 3 to 10 acre lots, organized village style, which were provided to worthy families for modest rent with an option to buy.

Leftist critics of the program saw it as an effort "to build up...a sheltered peasant group as a rural reactionary bloc to withstand the revolutionary demands of the organized industrial workers."53 Certainly the hope of subsistence homestead champions was to restore some elements of a pre-industrial, family-centered life. The project reflected a "general disillusionment with laissez-faire capitalism" and an "ardor for conservation" of both human community and nature. Senator Bankhead saw this as a chance for "a new basis for American society, in the restoration of that small yeoman class which has been the backbone of every great civilization." Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace justified the homesteads by noting that "we are more than economic man." One of the project’s staff members, the Quaker activist Clarence E. Pickett, argued that behind "the façade of abundant production," Americans "had forgotten that the hearth where the family gathers and where neighbors are welcomed is at the very heart of human life." The homesteads would decentralize workers in industry, fulfill "yearnings for a home, for a good life for children, [and] ‘for community,’" and free the imaginations and intelligence "of men and women who had mostly been treated as cogs in a machine."54

Program administrator M. L. Wilson admired the Mormon villages found in Utah, their unity of soil, family, and community. He looked to the homesteads as a way to renew village life nationwide through handicrafts, closer family relations, abundant children, and co-operative work. Every homestead would have a garden, a chicken house, and perhaps a pig or cow "for home consumption and not for commercial sale." The selection of homesteaders would focus on married couples, stable and honest, with one or more children. The process especially favored large families. Those who abandoned gardening and other home production acts were weeded out and replaced.55

(3) The Early Emergency Work Projects. The first New Deal relief efforts "aimed at [restoring] the male breadwinner as the mainstay of family life in America."56 A 1936 Gallup Poll asked if wives should work if their husbands had jobs. Eighty-two percent said "No," leading George Gallup to observe that he had finally "discovered an issue on which voters are about as solidly united as on any subject imaginable–including sin and hay fever."57 Later in the decade, Saturday Review’s Norman Cousins captured the popular attitude:

There are approximately 10,000,000 men out of work in the United States today; there are also 10,000,000 or more women, married and single, who are job holders. Simply firethe women, who shouldn’t be working anyway, and hire the men. Presto! No unemployment. No relief rolls. No depression.58

The Federal Emergency Relief Act (FERA) provided, in Katharine Lenroot’s words, "for the first time...a basis for direct Federal, state, and local co-operation in conserving home life for children."59 The Maternalists urged a modest role for women, provided that they be kept out of "the competitive fields" and the mass projects where men were found. While women comprised about 22 percent of the unemployed, they held only 12 percent of the FERA jobs.60 Another emergency work project, the Civil Works Administration (CWA), employed 1,600,000 persons in 1935; only 147,000 or 7 percent were women. Administrator Harry Hopkins meanwhile paid $1 per hour for skilled male labor and 30" per hour "for persons on relief and educational projects–largely women."61 The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), at its inception, focused solely on young men and involved 2,500,000 of them at its peak in 1936. They worked on outdoor construction and conservation projects in parks and national forests. At the behest of Eleanor Roosevelt, the CCC eventually organized 86 camps for 6,400 young women. These included Camp Jane Addams where instructors stressed domestic training in "cooking, nutrition, and table setting as well as serving [food] and personal hygiene." While the CCC’s young men received $1 per week for their labor, the women got 50".62

(4) The Works Progress Administration (WPA). The largest of the government work relief programs, the WPA employed over 2.5 million persons by early 1939. Moreover, according to Katharine Lenroot at the Children’s Bureau, 4,500,000 children under age 16 were at that time "being provided with maintenance through wages of family breadwinners on Federal works projects."63

The WPA had broader goals as well. The New Dealers were cognizant that one-third of the nation was either foreign born or only first-generation American. Alongside the employment of breadwinners, the WPA’s emergency education activities openly aimed at nation building and the creation of solidarity "through Americanization, literacy, and a strong family life." This would include an emphasis on "the values of Americanized home life."64

WPA regulations limited enrollment to one "breadwinner" per household. According to Grace Abbott, the "[e]mployment of mothers with dependent children on WPA is to be deplored as experience shows that...the children will be neglected and the mothers’ health will break under the double burden of serving as wage-earners and homemakers."65 Fairly typical WPA regulations from Louisiana held that "a woman with an employable husband is not eligible for referral as the husband is the logical head of the family."66

All the same, from 12 to 19 percent of WPA workers were women. Even here, though, the Maternalists shaped the program. Over half of WPA women found places in "sewing rooms," where they repaired damaged clothing or sewed new garments from scrap. Critics called the sewing room "a female ditch-digging project." But larger goals were at work. The women in WPA–disproportionately of immigrant background–also took instruction in parenting, child behavior, home health, food preparation, and "wholesome adult living." Lessons in "American" family values and maternal skills involved a quarter of all WPA personnel and reached 16 percent of regular enrollees. In addition, the WPA employed 1,700 jobless teachers as home economics instructors, who provided a two-month course "in methods of cooking and serving food, care of the house, care of the children, washing, ironing, and marketing." It employed another 30,000 women in its Housekeeping Aid Project, which offered housekeepers and babysitters to households composed of widowed fathers and their children. In a report on WPA courses directed by the U.S. Office of Education, Doak S. Campbell concluded that the "combined parent and homemaking program is perhaps the most social and democratic of all of the emergency education activities."67

While the WPA did operate day care centers for enrolled mothers with small children, administrators discouraged any broader use. According to one Federal expert, a woman’s desire to work and use day care for other than emergency reasons might betoken mental unbalance: "If the mother’s wish for improved status, economic or otherwise, seems exaggerated and impossible of fulfillment, the counsellor may help her to relinquish these ambitions."68

(5) The National Labor Relations Act. The "Wagner Act" gave a dramatic boost to membership in labor unions, including the overwhelmingly female International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union. At the same time, it did nothing to challenge, and in some ways reinforced, underlying gender differentials in labor: "Job categories remained sex-defined. Seniority lists [for men and women] were separate."69

(6) The Social Security Act of 1935. Abraham Epstein of Pennsylvania, one of the architects of this crown jewel of the emerging American welfare state, laid out in 1933 his base assumption for calculating "security":

...it must be remembered that the American standard assumes a normal family of man, wife, and two or three children, with the father fully able to provide for them out of his own income. This standard presupposes no supplementary earnings from either the wife or young children.

Epstein acknowledged that of the 26.2 million married women in 1930, 3.1 million–or 11.7 percent–were employed. However, "[m]ost of the remaining 88 percent were dependent on their husbands for support. The needs of these families must be considered as paramount."70 Grace Abbott, who served via Presidential appointment on the Advisory Council to the Committee on Economic Security, told Congress that "the mother’s services are worth more in the home than they are in the outside labor market and that consequently she should be enabled to stay home and care for the children."71 Another influential member of the Advisory Council was Father John Ryan, S.T.D., America’s foremost public advocate of a family wage for fathers.72

These ideas shaped the 1935 Act. Two of the Maternalists’ favorite projects–mothers pensions at the state level and the expired Sheppard-Towner Act providing pre-natal and infant care education–would be federalized and made permanent by the Social Security measure. Moreover, old age pensions funded by contributions to individual accounts, together with death, unemployment, and disability benefits would cushion the vagaries of the capitalist industrial economy.

