Maternalist Reforms in the United States were experiments in public policy beginning late 19th and early 20th century that took the form of laws providing for state assistance for mothers with young children that did not have the financial support of a male member of the household. This assistance took the form of financial reimbursements, as well as limits on the maximum working hours for women. These reforms arose from the belief that government has an obligation and interest in protecting and improving the living standards of women and children. Maternalism is defined by historians Seth Koven and Sonya Michel as a variety of ideologies that "exalted women's capacities to mother and extended to society as a whole the values of care, nurturance and morality", and was intended to improve the quality of life of women and children. To improve the conditions of women and children these policies attempted to reconcile the conflicting roles placed on women during this time period. As single mothers were responsible for both supporting their families and raising children, government assistance would reduce the probability that they could be charged with neglecting their "home duties".
History
Emergence
Maternal public policy emerged in the United States following the landmark United States Supreme Court decision Muller v. Oregon, 208 U.S. 412. This case upheld the constitutionality of a law that limited the maximum working hours of women, qualifying the previous Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45, in which setting maximum working hours for men was held to be unconstitutional, by ruling that the state was allowed to intervene in matters related to women's working hours due to "the difference between the sexes". The decision in Muller was based on a scientific and sociological study that demonstrated that the government has a legitimate interest in the working conditions of women as they have the unique ability to bear children. By the turn of the century, a middle-class women's movement emerged based on the ethos of maternalist reform. In spite of the lack of the capability to vote, these women were able to exert their influence, particularly demonstrated in the successes of the Progressive Era maternalist reformers, whose initiatives helped establish the federal Children's Bureau and pass the Sheppard-Towner Infancy and Maternity Protection Act. Maternalist precepts would continue to shape American welfare policies thereafter due to activism and came to succeed in three overlapping categories: child protection, social housekeeping, and maternal and child welfare. Maternalist reformers viewed women as "social mothers" who are called to clean up political corruption so they aggressively pushed for maternalist policies to become laws, usually with provisions for female administrators. They also worked to achieve civil service reform and were also involved in promoting food and drug policies. By drawing from the association to motherhood - that mothers were responsible for protecting citizens within the home - the reformers made political demands with great efficacy. Maternalist reform began to be employed as an analytical tool to explain the modern welfare states in the United States and Western Europe in the early 1990s. This was facilitated by a Koven and Michel article, which compared the maternal welfare provisions in the U.S., United Kingdom, Germany, and France, effectively introducing maternalism to welfare scholarship. Later scholarship tackling the same subject revealed that paternalist welfare policies, which were designed by male bureaucrats to benefit male workers and their dependents prevailed in England whereas the maternalist welfare policies initiated by female reformers to address specific plights of women thrived in the United States.
Successes and limitations
While maternalist reforms won protection for working people during a time in which labour movements enjoyed few gains and asserted the right of women to participate in the public realm, they also perpetuated ideas harmful to the advancement of women to a point of equality with men, eliciting criticism from growing numbers of feminists during the period. Some of these ideas include the belief that women ought to be mothers and that ideally men should be financially supporting the family. There were also strong pushbacks to materialist reform in the United States. The most significant of these came from opponents who claim that it was a living proof of socialist infiltration of the U.S. government. These were effective in undermining previous successes such as the repeal of the Sheppard-Towner Infancy and Maternity Protection Act as well as prevention of the maternalist hopes of incorporating universal health coverage to the New Deal.
Significance to later reforms
Related Entries
Individual reformers who were advocates of maternalist policies include:
