Mothers' pensions

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The General Federation of Women's Clubs, which advocated for mothers' pensions

Mothers' pensions, also referred to as mothers' aid or widows' aid, were cash payments distributed to impoverished single mothers in the United States during the first half of the 20th century. Introduced during the Progressive Era, they were the first public cash assistance programs in the United States explicitly targeted to single mothers.[1]

Mother's pensions were aimed at family preservation, intending to provide the means for poor single mothers to care for their children in their own homes. While primarily targeted at widows, they were also sometimes authorized for women whose husbands had deserted them, were confined to mental hospitals or prisons, or were physically or mentally incapacitated. They were financed and administered by state and local governments, and served as a precursor to the federal Aid to Dependent Children program created by the Social Security Act of 1935.[2]

Structure[]

Payments[]

Mothers' pensions were long-term cash provisions to impoverished single mothers.[2] Payments were generally inadequate to cover living expenses.[3] Nearly every state had a maximum allowable allowance ranging from 9 dollars to 15 dollars per month (approximately $120 to $275 in 2021 dollars) for the first child and 4 dollars to 10 dollars for any additional children.[4] In practice, payments were often smaller than the statutory maximum; in 1931, the median mothers' pension was $21.87 per month, and ranged from an average of $4.33 per month in Arkansas to $69.31 a month in Massachusetts.[3] As a consequence of the low payments, mothers receiving mothers' pensions tended to work outside of the home, despite the intention of many reformers that mothers' pensions would enable mothers to stay out of the workforce.[5]

Eligibility[]

Mothers' pensions came with a number of eligibility criteria and generally required lengthy and intrusive application processes as well as supervision by case workers. In most states, pensions were restricted to widows, though some states gave aid to mothers whose husbands had deserted them, were physically or mentally incapacitated, or were incarcerated. Aid was extended only to those who lived in deep poverty. Mothers had to satisfy state-residency requirements, typically mandating that they have lived in the state they are receiving benefits for at least one to three years.[4] Pensions most often cut off once the child reached the age of 14 or 16.[4] In some southern states, black mothers were excluded from benefits by law.[6] iI jurisdictions with adequate supervisory personnel, social workers visited mothers every month.[7]

Most states also included subjective character requirements.[4] In Maine, for instance, laws governing mothers' pensions required a potential recipient to be "a fit and capable person to bring up her children, and whether the inmates and surrounding of her household are such as to render it suitable for her children to reside at home".[7] These character requirements were sometimes used in racially or ethnically discriminatory ways;[7] black mothers, for instance, were often racistly judged to be of poor character,[8][9] while immigrant mothers could be faulted for speaking a language other than English in the home.[7] Case workers also sometimes required mothers to turn down or quit full-time jobs to satisfy their belief that the mother should spend more time at home with her children.[7]

Administration[]

Funding and administration was locally based, with administrative duties generally falling to juvenile courts.[4] In the 1920s, however, there was a tendency to hand administration over to county welfare agencies, even if the law stipulated that juvenile courts were to handle administration.[7] Social workers or private charities were often contracted out to supervise recipients and run proper-home investigations.[7]

Coverage and disparities[]

While mothers' pensions were occasionally available to single mothers whose husbands had deserted them, were physically or mentally incapacitated, or were incarcerated in asylums or prisons, the large majority of recipients were widows.[10] In 1931, only three states explicitly allowed unmarried mothers to receive benefits (because administration was largely handled at the local level, local practice sometimes differed from state law—generally in the direction of making access to aid more restrictive).[10] Mothers' pensions universally excluded families in which an able-bodied father was present, regardless of family income.[6] Consequently, mothers' pension programs excluded some of the most impoverished families.[6] In the mid-1920s, welfare advocate Emma Lundberg estimated that only one-third of needy children were in families receiving mothers' pensions;[3] in 1931, the Children's Bureau came to the same conclusion.[6]

Because funding and administration of mothers' pensions were often left to localities, there existed significant disparities in aid availability between counties, even within the same state. Western, urban-midwestern, and urban-northeastern counties were significantly more likely than southern and rural counties to operate mothers' pension programs, and were more likely to devote funds to them.[7]

