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Sowing the Seeds of “Welfare”: The Transformation of Mothers' Pensions, 1900–1940

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2011

Extract

Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) had come to symbolize everything that is wrong with the American welfare state. Benefit levels have always varied significantly from state to state and seldom have been adequate anywhere to move recipients above the poverty line. Until the 1960s some local administrators discriminated against certain categories of recipients, particularly blacks and unwed mothers. Overt discrimination is now rare; instead, potential beneficiaries must negotiate a series of seemingly neutral administrative hurdles whose cumulative effect is to discourage many of those eligible from applying. Conservatives claim that AFDC subsidizes a broad range of socially-undesirable behaviors, from idleness and a lack of civic obligation to out-of-wedlock births and permanent dependence on public assistance. Liberals dispute these claims but cannot or will not make an affirmative case for the program. Program administrators at the national and local levels have never been strong champions. Opinion polls consistently show that most Americans favor “helping the poor” but not “welfare,” which they equate with AFDC. Finally, beneficiaries view receipt of AFDC as stigmatizing and degrading. Low benefit levels and the lack of decent-paying jobs create a moral climate in which many single mothers receiving AFDC must lie to the Internal Revenue Service and their case workers about working on the side in order to make ends meet.

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Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 1992

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References

Notes

1. Concerning this last point, see Jencks, Christopher and Edin, Kathryn, “The Real Welfare Problem,” The American Prospect 1 (Spring 1990): 3150.Google Scholar

2. Leff, Mark, “Consensus for Reform: The Mothers'-Pension Movement in the Progressive Era,” Social Service Review 47:3 (Spring 1973): 400, 407.Google Scholar

3. Cited in Lubove, Roy, The Struggle for Social Security, 1900–1935 (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 91.Google Scholar

4. Orloff, Ann Shola and Skocpol, ThedaWhy Not Equal Protection? Explaining the Politics of Public School Spending in Britain, 1900–1911, and the United States, 1880's- 1920,” American Sociological Review 49:6 (December 1984): 726–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar. One notable exception was pensions for state and municipal employees. As of 1916, four states (Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania), and 159 cities had established pension systems for some or all of their retired and disabled workers. The most frequently covered workers were policemen, firemen, and teachers. Civil Service Retirement and Old-Age Pensions,” Monthly Labor Review 2:6 (June 1916): 101–17.Google Scholar

5. By my last count, there were eleven distinct models of welfare state development: logic of industrialization, national values, neo-Marxist, popular protest, pluralist, social democratic, corporate liberal, public choice, feminist, state-centered, and state-society coalition. For a subject as complex as modern welfare states, diversity may be expected, and even seen as an (all-too-rare) sign of intellectual ferment and vitality. On the other hand, such diversity may indicate general chaos and a collective spinning of wheels.

6. I define “political logic” as a recurring pattern of interactions and outcomes among a fixed set of institutions and interests.

7. This is not to say that scholars of welfare state development have ignored change over time; the “moment” I refer to can encompass a broad span of historical time. But this moment rarely spans both the origin and the subsequent development of social programs or welfare states. My claim is that scholars may make questionable inferences about the whole developmental logic based on an understanding of some (at times considerable) part of that logic.

8. There are, of course, notable exceptions to this generalization of the welfare state literature. For instance, Korpi and Esping-Anderson concede that the social democratic model may apply only to the postwar development of social programs: “Yet, with only a few exceptions, the welfare states of Western nations developed up to 1945 as a result of policy imposed ‘from above,’; where the working class was the object of the concerns and worries of the traditional ruling elites. As a result of improved capabilities for collective action during the first post-war decades, manifested, for example, in significantly higher levels of unionization and leftist voting, the representatives of the working class increased their influence in legislatures and governments. The improved power position then enabled social democratic parties to become—in differing degrees—the subjects of welfare state development. But the alternative courses of action that were open to those parties depended not only on their relative power positions but also on the existing institutional structures of social policy that were residues of the previous phase of development ‘from above.’”Korpi, Walter and Esping-Anderson, Gosta, “Social Policy as Class Politics in Post-War Capitalism: Scandinavia, Austria and Germany,” in Goldthorpe, John, ed., Order and Conflict in Contemporary Capitalism (Oxford, 1984), 180Google Scholar. Besides acknowledging discontinuities in development at the national level, this passage suggests one way of reconciling social democratic and statecentered explanations of welfare state development.