Feminist historians see Maternalist fingerprints all over Social Security. According to Kessler-Harris, the 1935 Act "rested on forms of behavior traditionally associated with white male lifestyles and population" (by this, she means marriage with the mother in the home).73 Abramovitz argues that the Social Security Act "enforced traditional work and family roles," "began systematically to subsidize the familial unit of reproduction," and structured a "gender bias" into its provisions that "has enforced the economic dependence of women on men,...and, in general upheld patriarchal social arrangements."74

The National Woman’s Party actually welcomed the 1935 Act for limiting Old Age Insurance strictly to workers: no paid labor; no security. Women who married and renounced their careers gave up most government protection as well.75 But contemporary feminist analysts again underscore how the system actually bypassed most working women. For example, the large majority of female laborers performed tasks exempted from the Old Age Insurance program: clerical work; sales; teaching; nursing; domestic service; farm labor; and work for charities. Mettler emphasizes how the system’s architects presumed that Unemployment Insurance had the primary function of "replac[ing] the wages of male breadwinners, who were understood to earn a ‘family wage.’"76 Specifically, this provision excluded part-time workers–heavily female–who "do not need or deserve the same protection as those who are fully dependent upon industry for employment."77

Women gained benefits under Social Security primarily through their ability to conceive and bear children, another galling fact for modern feminist analysts. Title V provided $3.8 million to qualifying women for prenatal, maternal, and infant care education. More broadly, the Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) program reinforced women’s domesticity. ADC provided financial allowances, through the states, to female-headed families that had lost the male breadwinner through death, desertion, and–at that time–only rarely through illegitimacy. In testimony on the ADC provsion, Grace Abbott assured Congress that "only nice children" in "nice families" would qualify for support.78 (And in fact, as of 1939, a mere two percent of the children accepted by the states into ADC lived with unmarried mothers.)79

The system clearly gave a preference to welfare motherhood over work. As Abbott told the House Ways and Means Committee: "The whole idea of mothers’ pension is that it should be enough to care for the children adequately, to keep the mother at home and thus to give some security in the home." Or as Frances Perkins explained to a Senate Committee: "You take the mother of a large family, she may be able-bodied and all that, but we classify her as unemployable because if she works the children have got to go to an orphan asylum."80 Another New Deal official, Jane Hoey, described the purposes of ADC as to "reconstruct" homes and "enable families now in the dependent class [through loss of breadwinner] to fulfill their own responsibilities to the children and to society."81

Feminist scholars are more harsh in their assessments, but not altogether incorrect. Mink charges that ADC was in fact "an essential defense against wage-earning motherhood," adding: "[i]f social insurance treated the working mother as inconceivable, ADC treated her as incompatible with family welfare." Ann Shola Orloff charges that ADC intentionally undercut feminist ideals and shut off aid to never-married women raising children alone. And Abramovitz asserts that ADC "judged female-headed households harshly," "subjected them to strict control," and financially punished women seen as "out of role."82

(7) The Fair Labor Standards Act. This substitute for the NIRA (declared unconstitutional in 1935) pleased The National Woman’s Party for fixing labor protections, maximum hours, and minimum wages without overt reference to gender. Yet later analysis shows that the Act indirectly exempted nearly half of working women from its coverage (compared to 20 percent of male workers), left untouched the "customary" division of labor into "men’s jobs" and "women’s jobs," and implicitly sustained the male "family wage" as the primary measure of labor justice.83

(8) Home Ownership Programs. The Rise of Suburbia and its association with a renewed familism are commonly seen as part of the post World War II era. In fact, these developments began in the 1930’s. During that decade, 90 percent of new residential construction were single-family dwellings in suburban-like locales, compared to only 60 percent in the 1920’s.84 This shift was attributable to a series of New Deal projects. The Home Owners Loan Act of 1933 provided novel long-term, low-interest loans to home owners delinquent in mortgage payment. With Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins as sole stockholder, the Emergency Housing Corporation issued over one million mortgages under this measure by 1936. The National Housing Act of 1934 created the Federal Housing Administration. The FHA quickly "revolutionized" housing finance by regularizing the long-term amortized mortgage featuring a low down payment, introducing up front financial and insurance commitments to developers, and constructing standards that "contributed greatly to more sophisticated builder and tract housing work."85 According to historian Janet Hutchison, this "focusing on the suburban residence heightened the importance of women’s domestic contributions, the home as the woman’s proper place, and voluntary, maternalistic reform efforts."86

(9) The Social Security Amendments of 1939. The 1936 Democratic Platform pledged "the protection of the family and home." Republicans ran for Congress in 1938 criticizing the stinginess of the Social Security Act of 1935, and gained over 80 seats in the House of Representatives. The result was the Social Security Amendments of 1939, perhaps the most important of New Deal innovations, and the one attracting the greatest contemporary feminist scorn.