Underfunding also plagued many localities' pension programs. In 1922, for instance, cities like Denver, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati maintained waitlists for eligible mothers that were larger than the number of mothers receiving aid.[11] Underfunding also prompted cities to tighten moral and behavioral eligibility requirements to ensure that the families who did receive aid appeared to be of the best character.[11]

History[]

The movement to institute mothers' pensions emerged during the Progressive Era, a period of widespread social activism and political reform spanning the 1890s to the 1920s.[2] Progressive reformers stressed the importance of family preservation (which contrasted with the consensus only a few decades earlier that extremely poor families, who were viewed as culturally and morally deficient, should be broken up and their children put into institutions, where they would be raised to appreciate middle-class values). This led to an effort to provide poor mothers with an income that would ensure they could care for their children in their own homes. Women made up the core force backing mothers' pensions, with women's civic organizations lobbying for them, women's magazines promoting them, and the expansion of voting rights to women (which culminated with the 19th Amendment in 1919) making politicians more mindful of policies beneficial to women.

The earliest attempt to provide pensions to mothers occurred in New York, when in 1898 the New York legislature passed a bill that would have given widowed mothers in New York City an allowance equal to the cost it would take to institutionalize their children; this bill, however, was vetoed by the governor at the behest of private charity organizations.[12] The first successful statewide mothers' pension program did not come for another 13 years, when the state of Illinois introduced a mothers' pension in 1911.[13] The following decade saw an explosion of mothers' pension programs, with thirty-nine states plus Alaska and Hawaii adopting them by 1919. By the time mothers' pensions were made redundant by the federal Aid to Dependent Children program in 1935, 46 states had adopted them.[14]

However, because counties had a significant degree of control over the administration of mothers' pensions, at no point did more than half of all counties in the United States provide mothers' pensions.[15] There were also large disparities in the size of mothers pensions, with the least generous states like Louisiana distributing only a few cents per capita while the most generous states, like New York, distributed 82 cents per capita. There were also large disparities between urban and rural benefits, with urban areas having the most generous mothers' pensions.

Mothers' pensions were a rare area in which the United States pioneered welfare policy. In most sectors of welfare politics, the United States lagged behind Western European countries, which had instituted social welfare policies like workmen's compensation, old-age insurance, and unemployment insurance decades before the United States.[16][17] These, however, were all directed towards the breadwinning male wage earner; the United States led the way in "maternalist" benefits, which included mothers' pensions, limits on women's hours of work, minimum wage laws for female workers, and government agencies staffed principally by women (the United States Children's Bureau).[17]

Background[]

Mothers pensions' arose during the Progressive Era, and dovetailed with simultaneous efforts to improve working conditions for women and children, reduce or abolish child labor, and provide workmen's compensation.[18] Of chief concern to advocates of mothers' pensions was the desire to protect poor women from family separation (that is, to promote family preservation) and to protect their children from institutionalization (e.g. in orphanages or workhouses).[19] Hence the most frequent argument for mothers' pensions was the indictment of the conditions of orphanages, as well as a corresponding "sanctification of 'mother's love' and of the home".[20]

The promotion of family preservation through mothers' pensions broke with earlier policies of deliberate family separation. In the late 1800s, a consensus existed that the condition of pauperism was culturally transmitted from parent to child, and so governments and private charities sought to separate children from their poor parents and raise them in institutions that instilled middle-class values like thrift and industriousness. By the early 20th century, however, family separation was widely viewed negatively. A resolution released by The White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children, held in 1909, for instance, stated:[21]

Home life is the highest and finest product of civilization. It is the great molding force of mind and character. Children should not be deprived of it except for urgent and compelling reasons. Children of parents of worthy character, suffering from temporary misfortune and children of reasonably efficient and deserving mothers who are without the support of the normal breadwinner, should, as a rule, be kept with their parents...Except for unusual circumstances, the home should not be broken up, for reasons of poverty.

While breaking with earlier views on family separation, mothers' pensions drew heavily on a longstanding American preoccupation with distinguishing the "deserving" from the "undeserving" poor.[16][22] Married women, who had husbands who could in principle provide income for the family, were generally viewed as undeserving of material aid. Widows and single mothers who had lost their husbands to desertion, illness, or incarceration, by contrast, were viewed as objects of public sympathy, especially given the prevailing cultural view that women should not be members of the workforce.[23] Still, eligibility for mothers' pensions came with a variety of restrictions in an attempt to limit them only to the most deserving, including the requirement that mothers live in extreme poverty. Most onerously, aid was restricted to mothers of "good character" (character requirements were omnipresent in welfare benefits of this era, both for men and for women[7]); mothers who drank alcohol, lived with male partners out of wedlock, or were viewed as neglectful towards their children were often denied aid.[10] Additionally, unmarried or deserted mothers were often made ineligible for aid out of a fear that it could encourage husbands to leave their families.[10]

Despite public sympathy for widows and a broadly held view that family preservation should be encouraged, advocates for mothers' pensions faced some opposition. Notably, however, mothers' pension faced limited opposition from business interests—who made up the core force opposing most forms of public aid—in large part because they had minimal effect on business costs and did not significantly affect the supply of labor.[24] Still, advocates of mothers' pensions confronted a decades-long opposition to government-provided public relief. In the late-1800s, social workers and private charity had challenged the system of local and state government-provided outdoor relief, contending that direct relief bred dependency and pauperization—that it was a "pathological parasitism that would inevitably create a new class of dependents".[25] These critics of public aid led a campaign that successfully abolished outdoor relief in a number of major cities and replaced it with a system of scientific charity (private charity, however, always proved unable to meet the needs of the cities' poor, and so other forms of public relief, like poorhouses, continued to exist alongside it).[26][23] When attention turned to mothers' pensions, charity workers once again provided the bulk of the opposition to direct relief, assailing the supposed detriments to personal character it encouraged, extolling their own form of scientific charity, and privately worrying direct relief posed a threat to the agencies that employed them.[27]

By the early 1900s, however, the inadequacy of private charity and existing public relief in providing for the poor (especially during the Panic of 1893), as well as the substantial growth of cities, new immigration, and a more militant labor movement, led to a resurgence of efforts to reform public welfare, much of it centering around children.[28] Much of this newfound focus on children can be attributed to evolving views of the place of children in society. Throughout most of early United States history, children were economically productive members of the family, performing tasks like assisting with work on the family farm or bringing in income through factory work. By the mid-19th century, however, middle-class children had lost most of their economic utility and spent increasingly long periods of time in school.[29] This led to an evolving view of the place of children in society, from contributory members of the family to those who purely needed to be cared for.[29] This view accelerated in the early 20th century, as working-class urban children (who had remained economically productive for longer than children in higher-income families because industrialization had introduced many jobs that could be performed by children) were gradually removed from the labor force by compulsory education, child labor laws, and decreased usefulness in industrial settings.[29]

In accordance with this new view of children, forerunners to mothers' pension began to emerge in the form of widows' scholarships.[30] Certain private groups, especially the National Consumers' League and groups within the General Federation of Women's Clubs, began to offer scholarships to poor mothers commensurate with the wages their children would have earned had they been in the workforce rather than in school.[30] Though limited in scope, these provided a prototype from which public policy could be modeled.[31]

Early efforts[]

In the early years of the 20th century, public aid for dependent children in their own homes began to emerge as an alternative to private charity and existing forms of outdoor relief.[12] The first significant effort to provide a mothers' pension came in New York, when in 1898 the New York legislature passed a bill that would have given widowed mothers in New York City an allowance equal to the cost of institutionalizing their children.[12] However, under pressure from private charity groups, which opposed the measure, the governor vetoed the bill.[12]

Over the next decade, an increasing number of measures intended to benefit widows with dependent children were introduced. As outlined by historian Mark H. Leff:[12]

In 1906, the juvenile courts in some California counties liberally interpreted laws to furnish county aid to children in their own homes, and in 1910 the attorney general of New Jersey took a similar step. Oklahoma in 1908 established "school scholarships," paid from educational funds to children of widows; and in the early months of 1911 Michigan enacted a comparable law for indigent children. None of these laws explicitly recognized state responsibility for support of dependent children in their own homes. Nevertheless, it is clear that the public distinguished widows' aid from other public relief.