Similarly, Hage, Hanneman, and Gargan conclude, based on analysis of expenditure trends for social welfare and education between 1874 and 1965, “that the logic of industrialization and the logic of politics [i.e., variants of the social democratic model] explain the growth in public welfare expenditure across time even if they do not explain the origins of these systems.” Hage, Jerald, Hanneman, Robert, and Gargan, Edward T., State Responsive' ness and State Activism (London, 1989), 122–23.Google Scholar

9. The most heated debate in the American welfare state literature during the 1980s concerned the origin of the Social Security Act of 1935. One premise of this debate is that the roots of contemporary dilemmas in social policy can be traced directly to the circumstances surrounding the passage of that act—that origins hold the key to later developments. See, for example, Skocpol, Theda, “Political Response to Capitalist Crisis: Neo- Marxist Theories of the State and the Case of the New Deal,” Politics & Society 10:2 (1980): 155201CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Skocpol, Theda and Ikenberry, John, “The Political Formation of the American Welfare State in Historical and Comparative Perspective,” Comparative Social Research 6 (1983): 87148Google Scholar; Quadagno, Jill S., “Welfare Capitalism and the Social Security Act of 1935,” American Sociological Review 49:5 (October 1984): 632–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Skocpol, Theda and Amenta, Edwin, “Did Capitalists Shape Social SecurityAmerican Sociological Review 50:4 (August 1985): 572–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Quadagno, Jill S, “Two Models of Welfare State Development: Reply to Skocpol and Amenta,” American Sociological Review 50:4 (August 1985): 575–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Domhoff, G. William, “Corporate Liberal Theory and the Social Security Act,” Politics & Society 15:3 (19861987): 297330CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jenkins, J. Craig and Brents, Barbara G., “Social Protest, Hegemonic Competition, and Social Reform: A Political Struggle Interpretation of the Origins of the American Welfare State,” American Sociological Review 54:6 (December 1989): 891909CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Many of these authors also debate the origins of the Wagner Act, assuming that it largely determined the subsequent development of labor policy and labor's place in the New Deal coalition.

10. Hage, Hanneman, and Gargan, State Responsiveness and State Activism, 121.

11. I have omitted Civil War pensions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries because, while fascinating in their own regard, they do not connect directly with contemporary veterans' benefits or civilian old-age pensions.

Some authors prefer to use the more gender-neutral term of “workers' compensation.” I have chosen “workmen's compensation” because it more accurately reflects the predominance of men as initiators, administrators, and beneficiaries of the program.

12. Leff, “Consensus for Reform”; Lubove, The Struggle for Social Security, 1900–1935; Bell, Winifred, Aid to Dependent Children (New York, 1965)Google Scholar; Pumphrey, Muriel W. and Pumphrey, Ralph E., “The Widows' Pension Movement, 1900–1930: Preventive Child- Saving or Social Control?” in Trattner, Walter I., ed., Social Welfare or Social Control? (Knoxville, 1983), 5166Google Scholar; Tiffin, Susan, In Whose Best Interest? Child Welfare Reform in the Progressive Era (Westport, Conn., 1982)Google Scholar; Trattner, Walter I., From Poor Law to Welfare State, 3d ed. (New York, 1984)Google Scholar; and Vandepol, Ann, “Dependent Children, Child Custody, and the Mothers' Pensions: The Transformation of State-Family Relations in the Early 20th Century,” Social Problems 29:3 (February 1982): 221–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Feminist scholars usually explain the origins of mothers' pensions in terms of the pensions' social control functions. See, for example, Abramowitz, Mimi, Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present (Boston, 1988).Google Scholar

13. Quoted in Leff, “Consensus for Reform,” 400. The progressive defense of mothers' pensions is summarized in a 1914 report issued by the New York State Commission on Relief for Widowed Mothers: Quoted in Bremner, Robert H., ed., Children and Youth in America: A Documentary History, vol. II: 1866–1932 (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), 379Google Scholar. In Regulating the Lives of Women, Abramowitz provides evidence that black elites shared this conception of home life.

14. Leff, “Consensus for Reform,” 408.

15. The phrase “mothers' pensions” is therefore misleading: benefit schedules were based on the number of children and made no provision for the support of mothers.