These amendments "saved" the Social Security system from repeal, were "wildly" popular, and turned the Old Age pension scheme from an individualistic orientation modeled on private insurance into social insurance resting on a pay-as-you-go basis and focused on preservation of the father-headed family.87 Indeed, according to Orloff, the American welfare state gained here its distinctive charter as a family-centered entity.88 Mink emphasizes how "the 1939 amendments spelled out the gendered basis of social insurance and spread gender bias throughout the welfare state for the first time."89 Kessler-Harris argues that the measure "brilliantly convey[ed] a set of messages about how people should live." Notably, women should marry and stay married. Men would gain little from working wives, and women "would have to work mighty hard" to exceed the benefits of staying at home with their children. And the more children born, the greater the benefit.90

The 1939 Amendments were, in part, a consequence of a political embarrassment. Contributions for Old Age Insurance started flowing into the Federal coffer in 1936, yet no benefits were to be paid out until 1942. The result was a swelling reserve. In spring 1937, the Senate Finance Committee pressured the Social Security Board to create the Federal Advisory Council (FAC). As Kessler-Harris notes, the panel could have recommended spending the surplus by expanding coverage to the disabled and to excluded occupational groups such as domestics and agricultural workers. Instead, "family protection" became the operative principle.91

Of the FAC’s twenty-four members, at least six had their graduate education at the University of Wisconsin. These included Chairman J. Douglas Brown, Edwin Witte of the original Committee on Economic Security, Chief Actuary William Williamson, and Chairman of the Social Security Board Arthur Altmeyer. The latter–dubbed "Mr. Social Security" by Roosevelt–was particularly influential. Born and reared in small town Wisconsin, Altmeyer was the descendant of German immigrants fleeing their homeland after the failed rebellions of 1848. According to biographer Larry Witt, Altmeyer "inherited...liberal progressivism in his genes." The German-American took advantage of the FAC to advance a very different approach to security:

The other key group behind the 1939 Amendments was the Settlement House Maternalists, led here by Molly Dewson, who actively served on the parent Social Security Board. To the horror of later feminist analysts, these policymakers "constructed ‘men’ and ‘women’ each after particular gendered patterns," "created the mechanisms that sustain notions of male dignity and female virtue," "used language that mingled the rights of men with their control over women," linked "the appearance of equity" for men to "an essentially passive, and even sacrificial, role for women," gave "issues of masculinity and womanliness...paramount importance," and totally ignored questions of "female security," "justice to women," and the "success and self-reliance" of women.93

Specifically, the 1939 Amendments incorporated the family responsibilities of males into the system of contributory insurance crafted four years earlier. Using common sense and normative values (e.g., J. Douglas Brown: "it is more costly for the single man to live than for the single woman if she is able to avail herself of the home of the child"), the FAC recommended and Congress approved a series of new benefits. Molly Dewson explained the base principle:

Men who can afford it always consider it their first duty to provide insurance protection for their wives and children. Survivor benefits extend the same kind of protection to families who need it most and can afford it least.94

Specifics included:

* Aged women married for at least five years to eligible men would receive an extra pension equal to 50 percent of their husbands’ benefits. Neither work nor prior contributions would be necessary and divorced women were excluded.

* Widowed mothers with children in the home were moved off of ADC, receiving instead a monthly survivors benefit equal to 75 percent of the pension her husband would have received, so long as she earned no more than $15 per month and did not remarry.

* Surviving children received a benefit equal to half that which their father would have received.

