Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare

by Linda Gordon

With three-fourths of all poor families headed by women and about 54 percent of single-mother families living below the poverty line, a rethinking of the fundamental assumptions of our much-reviled welfare program is clearly necessary. Here, Linda Gordon unearths the tangled roots of AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children). Competing visions of how and to whom public aid should be distributed were advanced by male bureaucrats, black women's organizations, and white progressive feminists. From their policy debates emerged a two-track system of public aid, in which single mothers got highly stigmatized "welfare" while other groups, such as the aged and the unemployed, received "entitlements."Gordon strips today's welfare debates of decades of irrelevant and irrational accretion, revealing that what appeared progressive in the 1930s is antiquated in the 1990s. She shows that only by shedding false assumptions, and rethinking the nature of poverty, can we advance a truly effective welfare reform.

Genres: History, American History, Feminism, Politics, Nonfiction, 20th Century

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Linda Gordon is the Florence Kelley Professor of History at New York University. She is the author of numerous books and won the Bancroft Prize for The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction. She lives in New York. "

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

In "What is 'Welfare'?," Gordon explains that welfare's meaning in today's society as an underserved handout is primarily liked to the AFDC program. AFDC is the successor to ADC which was part of the Social Security Act of 1935. But Social Security had 11 titles that established 9 different programs, but it is in the difference between Old Age Insurance and ADC that Gordon sees the historical roots of welfare's stigmatization:

The Social Security Act created the contemporary meaning of "welfare" by setting up a stratified system of provision in which the social insurance programs were superior both in payments and in reputation, while public assistance was inferior - not just comparatively second-rate but deeply stigmatized. Public assistance is what Americans today call "welfare"; recipients of the good programs are never said to be "on welfare." And while most people hate "welfare," they pay the utmost respect to Old-Age Insurance.

By shifting the focus from OAI to ADC, Gordon gives us a new view of the Social Security Act of 1935.

AFDC is linked today to the problem of "single mothers," which Gordon reminds us is not a problem of the last few decades but rather one of the 20th Century as a whole. As the 19th C patriarchal society broke down, along with the community bonds that had held it together, the increasing presence of unmarried women with children became the concern of social reformers. Aid to unemployed men was intended to retain their status as "breadwinners," whereas the aid to single mothers was designed so as not to let them get too comfortable in that status.

The apparent irony in terms of the specific design of welfare in ADC is that it was designed by feminist women, women who cared deeply about the plight of women and children in the Great Depression of the 1930s. Yet this is problematic for us only if we take an ahistorical view of gender and how it works. It was because these women sought to protect the "family wage," by which a husband and father could support the family that they supported a proposal for ADC that ended up stigmatizing the recipients. Because the ADC program was cast in terms of needs, instead of rights or earnings, it was socially constructed as a handout. Single mothers are thus "pitied but not entitled."

"Single Mothers: The Facts and the Social Problem" considers the real problem created by industrialization. Women who were without husbands were likely to earn the least and have the double burden of raising children. At first, in response to industrialization, there were efforts at institutionalizing child care. White protestants were fairly quick to mobilize against that option, as it was detrimental to women's special role as mothers. Many children ended up in orphanages as a result of their mother's not being able to support them. Progressive reformers saw the rise in single mothers as a sign of social decline and sought to provide poor relief.

Progressive Reformers' efforts are considered in "State Caretakers: Maternalism, Mothers' Pensions, and the Family Wage." These Progressives developed an approach to mothers' aid that would underlie the structure of ADC in the Social Security Act. In a world in which laissez faire capitalism held that poverty was the result of personal failings, the advocacy of mothers' aid by reformers like Jane Addams seems quite progressive. She insisted that the phenomenon of impoverished single mothers was a result of advanced industrial capitalism. Mothers' pensions were a first step in the direction of a more comprehensive approach to aid intended to offset the endemic tendencies of capitalist competition.

In "'Pity is a Rebel Passion': The Social Work Perspective" Gordon discusses the work of social workers from the 1920s who ran the Children's Bureau of the Department of Labor. Despite the fact that they lived as single professional women, within a network of women, they supported a maternalist policy that gave primary emphasis to women's roles as mothers. Gender roles it seems had not caught up with gender ideology. When the Great Depression descended upon the nation in 1929, its was the Children's Bureau that was uniquely positioned to fight for the social work perspective within the federal government.