16. Abbott, Grace, ed., The Child and the State, vol. 2 (Chicago, 1947 [1938])Google Scholar; idem, From Relief to Social Security (Chicago, 1941)Google Scholar; U.S. Department of Labor, Children's Bureau, Mother's Aid, 1931 (Washington, D.C., 1933)Google Scholar; Bell, Aid to Dependent Children; Leff, “Consensus for Reform.”

17. For evidence that mothers' pensions were a more economical solution, see the statement of Illinois juvenile court Judge Merritt W. Pinckney in Bremner, ed., Children and Youth in America, 370–73.

18. Orloff and Skocpol, “Why Not Equal Protection?” 745. Similar reasons explain the successful passage of consumer and workplace regulation. Regulations entailed a relatively small expansion of the national government and located authority in an impartial bureaucracy rather than a patronage party. This essay by Orloff and Skocpol also includes a critique of alternative explanations of mothers' pensions and workmen's compensation.

19. Besides Orloff and Skocpol, “Why Not Equal Protection?” see Nelson, Barbara, “The Gender, Race, and Class Origins of Early Welfare Policy and the Welfare State: A Comparison of Workmen's Compensation and Mothers' Aid,” in Tilly, Louise A. and Gurin, Patricia, eds., Women, Politics, and Change (New York, 1990), 413–35Google Scholar; Orloff, Ann Shola, “The Political Origins of America's Belated Welfare State,” in Weir, Margaret, Orloff, Anne Shola, and Skocpol, Theda, eds., The Politics of Social Policy in the United States (Princeton, 1988), 3780Google Scholar; and Skocpol, Theda and Ritter, Gretchen, “Gender and the Origins of Modern Social Policies in Britain and the United States,” Studies in American Political Development 5 (1991): 3693.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20. The partial exceptions are Leff, “Consensus for Reform”; Lubove, The Struggle for Social Security, 1900–1935; Nelson, “The Gender, Race, and Class Origins of Early Welfare Policy and the Welfare State,” and Pumphrey and Pumphrey, “The Widows' Pension Movement, 1900–1930.”

21. Ibid.

22. Abbott, Grace, “Recent Trends in Mothers' Aid,” Social Service Review 8:2 (June 1934): 191210CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Abbott, ed., The Child and the State; U.S. Department of Labor, Children's Bureau, Mothers' Aid, 1931.

23. Local governments financed approximately 85 percent of all mothers' pensions in 1934 ($31.6 million out of a total of $37.5 million). The remainder was financed by state governments. Bell, Aid to Dependent Children, 14.

24. Brown, Josephine Chapin, Public Relief, 1929–1939 (New York, 1940)Google Scholar; U.S. Department of Labor, Children's Bureau, Mothers' Aid, 1931.

25. Pumphrey and Pumphrey, “The Widows' Pension Movement, 1900–1930,” 59.

26. States administering mothers' pensions through juvenile, county, district, or probate courts in 1926 included Arkansas, Colorado, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Tennessee, Washington, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. States using public assistance or child welfare commissions included Arizona, California, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, and Wyoming. In Florida, New Jersey, and parts of New York, these local commissions were private. New Hampshire administered mothers' pensions through the state board of education, and Connecticut designated a state agent. Davis, Ada J., “The Evolution of the Institution of Mothers' Pensions in the United States,” American Journal of Sociology 35:4 (January 1930): 573–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27. U.S. Department of Labor, Children's Bureau, County Organization of Child Care and Protection (Washington, D.C., 1922)Google Scholar; Davis, “The Evolution of the Institution of Mothers' Pensions in the United States”; U.S. Department of Labor, Children's Bureau, Mothers'Aid, 1931.

28. Abbott, Edith, “The Administration of the Illinois ‘Funds to Parents’ Laws,” in U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Proceedings of the Conference on Social Insurance (Washington, D.C,, 1917), 818–34Google Scholar; Leiby, James, A History of Social Welfare and Social Work in the United States (New York, 1978), 151Google Scholar; Bremner, Children and Youth in America; U.S. Department of Labor, Children's Bureau, Mothers' Aid, 1931.

29. Pumphrey and Pumphrey, “The Widows' Pension Movement, 1900–1930,” 59.

30. Ehrenreich, John H., The Altruistic Imagination: A History of Social Work and Social Policy in the United States (Ithaca, 1985), 6063Google Scholar; Leff, “Consensus for Reform”; Nelson, “The Gender, Race, and Class Origins of Early Welfare Policy and the Welfare State.”