One of the most important events spurring the creation of mothers' pensions was The White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children, held in 1909.[12] President Theodore Roosevelt opened the conference by discussing the plight of widows unable to support their children. At the conclusion of the conference, the participants released a resolution calling for mothers' pensions (though expressing a preference for private charity).[32] According to Leff, "This resolution, though expressing a preference for privately funded mothers' pensions, catalyzed the drive for public legislation. Soon a stream of people declared their advocacy of pensions for mothers."[13]

The conference also led to the creation of the federal Children's Bureau three years later.[33] While the Children's Bureau had no direct control over financing or administering any mothers' pensions (which were handled by local and state governments), according to historian Barbara Machtinger the Bureau "played a significant federal advocacy role for mothers’ pensions".[33] It "provided leadership and guidance to recipients and local administrators and, in the process, helped forge a network of support for this new public policy. Most important, the Bureau financed and studied local administration, and as a result of its investigations, developed a reform agenda to improve the policy and practice of this early form of public provision to single-mother families".[33] The Bureau's recommendations were largely centered around making mothers' pensions more expansive and inclusive, as well as advocating the hiring of trained social workers to provide social services.[33]

In the private sphere, women made up the principle element of the mothers' aid movement.[34][35] National mass-circulation women's magazine (especially The Delineator, as well as Good Housekeeping and Collier's) helped to spread the idea of mothers' pensions to the public, women's federations and other civic groups (especially the National Congress of Mothers and to a lesser extent the General Federation of Women's Clubs) lobbied for them and, following the adoption of the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which extended the right to vote to all women, politicians felt greater pressure to cater to the interests of female voters.[14][35][36] Other groups that pushed for mothers' pensions included juvenile court judges (who were influential in the adoption of the earliest mothers' pensions), labor organizations (which gave tepid support), and advocates of social insurance who were not members of charity organizations.[37]

Creation of mothers' pensions[]

The first mothers' pensions were introduced in 1911, when the state of Illinois introduced a mothers' pension and Missouri introduced one in Kansas City.[13] The next year, a number of counties in Colorado introduced their own mothers' pensions.[13] These earliest mothers' pension programs were spearheaded by reformist juvenile court judges who disagreed with policies of family separation and who wanted poor children to be able to stay in school rather than enter the workforce.[38] The Missouri mothers' pension, for instance, arose almost entirely due to the efforts of Judge. E. E. Porterfield of the Juvenile Court of Kansas City, while the Illinois pension was quietly engineered as an amendment to juvenile court legislation by Juvenile Court Judge Merrit W. Pickney.[38]

By 1912, as awareness of mothers' pensions rose, opponents in private charity began to mobilize against them.[39] However, a simultaneous push by women's civic organizations like the National Congress of Mothers and the General Federation of Women's Clubs, as well as mass-media public advocacy by women's magazines, produced a concerted nationwide effort to adopt mothers' pensions.[40] In the view of sociologist and political scientist Theda Skocpol, it was the association of mothers' pensions with elite and middle-class married women (who dominated women's civics organizations) that enabled the mothers' pension movement to transform from "an idea initially sponsored by a few juvenile court judges into a national social movement and legislative reality".[41] Lacking the stigma generally associated with public aid to the poor through its association with middle and upper-class married women, in 1913 there emerged a mass of legislation enacting mothers' pensions laws; in that year alone, 27 of the 42 state legislatures in session considered them, and 17 passed laws introducing them.[13] This brought the total number of states with pensions for mothers in 1913 to twenty (sixteen in the West or Midwest).[13] Over the next decade and a half, most states followed in introducing mothers' pensions, and almost always by nearly unanimous votes.[13] By 1915, twenty-nine states were providing pensions to mothers; by 1919, it was thirty-nine, plus Alaska and Hawaii (which at the time were United States territories); by 1930, 46 states had mothers' pension programs (only Georgia and South Carolina did not offer them).[4][16]