Julia Lathrop and Grace Abbott were the primary architects of the welfare provisions in the Social Security Act of 1935. Both of whom were highly educated and politically progressive alumnae of Hull House in Chicago. They were part of a larger maternalist social reform movement that constituted, in essence, an "old girls club." Many of these women were female celibates, others were lesbians, but all were dedicated to the the cause of reform and made life choice based upon what Gordon calls the "nuns' sensibility." The racial context of their thought was shaped by their white elite Protestant culture in a reform movement that saw immigrant culture as a danger to American society. Segregationist in spirit and in practice, white settlements excluded blacks and focused on "Americanizing" white immigrants.

In contrast to the Women's Bureau (est. 1918), the women of the Children's Bureau were firmly opposed to women's paid labor. Out of the process of administering the Sheppard-Towner Act at the local level, the local women connected to the national Children's Bureau developed a network that shaped the local character of relief to single women with children which would be a matter for local administration henceforth. In this environment "maternalism was quickly becoming a state-building impulse" in the 1920s. Fighting the creeping influence of the male-dominated Public Health Service (PHS) and the labor-oriented Women's Bureau, the Children's Bureau emerged from the 20s as a force to be reckoned with in bureaucratic politics of the New Deal.

"'Don't Wait For Deliveries': Black Women's Welfare Thought" explores the other side of the black-white race divide of reform. Black women's reform movements were aimed at race uplift and must be understood in the context of the exploitation of black women in American society. The seemingly puritanical emphasis on cleanliness and purity of black mothers is best understood as part of a larger program of "resistance to sexual slander." Agreeing with white reformers on the importance of protecting black mothers, they spoke similarly about women's appropriate sphere. Yet the realities of African-American life mean that women needed to work, and the black reformers were therefore much more likely to support daycare and kindergarten facilities for working mothers to ease the "double burden."

In "Prevention Before Charity: Social Insurance and the Sexual Division of Labor," Gordon shows how the network of white male progressives advocated and secured the acceptance of social insurance as an entitlement for men. The belief of John Commons and the Wisconsin School was largely that unemployment was the product of economic cycles and that workers were entitled to relief when they were hit by the ill effects of the labor market. Hence male social insurance became an entitlement as opposed to the handout of poor relief. Destigmatizing relief to male heads of households, they freed male workers from the laissez faire market.

In support of this vision of male social insurance, female social workers supported the "family wage" for working families and through the case study methodology shaped relief to poor mothers with children as "needs based." Representing the hands-on approach of case work in the developing profession of sociology, women resisted the male take-over of the newly professionalized field against the encroachment of academics. But their recourse to case work methodology supported the very means-testing that relegated ADC to a lesser grade of relief. Through the family wage system, male and female reformers found common class ground. The gender ideologies of progressive reform were not divided along strictly male-female lines, rather like race in the antebellum south, they tended to support existing class structures.

"The Depression Crisis and Relief Politics" shows the shaping of New Deal policy through the conflicts between the Roosevelt Administration's Harry Hopkins and state and local relief officials. Within a federal structure that put an emphasis on the male head of household's wage in depression America, the Women's Bureau was quick to protest discrimination against women in the WPA. The Children's Bureau, committed to their maternalist vision was more likely to overlook these problems. Tenaciously guarding their rights against usurpation by the federal government, states and localities insisted upon exercising control. In the South this meant that employers remained free to hire labor at the starvation wages they had since the end of Reconstruction. It also meant that relief to poor mothers with children would be administered by local officials who would means test and otherwise stigmatize single mothers with children. In the conflict between Harry Hopkins and the state and local authorities, the sentiments of the Children's Bureau were clearly aligned against the domineering Hopkins.