Overwhelmingly popular, the 1939 Amendments saved and solidified the Social Security system by grafting onto it the core values of the American people. The measure shifted the system from an "individualistic" to a "communitarian" basis. It brought marriage, the "family wage," the mother-at-home, and the large family directly into public policy. Deviations from these norms–divorce, illegitimacy, working mothers, deliberate childlessness–faced significant financial disincentives. As Mink has noted, this measure also "assumed that conformity to the maternalists...domestic, conjugal, and behavioral practices would assure [racial minorities] uplift to equality....It assumed, too, that the well-spring of family security and the sign of ‘American’ family values was the husband."95

But more was going on in 1939. Kessler-Harris admits that the gender distinctions "built into the system for men and women tell us less about injustice and inequities than they do about the ways in which men and women conceived the relationship between national values and the role of the state in preserving the family in its traditional form."96 Perhaps Molly Dewson explained best this linkage of family, social security, and national solidarity lying behind the 1939 Amendments:

[W]hen you begin to help the family to attain some security you are at the same time beginning to erect a National structure for the same purpose. Through the well-being of the family, we create the well-being of The Nation. Through our constructive contributions to the one, we help the other to flourish.97

As the culmination of three decades of Maternalist social reform, the New Deal was the movement’s "finest hour." On learning in June 1940 that the new Republican Party platform had endorsed all of the recent Social Security reforms, Frances Perkins declared: "God’s Holy Name be praised! No matter who gets elected, we’ve won."98 There were other early signs of victory, as well. Despite the disproportionate concentration of unemployment among men, the percentage of women in the labor market changed little during the 1930’s. By 1934, moreover, the marriage and birth rates began climbing again. The domestic or home economy also showed signs of revival. For example, a marked decline in the sale of industrial canned foods occurred alongside a surge in the purchase of home canning supplies. Home gardens flourished. The 1930’s saw a revival in home sewing as well, alongside the return of home-based industries: "women took in laundry, ironing, and dressmaking; they baked cakes to sell....Everywhere there were signs in yards advertising household beauty parlors, cleaning and pressing enterprises, grocery stores, and the like." Families began to "de-nuclearize," as the number of three-generation households increased. It appears that the Maternalists were pushing industrial organization out of the home, that they had reversed capitalism’s "creative destruction", that they were shoring up the traditional family structure and gender roles.99

A short time later, though, American entry into World War II seemed to be their Waterloo. By early 1942, intense pressures grew to draw married women into the wartime labor force. Maternalists at the Children’s and Women’s bureaus fought the idea fiercely. "The first responsibility of women with young children, in war as in peace, is to give suitable care in their own home to their children," opined the Children’s Bureau. A later bulletin declared that a "mother’s primary duty is to her home and children....This duty is one she cannot lay aside, no matter what the emergency."100 A Children’s Bureau conference on day care resolved that "Mothers who remain at home to provide care for children are performing an essential patriotic service in the defense program." When the Federal government issued an October 1942 directive to recruit all women possible for war work, the document added that mothers of young children be left alone "until all other sources of labor supply have been exhausted."101

Still, the number of female workers during the war years nearly doubled, reaching 19.5 million by 1945. Many of them did have small children. In August 1942, Roosevelt allocated $400,000 in emergency war funds to coordinate child care programs. Yet, placing the fox in charge of the chicken coop, he also directed the Children’s Bureau to approve state plans and oversee the construction of day care centers with Lanham Act funds. The Maternalists at the Bureau insured that "facilities required for the emergency should not be so permanent in structure that they cannot be changed or discontinued when the temporary need is over."102

Indeed, they proved successful here again, turning the wartime surge in the employment of married women into a time-limited event. As military personnel demobilized in 1945-46, the government now encouraged women to abandon paid work and to return to domestic responsibilities. Male veterans gained hiring preferences. Child care programs and buildings were dismantled, while "management and unions cooperated in efforts to reinstate traditional divisions of occupational segregation, forcing women to return to clerical and service-sector jobs so that men could regain high-skilled ones." Congress targetted the G.I. Bill, with its generous educational and housing benefits, solely on returning soldiers, sailors, and airmen, overwhelmingly male. Labor force participation rates among women fell quickly.103

With Roosevelt’s death in 1945, most of the Maternalists still active in Federal agencies retired, including Perkins, Mary Anderson, and Katharine Lenroot. Yet they had achieved much. These women had used the opportunity of the New Deal to build barriers against the further industrialization of the home, to construct the emerging American welfare state on family-centered and communitarian bases, to restore prestige to the tasks of homemaking and mothering, to Americanize recent immigrant families through emphasis on a common affection for the home, and to rest the American identity on the image of the traditional family. On social welfare issues, they had vanquished their foes in the National Woman’s Party and the National Association of Manufacturers. As Wandersee admits, "[f]eminism...suffered a major setback during the interwar years because it refused to recognize the continued importance of family life and family values to most American women."104 On the immigration front, the Maternalists had won out over the Anglo-Saxonists and the Cultural Pluralists. And these women had created the policy conditions that would undergird the "marriage boom" of the late 1940’s , the "baby boom" of the 1950’s, and the "happy days" associated with the whole postwar era, 1945 to 1963.

The fatal weaknesses of this restored social order would become apparent only later.

Endnotes

1 Lois Scharf, To Work and to Wed: Female Employment, Feminism, and the Great Depression (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980): 111, 129.

2 Mimi Abramovitz, Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1988): 235.

3 Gwendolyn Mink, The Wages of Motherhood: Inequality in the Welfare State, 1917-1942 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995): 171.

4 Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982): 251.

5 Suzanne Mettler, Dividing Citizens: Gender and Federalism in New Deal Public Policy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998): 214.

6 Winifred D. Wandersee, Women’s Work and Families Values, 1920-1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981): 101.

7 Scharf, To Work and to Wed, p. 136.

8 Mink, The Wages of Motherhood, p. 171.

9 Jane Humphries, "Women: Scapegoats and Safety Values in The Great Depression," The Review of Radical Political Economics 8 (Spring 1976): 110.

10 Gosta Esping-Anderson, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990): 23.

11 See: Allan Carlson, The Swedish Experiment in Family Politics: The Myrdals and the Interwar Population Crisis (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1990): especially 195.

12 In Lillian Holmer Mohr, Frances Perkins: ‘That Woman in FDR’s Cabinet!’ (Boston: North River Press, 1979): 76.

13 Florence Kelley, "The Family and the Woman’s Wage," in Alexander Johnson, ed., Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections, Buffalo, NY, June 9-16, 1909 (Fort Wayne, IN: Fort Wayne Printing Co., 1910): 119.

14 Kelley, "The Family and the Woman’s Wage," p. 120; and Julia Lathrop, "Standards of Child Welfare," The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 98 (Nov. 1921): 7-8.

15 In Humphries, "Women: Scapegoats and Safety Values in the Great Depression," p. 105.

16 Kelley, "The Family and the Woman’s Wage," pp. 120-21.

17 In Ann Shola Orloff, "Gender in Early U.S. Social Policy," Journal of Policy History 3 (No. 3, 1991): 256; also pp. 251-53.

18 In Stanley Lemons, The Woman Citizen: Social Feminism in the 1920’s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973): 185.

19 Mohr, Frances Perkins, p. 190.

20 Linda Gordon, "Social Insurance and Welfare Assistance: The Influence of Gender in Welfare Thought in the United States, 1890-1935," American Historical Review 97 (Feb. 1992): 48. Emphasis added.

21 From: Susan D. Becker, The Origins of the Equal Rights Amendment (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981): 146.

22 Mary Anderson and Mary N. Winslow, Woman at Work: The Autobiography of Mary Anderson (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1951): 166-67.

23 In Becker, The Origins of the Equal Rights Amendment, p. 220.

24 See Mohr, Frances Perkins, p. 192; and Anderson and Winslow, Woman at Work, p. 171.

25 Lemons, The Woman Citizen, p. 191.

26 Recent Social Trends in the United States: Report of The President’s Research Committee on Social Trends (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1933): xlii-xlvi, 661-78, 706. Emphasis added.

27 Lorine Pruette, "The Married Woman and the Part-Time Job," The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 143 (May 1929): 302-06.

