On
July 19th, 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton presented the Declaration
of Sentiments at the first women’s rights convention
in Seneca Falls, New York. Stanton and other early supporters of
the women’s rights movement set a wave of progress
in motion that moves us to this day. But the long struggle to win the vote
for women is only one example of the extraordinary fortitude of
19th century woman activists.
Support for Stanton’s
demand for enfranchisement was not universal— at a time when
the ideology of domesticity was in full flower, the suggestion that
women had inalienable rights and civic responsibilities was treated
with derision by most men and many women. However, even wives and mothers who
openly rejected the appeal for women’s suffrage were poised
to expand their social influence beyond the boundaries of the domestic
sphere.
During the Victorian
and Progressive eras (1830 to 1920) millions of middle-class homemakers took part in grassroots political action through affiliation
in women’s voluntary organizations. Rather than challenging
the status quo of male dominance, reform-minded clubwomen exploited
the cultural ideology of their day— an idealization of womanhood
that granted women moral superiority and absolute authority in
all matters related to the health and welfare of the family—
to achieve their political goals.
From pure food and milk
to better wages for women workers, reforms championed by women’s
groups in this period were aimed at protecting the well-being
of mothers and children and preserving the maternal-child bond.
These campaigns proved to be highly effective— so effective
that the activities of women’s voluntary organizations were
central to the enactment of some of the earliest social policies
in the United States.
Women
in a changing world
The rapid advance of
industrialization, immigration and urbanization in the second half of the 19th century produced profound
changes in family life— and a host of social
problems of staggering proportions. While men shifted their attention
to the worldly affairs of commerce and public life, women were expected
to fulfill their part of the social compact through selfless dedication
to motherhood and housekeeping. Wives and mothers were celebrated
as the moral guardians of the household, and educators, politicians
and clergymen frequently called upon mothers to apply their specialized
talents to the betterment of the human race, one well-reared child
at a time.
When viewed through a
feminist lens, 19th century social conditions appear inordinately
oppressive to women. Certainly, married women were deprived of the
most basic rights of citizenship— a wife had no legal claim
to personal property, or even to her own wages. As Elizabeth Cady
Stanton wrote in her Seneca Falls Declaration, when a woman
married, she became “in the eye of the law, civilly dead.”
Paradoxically, the gendered
division of power inherent in the ideology of “separate spheres”
germinated new cultural attitudes which allowed women to flourish
as social actors. The Victorian notion of “true
womanhood” upheld the “feminine” virtues of
purity, piety, domesticity and submissiveness as the moral antidote
to the corrupting influence of the free market. An emphasis on care-giving
as a “sacred” duty provided homemakers with a sense
of higher purpose, and women were urged to develop mastery over
all things in the private domain. Furthermore, the popularization
of domesticity through novels, homemaking manuals and magazines
such as Godey’s Ladies Book and Ladies Home Journal prompted women to cultivate a resilient collective identity based
on the ideal qualities of motherhood.
The combination of moral
empowerment, feminine mastery and collective identity was a potent
mix for conceptualizing a broader political role for middle-class
mothers at a time when women and children from less fortunate families
were suffering from the devastating consequences of urban poverty. Although
women were chided to direct their growing sense of social agency
to home, church and charity, dutiful wives and mothers began organizing
for the common good as early as 1830.
Banding
together
By igniting the maternal
sentiment of respectable clubwomen, female voluntary groups spearheaded
a number of successful reform campaigns in the name of “social
housekeeping.” Club leaders recruited volunteers to collect
information on target issues (which occasionally required members
to visit the workfloors of factories or conduct door-to-door surveys
in impoverished neighborhoods). Calls to action were disseminated
through a vast network of state and local affiliates, and club members
advanced campaigns at the regional level by coordinating public
lectures, letter writing campaigns, and petition drives. Maternal
activists also harnessed the power of the press by submitting letters
and essays decrying the reprehensible conditions afflicting American
mothers and children to newspapers and magazines.
By the turn of the 20th
century, women had organized to promote the abolition of prostitution;
women’s suffrage (achieved in 1920); temperance and prohibition
(national prohibition was enacted in 1919, and later repealed);
dress reform; juvenile justice and prison reform; equal wages, shorter
work hours and occupational safety for working women (the U.S. Department
of Labor Women’s Bureau was formed in 1920); pensions for
widowed and destitute mothers (passed into law in 40 states between
1911 and 1920); a centralized program to improve maternal and infant
health (resulting in the creation of the U.S. Children’s Bureau
in 1912 and the Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921); the Pure Food and
Drug Act (1911); child labor reform; compulsory school attendance;
civil service reform; public kindergartens, urban playgrounds; and
free public libraries.
