Abstract
Harry Hopkins defined a good part of his social philosophy during his practical education in social work during the second decade of the twentieth century. Indeed, the design of much of the American welfare system that he helped to formulate after 1933 was cast in New York City from 1913 to 1917. During these years the movement to legislate public pensions for poor, single mothers captured Hopkins’ attention. In New York City widows’ pensions became one of the most important issues for the child-savers and progressive social workers because the movement both reinforced the value placed on home life and reiterated the need for public funding.
There is always the danger that in our dread of making people dependent we shall cease to do good for fear of doing harm.
—Harry Hopkins, 1914
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Notes
Walter Trattner, From Poor Law to Welfare State: A History of Social Welfare in America, 3rd Ed. (New York: The Free Press, 1984), 90.
Grace Abbott, The Child and the State: Vol. II, The Dependent and Delinquent Child (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968, first published 1938), 231; “Report on Outdoor Relief,” Proceedings of the Conference of Charities 1877, Boston: Williams & Co., 1877, 48–49, 51.
Josephine Shaw Lowell, quoted in Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Correction 1888 (Boston: Geo. H. Ellis Press, 1888), 147. Lowell, the first woman appointed to the New York State Board of Charities (in 1876), formed the COS in 1882.
Mrs. Louise Wolcott, “Treatment of Poor Widows with Dependent Children,” Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Correction. Boston: Geo. H. Ellis Press, 1888, 137–138.
Mark Leff, “A Consensus for Reform: The Mothers’ Pension Movement in the Progressive Era,” Social Service Review 47 (September 1973): 402.
Frederic Almy, “Public Pensions to Widows: Experiences and Observations Which Lead Me to Oppose Such a Law,” in Edna O. Bullock, Selected Articles in Mothers’ Pensions (White Plains, N.Y.: H. W. Wilson and Co., 1950), 153–158.
Edward T. Devine, “Widows’ Needs,” Survey 32 (April 4, 1914): 27.
Edward Devine, “Pensions for Mothers,” American Labor Legislation Review (June 1913), in Bullock, 176–81.
Mary E. Richmond, “Motherhood and Pensions,” Survey 22 (March 1, 1913), in Bullock, 62–64; Roy Lubove, The Struggle for Social Security (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), 102.
Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1992), 426.
According to Linda Gordon, this maternalist discourse implied and reinforced the subordination of poor women while at the same time carving out a space in the public sphere for reforming women. Many of these reformers saw day nurseries, an alternative that would allow some women to earn enough money to support their families or to supplement their pension, as merely undermining women’s domestic role. Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled, 23, 27, 55. See also Sonya Michel, “Limits of Maternalism,” in Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of the Welfare State (New York: Routledge, 1993), 227–280.
Miriam Cohen and Michael Hanagan, “The Politics of Gender and the Making of the Welfare State, 1900–1940,” Journal of Social History (Spring 1991), 469.
Robert Bremner, “Origins of the COS,” in Roy Lubove, ed., Poverty and Social Welfare in the United States, (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972), 39–40.
State of New York, Report of the New York State Commission on Relief for Widowed Mothers (Albany, New York: J.B. Lyon Company, 1914), 1. The commission was formed June 1913 and the report was submitted to the New York state legislature March 27, 1914. Witnesses included Dr. Edward Devine, John Kingsbury, Homer Folks, Mary Richmond, Porter Lee, Mary Simkhowitch, Rabbi Stephen Wise, Mary Van Kleeck, Frank Persons, and Frank Bruno. See also Survey 32 (April 4, 1914): 1. Although somewhat radical, this statement of government responsibility for children was not unprecedented. At the 1898 National Conference of Charities and Correction, Hugh Fox quoted the New Jersey Constitution, which declared that “Government is instituted for the protection, security and benefit of the people.” He added, “It is a wide departure from the Laissez Faire doctrine of the old economists.” Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Correction 1898, 2.
“A Report to the Public of the Service Rendered by the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor to 474 Widows with Dependent Children…” 1914, 7, JAKP, A4: Board of Child Welfare 1914–1916 M-Z; William H. Matthews, “Widows’ Families: Pensioned and Otherwise,” Survey 32 (June 6, 1914): 272; “A Year’s Work: Seventy-First Annual Report of the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, For the Year Ending September 30, 1914,” 13, Hopkins III, 1:14, GUSC. (Hereinafter AICP, Report 1914)
AICP, Report 1914, 32. As early as 1889, the AICP declared its intention to use aid as a moral lever. See Francis S. Longworth, “Report of the General Agent,” Forty-Sixth Annual Report of the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor (New York, 1889), 24; AICP Report 1914, 32.
William H. Matthews, Adventures in Giving (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1939), 121.
Hannah B. Einstein, “Child Welfare Work and State Allowance for Widowed Mothers,” address delivered to the State Federation of Women’s Clubs, Rochester, New York, November 16, 1916, p. 1. See also Notable American Women, 1607–1950, 416.
Rosalind Rosenberg, Divided Lives: American Women in the Twentieth Century (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 160, 262.
Ann Vandenpol, “Dependent Children, Child Custody, and the Mothers’ Pensions: The Transformation of the State-Family Relations in the Early 20th Century,” Social Problems 29, no. 3 (February, 1982): 221–235.
Barbara Nelson, “The Origins of the Two-Channel Welfare State: Workmen’s Compensation and Mothers’ Aid,” in Linda Gordon, Women, the State, and Welfare (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 126.
Muriel N. and Ralph E. Pumphrey, “The Widows’ Pension Movement, 1900–1930: Preventive Child-Saving or Social Control?”, in William Trattner, ed. Social Control or Social Welfare: Some Historical Reflections on “Regulating the Poor” (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983), 59; Theda Skocpol also makes this point in Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, 468.
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© 1999 June Hopkins
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Hopkins, J. (1999). Widows’ Pensions. In: Harry Hopkins. The World of the Roosevelts. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-10580-6_6
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