In 1931, $33 million (approximately $595 million in 2021 dollars) was expended on mothers' pensions, with over 93,000 families receiving assistance.[16]

Legacy[]

Mothers' pensions were the precursors to the federal Aid to Dependent Children program (later modified and renamed Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and in 1997 replaced by Temporary Assistance for Needy Families).[16] Aid to Dependent Children carried over the "suitable homes" provisions of mothers' pensions, which restricted public aid only to those deemed to be of good character.[42]

Effects[]

A study of mothers' pensions recipients in Chicago found that mothers did better under mothers' pensions than they did when previously dependent upon private charity.[43] A study published in the American Economic Review analyzing data collected on over 16,000 boys from 11 states who were born between 1900 and 1925 and whose mothers applied to the Mothers' Pension program determined that receiving a mothers' pension increased life expectancy of the benefiting child by one year on average.[44]

See also[]

Notes[]

  1. ^ Moehling 2002.
  2. ^ a b c Leff 1973, p. 397.
  3. ^ a b c Skocpol 1995a, p. 472.
  4. ^ a b c d e f Leff 1973, p. 401.
  5. ^ Godwin 1992.
  6. ^ a b c d Leff 1973, p. 414.
  7. ^ a b c d e f g h i Skocpol 1995a, p. 468.
  8. ^ Floyd et al. 2021.
  9. ^ Badger & Miller 2021.
  10. ^ a b c d Skocpol 1995a, p. 467.
  11. ^ a b Skocpol 1995a, p. 475.
  12. ^ a b c d e f Leff 1973, p. 399.
  13. ^ a b c d e f g Leff 1973, p. 400.
  14. ^ a b Skocpol 1995b.
  15. ^ Leff 1973, p. 413-414.
  16. ^ a b c d e Ward 2000.
  17. ^ a b Skocpol 1995a, p. 3-11.
  18. ^ Leff 1973, p. 405.
  19. ^ Ward 2005, p. 28.
  20. ^ Leff 1973, p. 410.
  21. ^ U.S. Government Printing Office 1909.
  22. ^ Katz 2013.
  23. ^ a b Leff 1973, p. 398.
  24. ^ Noble 1997, p. 49.
  25. ^ Leff 1973, p. 404.
  26. ^ Katz 1996, p. 81.
  27. ^ Leff 1973, p. 402.
  28. ^ Katz 1996, p. 113-114.
  29. ^ a b c Katz 1996, p. 116.
  30. ^ a b Skocpol 1995a, p. 443-444.
  31. ^ Skocpol 1995a, p. 444.
  32. ^ Leff 1973, p. 399-400.
  33. ^ a b c d Machtinger 1999.
  34. ^ Leff 1973, p. 409.
  35. ^ a b Skocpol et al. 1993.
  36. ^ Sparks & Walnuik 1995.
  37. ^ Leff 1973.
  38. ^ a b Skocpol 1995a, p. 428.
  39. ^ Skocpol 1995a, p. 429.
  40. ^ Skocpol 1995a, p. 432-456.
  41. ^ Skocpol 1995a, p. 448.
  42. ^ Katz 1996, p. 253.
  43. ^ Skocpol 1995a, p. 466.
  44. ^ Aizer et al. 2016.

References[]

Books[]

  • Katz, Michael B. (1996). In the Shadow Of the Poorhouse: A Social History Of Welfare In America. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 978-0465032105.
  • Katz, Michael B. (2013). The Undeserving Poor: America's Enduring Confrontation with Poverty. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0199933952.
  • Noble, Charles (1997). Welfare As We Knew It: A Political History of the American Welfare State. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0195113372.
  • Proceedings of the Conference on the Care of Dependent Children Held at Washington, D.C., January 25, 26, 1909. U.S. Government Printing Office. 1909.
  • Skocpol, Theda (1995a). Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States. Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674717664.
  • Ward, Deborah E. (2005). The White Welfare State: The Racialization of U.S. Welfare Policy. The University of Michigan Press. ISBN 978-0472030958.

Journal articles[]

Web articles[]

External links[]

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