The ranks of woman who
rallied behind the maternalist agenda originated from two distinct
sectors. Middle- and upper-class married women were frequently mobilized
through membership in national women’s associations. Organizations
such as the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, The Women’s
Christian Temperance Union, the National Congress of Mothers (which
became the Parent-Teacher Association in 1908), and the National
Consumer’s League were at the forefront of Progressive era
reform movements. Women of color formed the National Colored Women’s
Association in 1896 to support reform related to race issues. By
1900, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union was represented
in every state, with more than 168,000 dues-paying members and over
7,000 local associations; in 1911, the General Federation of Women’s
Clubs had over one million members.
A second group of reformers
consisted of unmarried professional women with connections to the settlement
house movement. Settlement houses were residential centers established
and staffed by educated, middle-class men and women to provide outreach
and social services to the urban poor. Hull House in Chicago (founded
1889) was one of the largest and most successful settlement projects
in the U.S., and many women who trained at there—including Jane
Addams, Florence
Kelly and Grace
Abbott—were prominent in the maternalist reform and suffrage
movements.
Although
clubwomen and social work professionals led dramatically different
lives, they shared a core belief that women were naturally endowed
with a special aptitude for attending to the welfare of others. While
married women applied this ideology to their private obligations,
settlement women used it to justify a dedication to public service.
The two groups ultimately formed a powerful coalition committed
to resolving some of the most pressing social problems of the time.
The strength of this
relationship is evident in the interaction between the U.S. Children’s
Bureau and the General Federation of Women’s Clubs in the
early decades of the twentieth century. When Julia
Lathrop (who began her career in public service at Hull House
in the early 1890s) was appointed to head the newly formed U.S.
Children’s Bureau in 1912, her primary mission was to
track and reduce infant mortality. Since municipal records were
known to be woefully inaccurate in reporting either live births
or infant deaths, Lathrop launched a nation-wide birth registration
campaign. One of her first official acts was to enlist members of
GFWC in the task of recording every birth in their home communities
and reconciling the findings with local officials. Clubwomen were
also charged with organizing public events in honor of the Children
Bureau’s National Baby Week. Due to their zeal for protecting
the health and welfare of children, maternalist reformers were referred
to (and sometimes ridiculed) as “baby savers” by the
popular press.
The
power and problems of maternalist reform
Historians consider
the maternalist reform movement instrumental to the development
of the modern U.S. welfare state. But by conceptualizing the source
of women’s political power as an extension their domestic
roles, and by advocating public policies favoring the family’s
sole dependency on the wages of a male head of household, maternalist
reformers also succeeded in institutionalizing a class-bound ideology of mothering that set the standard for future social programs based
on a gender-biased standard of the “family wage.”
Infant mortality— which,
according to estimates, was as high as 30 percent in poor urban communities
in 1900— declined rapidly after 1930. How much the work of
the Children’s Bureau and maternalist reformers contributed
to this reduction has been questioned by scholars who observe that
overall improvements in urban sanitation systems and public health
regulations were probably far more effective in preserving the lives
of babies than the Bureau’s national campaign to mass educate
mothers in the basic of infant care and feeding.
Although “maternalism”
has been portrayed as a branch of early feminism, there remains
some debate about whether the objectives of maternalist reformers
were entirely compatible with the women’s rights agenda. Certainly,
the maternalist reform movement opened a new path for women’s
political empowerment, and many (but not all) leaders and organizations
associated with the maternalist cause were also outspoken supporters
of women’s suffrage. But because maternalism valorized women’s
selfless care-giving and called for social recognition of women’s
rights based on the power of maternal influence to shape
the character of future generations, it may be problematic to view
classic maternal activism as a true form of feminism.
Nevertheless, the maternal
reform movement during the Progressive Era deserves a place in our
historical awareness of women’s activism— both for the
capacity of the maternalist ethic to engage a population that at the time was
formally disenfranchised from the mainstream political process,
and for the unprecedented number of social reforms secured with
the support of women’s voluntary organizations.
Social and cultural conditions
at the end of the 19th century presented certain women with a unique
opportunity to seize the moment as their own. Although the political
presence of women’s voluntary groups faded significantly after
the first quarter of the 20th century, many woman reformers who
were attuned to the maternalist ethic continued to work for social
progress, including Eleanor
Roosevelt and Frances
Perkins (FDR’s secretary of labor, the first woman to
hold a position on a presidential cabinet, and one of the principal
authors of the Fair Labor Standards and Social Security acts).
If there is a larger
lesson to take away from the success of maternal activism during
the Progressive Era, it may be that contemporary mothers’
activists should be wary of the temptation to rework the valorization
of motherhood into a platform for social action. But we should never
be ashamed to emulate the extraordinary resourcefulness of our foremothers
who banded together over one hundred years ago to advance their
own maternal cause, or dismiss the power of their determination
to shape a better world.
mmo : march 2004 |