28 Stuart Ewen, "Advertising as a Way of Life," Liberation 19 (Jan. 1975): 18.

29 Philip S. Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement: From World War I to the Present (New York: The Free Press, 1980): 278; also: Frances M. Seeker, "Eleanor Roosevelt and Women in the New Deal: A Network of Friends," Presidential Studies Quarterly 20 (Fall 1990): 711.

30 See: Gordon Berg, "Frances Perkins and the Flowering of Economic and Social Policies," Monthly Labor Review 112 (June 1989): 29-30.

31 In George Martin, Madam Secretary: Frances Perkins (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976): 116.

32 Mohr, Frances Perkins, p. 194.

33 Abramovitz, Regulating the Lives of Women, p. 224.

34 See: Mary T. Waggaman, Family Allowances in Various Countries (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1943): 1.

35 Anderson, Woman at Work, pp. 157-58; and Becker, The Origins of the Equal Rights Amendment, p. 177.

36 Eleanor Roosevelt, "Today’s Girl and Tomorrow’s Job," Women’s Home Companion 59 (June 1932): 12; and Eleanor Roosevelt, "Should Wives Work?" Good Housekeeping 105 (Dec. 1932): 212.

37 See: Mettler, Dividing Citizens, p. 57.

38 Becker, The Origins of the Equal Rights Amendment, p. 150.

39 Gordon, "Social Insurance and Public Assistance," pp. 22-35, 51-54. Emphasis added.

40 Katharine F. Lenroot, "Child Welfare 1930-40," The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 212 (Nov. 1940): 1.

41 Anderson and Winslow, Woman at Work, p. 157.

42 In Mettler, Dividing Citizens, p. 189.

43 Gordon, "Social Insurance and Public Assistance," pp. 47-49.

44 Mink, The Wages of Motherhood, p. 125, 151, 155.

45 Mettler, Dividing Citizens, p. 45.

46 For example, see: Abramovitz, Regulating the Lives of Women, pp. 224, 235.

47 Gordon, "Social Insurance and Public Assistance," p. 49.

48 See: Ruth Milkman, "Women’s Work and Economic Crisis: Some Lessons of the Great Depression," Review of Radical Political Economics 8 (Spring 1976): 76, 80, 83.

49 The following discussion of New Deal projects focuses on their social and familial aspects; no attempt will be made to judge their nature and effectiveness from a secular economic point of view.

50 George E. Paulsen, A Living Wage for the Forgotten Man: The Quest for Fair Labor Standards, 1933-1941 (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1996): 35, 46; Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement, p. 278.

51 Scharf, To Work and to Wed, pp. 112, 114, 119; Ware, Holding Their Own, pp. 38-39; and Winifred D. Wandersee, "A New Deal for Women: Government Programs, 1933-1940," in Wilbur J. Cohen, ed. The Roosevelt New Deal: A Program Assessment Fifty Years After (Austin: University of Texas, 1986): 187-88.

52 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Coming of the New Deal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958): 362-63.

53 In Paul K. Conkin, Tomorrow a New World: The New Deal Community Program (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1959): 124.

54 Brian Q. Cannon, Remaking the Agrarian Dream: New Deal Rural Settlement in the Mountain West (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996): 9; Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal, p. 363; Russell Lord, The Wallaces of Iowa (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947): 413; and Clarence E. Pickett, For More Than Bread (Boston: Little Brown, 1953): 52, 62.

55 Diane Ghirardo, Building New Communities: New Deal America and Fascist Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989): 172, 175, 177.

56 Wandersee, Women’s Work and Family Values, p. 96.

57 In Ware, Holding Their Own, p. 27.

58 From Current History and Forum, 1939; in Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, p. 256.

59 Lenroot, "Child Welfare," p. 10.

60 Mink, The Wages of Motherhood, p. 128; and Ware, Holding Their Own, p. 39.

61 Humphries, "Women: Scapegoat and Safety Values," p. 107; and Scharf, To Work and to Wed, p. 122.

62 Mink, The Wages of Motherhood, p. 157; Scharf, To Work and to Wed, p. 122; and Ware, Holding Their Own, p. 40.

63 Lenroot, "Child Welfare," p. 10.

64 From Mink, The Wages of Motherhood, p. 158.

65 Ibid., p. 123.

66 From Scharf, To Work and to Wed, p. 123.

67 Mink, The Wages of Motherhood, pp. 158-62; Scharf, To Work and to Wed, p. 123. Emphasis added.

68 Doris Campbell, "Counselling Service in the Day Nursery," The Family: Journal of Social Case Work 24 (March 1943): 29.