"New Deal Social Movements and Popular Pressure for Welfare" explains how popular agitation for poor relief during the Depression shaped the New Deal approach to relief, valorizing the deserving poor (unemployed men and the elderly) at the expense of stigmatizing the undeserving poor (single women with children). The New Deal Administration was besieged by a variety of reform proposals during the early years of the Depression. California's Francis Townsend proposed his EPIC (End Poverty in California) program and Huey Long called for a Share Our Wealth (SOW) program. In response to these pressures from the left, FDR veered leftward in 1935. Yet he didn't veer as far left as to countenance proposals by the socialists and communists, who were the main force behind the most progressive of all legislation of the period. The Lundeen Bill was structured to extend relief to black Americans and to support female heads of household. The bill went down to defeat as "too expensive" and as "a communist plot." Yet along with the other pressures for welfare relief it contributed to the administration's momentum behind social security. Marginalized at the time, those who called for more radical approaches to relief were not to shape the form of relief extended to single mothers with children.

"The Legislative Process: Reformers Face Politics" shows how the Children's Bureau, cowed by years of red baiting and perpetually anxious in its battles against the PHS, made only modest claims for single women with children in crafting the ADC portion of the Social Security Act. They believed, as did many others, that the provisions for unemployed and retired breadwinners would ultimately take care of mothers and their children. In the bureaucratic maneuvering around the social security act, though ADC was drafted by the Children's Bureau its administration was ultimately taken over by the Social Security Board. The forces of states rights then moved in to further limit the distribution of ADC.

Conservative Southern voices in Congress ensured that federally imposed standards would not undermine their access to cheap wage labor by providing a social security net for, say, migrant working families. They also sought to hold black women in agricultural and domestic service at low wages. Freed by federal programs from working at low wage jobs, black women would be less ready to accept this kind of work. Unless strictly contained, programs like ADC threatened to undermine the entire social structure in the minds of conservatives. The provisions that finally emerged in Social Security excluded domestic and migrant workers from unemployment relief and left the shaping of ADC administration in local hands. States could then shape the programs to fit their liking, forcing an all or nothing approach on the federal government. In a telling commentary, Gordon notes in conclusion of this section on the legislative process:

The inferiority of ADC in comparison to other Social Security programs was not created directly by sexism or hostility to single mothers. On the contrary, to most legislators in 1935 single mothers were respectable, pitiable widows. The gender system imported by ADC designers came into play at a more basic level, through assumptions that made the program small and marginal and the programs for men large and honorable. But American politics and Congress in particular brought race into ADC and the whole Social Security package. Indeed one could say that the fate of ADC was defined by the Civil War and Reconstruction - by the economic race relations and party alignments then constructed. These included the South's loyalty to the Democratic party and the party's dependence on its southern support, the retention of strong states' rights in constitutional adjudication and in legislation, and the enforced low-wage labor of black agricultural and domestic service workers. (p. 285)

Hence are race and gender inequities linked via the oppression of Southern conservatism.

In her coda on "Welfare and Citizenship," Gordon notes that gender ideology does not correspond to a male-female split. As we are reminded in Unequal Sisters, women who accept and participate in a gender ideology ladened with class implications often reap a bitter harvest. Believing deeply in the importance of the "family wage," Children's Bureau feminists got a program that was enfeebled from the very start. Only by recognizing the was in which race, gender and class interact can progressive causes build solid foundations for programs that have a lasting positive impact. Rather than retreat, Gordon urges an aggressive expansion of federal support for single women with children, who are entitled as citizens to the support of the government. The problem with today's welfare system is that it blames the victim, applying intrusive "home visits," means tests and morals tests, it degrades those it seeks to help.

[Sareena Crawford · Rating 4 out of 5]

For many Americans, welfare is the proverbial piggy bank of the American ghetto, paying for the tired, poor, and huddled masses to sit and do nothing. In her 1994 monograph Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare 1890-1935, one of the foremost pioneering historians of women and gender history, Linda Gordon, lays out the history of welfare and shows how "the United States evolved a set of programs of public provision that ultimately made 'welfare' a pejorative term" (1). To help inform on the welfare system that we know today, Gordon meticulously examines the rise and evolution of welfare programs in the United States, focusing on single mothers because they vividly exemplify the "status of women...about the degree of community, and about the actual (as opposed to the rhetorical) commitment of a welfare state to children" (12). The monograph's periodization of 1890 to 1935 reveals the foundations of welfare during the Progressive and New Deal Eras and the birth and lasting contempt of social welfare to aid women and children experiencing poverty. Gordon's book is enlightening in many ways, but most notably, for her dedication to showing how programs intended to help the poor often deepened racial, gender, and economic inequalities and stigmas.

Gordon convincingly underscores that despite sincere intentions by many of the upper-middle-class white female reformers, the Progressive and New Deal era welfare programs functioned within a racial and gendered system of thought. She reiterates throughout the monograph that despite the positive aims of welfare groups like the Children's Bureau (which allowed Blacks starting in 1930), white female activists saw Black women more as a hindrance than a help to the cause, barring an entire group that desperately needed protection as a demographic with high poverty and single-motherhood rates. Further, even when organizations, such as the Children's Bureau, pushed for minority assistance, the programs' agents were often racist.

Within the gendered thought, Gordon explains how reformers based welfare programs on maternalism. Rather than being similar to modern feminist thought, reformers, Black and White alike, believed in aid for mothers so that they could stay home with their children. This emphasis on the mother as the care provider for children allowed for welfare systems to rate parenting (children's cleanliness, the care of the home, etc.) as an indicator of who deserved aid and who didn't. Even reformers who broke domestic motherhood conventions pushed poor women to remain in the home and the "family wage" concept, which continued to force wives' dependence on their husbands.

The way reformers enacted programs continued traditional racial and patriarchial thought and deepened economic inequalities. Gordon explains that despite motherhood stipends being for single mothers, "...few needy single mothers ever received any"(49). Cultural stigmas surrounding single mothers and the fear of financial dependence on the state led many reformers to create further loopholes for mothers to go through for aid. Reformers and citizens did not see economic support as a given right, and not every poor person deserved it. Social Security is the penultimate social welfare program Gordon's work leads up to as a major welfare precedent. However, Gordon recognizes that Social Security, as with many leading welfare programs, "helped most those who needed help the least" (6). Social Security favored those who likely had other financial cushions in the event of unemployment. Single mothers did not get that grace despite the creation of the Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) federal assistance program.

Gordon's book not only tells the history of welfare from the perspective of one of the least protected classes of the time but also details how the public held on to largely false negative ideas surrounding welfare throughout history and embedded them in American culture. Gordon claims that welfare began as a philanthropic dream by middle-class white women to support those less fortunate than them. However, publically and politically, welfare became attached to poverty and federal dependence. It is those stigmas that shaped the ADC. "The whole experience of mothers' aid, from its conception to the evaluations of its administration helped congeal a particular view of public welfare which contioned, more than any other single factor, the future shape of the ADC" (64).

Despite the bleak recognition that these programs often hurt the demographics they sought to help, Gordon's book ends positively with knowledge production and welfare reform. On the one hand, she provides us with a meticulous work of gender history for the historiography. Equally important, though, is that she gives ideas on gaps to fill. She encourages future historians to look at other races since "...Little has been written about the welfare activism of farm women, working-class women, Hispanic, Asian, or American Indian women" (143). Further, she argues that the failures of welfare were not because of bad intentions but because of historical constraints that we can now break. To Gordon, the history of welfare is to show that despite the false stigmas surrounding welfare and its recipients, America can be a state for the tired, poor, and huddled masses. It is just up to us to keep fighting for them.

[Ren Morton · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish I had had this history when I started my career in domestic violence prevention and welfare almost thirteen years ago. I had no idea how complex the history is- from the white woman’s movement, the black woman’s movement, and the white men’s movement. The history is grounded in a legacy of poor relief and mothers pensions, in social reform/moralism/maternalism, in social agitation around the family wage and woman’s wage, in the unexpected and bizarre social phenomena of unemployment in the 20s and 30s. All this history we are never taught- that leads up to why our welfare state is the way it is, how the non poor benefit, and the poor are stigmatized. If you wonder why poverty is intractable and we can’t pass national parental leave in the U.S., this history will illuminate political and historical forces that have shaped our current struggles.

[Ava Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

exhaustively researched, clearly written, and extremely relevant. Strongly recommend.

[AskHistorians]

Gordon's history of welfare is essential reading for those interested in both women's history and in the history of welfare.

[Simone · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great look at how the government has treated single mothers struggling to raise their children.