69 Scharf, To Work and to Wed, p. 131.

70 Abraham Epstein, Insecurity: A Challenge to America (New York: Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, 1933): 101-02. Emphasis added.

71 Grace Abbott, From Relief to Social Security (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1941): 211.

72 See: John A. Ryan, A Living Wage: Its Ethical and Economic Aspects (New York: Macmillan, 1910).

73 Alice Kessler-Harris, "Designing Women and Old Fools: The Construction of the Social Security Amendments of 1939," in Linda Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar, eds., U.S. History as Women’s History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995): 91, 101.

74 Abramovitz, Regulating the Lives of Women, pp. 228, 234-35.

75 See: Scharf, To Work and to Wed, pp. 127-28.

76 Mettler, Dividing Citizens, p. 127.

77 Paul H. Douglas, Standards for Unemployment Insurance (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1933): 50.

78 Mettler, Dividing Citizens, p. 132.

79 Jane M. Hoey, "Aid to Families with Dependent Children," The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 202 (March 1939): 77.

80 Both quotations in: Mink, The Wages of Motherhood, pp. 131-132.

81 Hoey, "Aid to Families with Dependent Children," p. 81.

82 Mink, The Wages of Motherhood, pp. 129, 151; Orloff, "Gender in Early U.S. Social Policy," p. 171; Abramovitz, Regulating the Lives of Women, pp. 313-14.

83 See: Scharf, To Work and to Wed, p. 134; Mettler, Dividing Citizens, p. 191; and Paulsen, "A Living Wage for the Forgotten Man," pp. 50, 92.

84 Janet Hutchison, "Building for Babbit: The State and the Suburban Home Ideal," Journal of Policy History 9 (No. 2, 1997): 202.

85 James Mason, History of Housing in the U.S., 1930-1980 (Houston, TX: Gulf, 1982): 13; and Mohr, Frances Perkins, p. 184.

86 Hutchison, "Building for Babbitt," p. 187.

87 Mink, The Wages of Motherhood, p. 135; Kessler-Harris, "Designing Women and Old Fools," p. 90; and Mettler, Dividing Citizens, p. 99.

88 Orloff, "Gender in Early U.S. Social Policy," p. 271.

89 Mink, The Wages of Motherhood, p. 136.

90 Kessler-Harris, "Designing Women and Old Fools," p. 104.

91 Ibid., p. 93.

92 Larry Witt, "Never a Finished Thing: A Biography of Arthur Joseph Altmeyer–The Man FDR Called ‘Mr. Social Security,’" at http://www.ssa.gov/history/ajabiocl.html: Chapters 1 and 5.

93 A litany found in: Kessler-Harris, "Designing Women and Old Fools," pp. 90, 93-94, 98-100, 105.

94 In Mettler, Dividing Citizens, p. 100.

95 Mink, The Wages of Motherhood, p. 150.

96 Kessler-Harris, "Designing Women and Old Fools," p. 105.

97 Ibid., p. 87.

98 Wandersee, "A New Deal for Women," p. 186.

99 See: Milkman, "Women’s Work and Economic Crisis," p. 82.

100 From: Mink, The Wages of Motherhood, p. 163; and Martin, Madam Secretary, p. 458.

101 Mink, The Wages of Motherhood, p. 165; and Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement, p. 349.

102 Emma O. Lundberg, "A Community Program of Day Care for Children of Mothers Employed in Defense Areas," Child 6 (Jan. 1942): 153.

103 See: Mettler, Dividing Citizens, p. 215.

104 Wandersee, Women’s Work and Family Values, p. 122.