31. Lundberg, Emma, “Progress of Mothers' Aid Administration,” Social Service Review 2 (September 1928): 451.Google Scholar

32. Pumphrey and Pumphrey, “The Widows' Pension Movement, 1900–1930.”

33. U.S. Department of Labor, Children's Bureau, Administration of Mothers' Aid in Ten Localities (Washington, D.C., 1928), 147Google Scholar. See also Abbott, Edith and Breckenridge, Sophonisba P., The Administration of the Aid-to-Mothers' Law in Illinois (Washington, D.C., 1921).Google Scholar

34. U.S. Department of Labor, Children's Bureau, Administration of Mothers' Aid in Ten Localities.

35. Massachusetts Department of Public Welfare, Policies Relating to the Administration of the Mothers' Aid Law (Boston, 1921)Google Scholar; Abbott and Breckenridge, The Administration of the Aid-to-Mothers Law in Illinois.

36. Bell, Aid to Dependent Children; U.S. Department of Labor, Children's Bureau, Mothers'Aid, 1931.

37. U.S. Department of Labor, Children's Bureau, Mothers'Aid, 1931.

38. Quoted in Tiffin, In Whose Best Interest.?; 132. Thus, not only did “mothers' pensions” provide for mothers, they also were not pensions. They were payments contingent on conformity to certain norms of child-rearing. Nelson, “The Gender, Race, and Class Origins of Early Welfare Policy and the Welfare State.”

39. Nelson, “The Gender, Race, and Class Origins of Early Welfare Policy and the Welfare State,” 429, 431. Bell writes that “lapses into extramarital relations were particularly frowned upon. Rural areas and small villages tended to be more exacting than the larger urban centers. In North Carolina, Lily Mitchell observed in 1928, ‘community attitudes in small social groups…are to be reckoned with….North Carolina communities on the whole regard mothers' aid as a special privilege…and any lapse into extramarital relations is not only severely censured, but it is expected that she will automatically be discontinued’“(Aid to Dependent Children, 12).

40. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, Part 1 (Washington, D.C., 1976)Google Scholar; U.S. Department of Labor, Children's Bureau, Mothers' Aid, 1931.

41. Myrdal, Gunnar, An American Dilemma (New York, 1962 [1944]), 360.Google Scholar

42. Bell, Aid to Dependent Children; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States; U.S. Department of Labor, Children's Bureau, Mothers' Aid, 1931.

43. Admittedly, these figures do not take into account regional differences in the cost of living, but it is highly doubtful that a Massachusetts family required fifteen times the income of an Arkansas family.

It would seem reasonable to test whether benefit levels among states might vary by levels of industrialization, urbanization, voter turnout, or party competition. More detailed analysis of these variations awaits further study.

44. Davis, “The Evolution of the Institution of Mothers' Pensions in the United States,” U.S. Department of Labor, Children's Bureau, Mothers' Aid, 1931.

45. For further evidence of variability of benefits within a single county, see Abbott and Breckenridge, The Administration of the Aid-to-Mothers Law in Illinois, 49.

46. Pumphrey and Pumphrey, “The Widows' Pension Movement, 1900–1930,” 59.

47. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States.

48. Tiffin, In Whose Best Interest?

49. U.S. Department of Labor, Children's Bureau, Administration of Mothers' Aid in Ten Localities.

50. “What Should a Family Agency Do About It?” The Survey, 15 May 1925, 232; Bell, Aid to Dependent Children; Nelson, “The Gender, Race, and Class Origins of Early Welfare Policy and the Welfare State.”

51. “What Is Desirable Income?” The Survey, 15 February 1927, 643–44. A smaller survey of fifty families receiving mothers' pensions in Buffalo found that these pensions provided 60 percent of the families' 4ncome. The mothers' earnings provided 14 percent and her children's earnings another 12 percent. All other sources totaled 5 percent.

52. Nelson, “The Gender, Race, and Class Origins of Early Welfare Policy and the Welfare State”; U.S. Department of Labor, Children's Bureau, Administration of Mothers' Aid in Ten Localities.

53. Abbott, From Relief to Social Security; Abbott, The Child and the State; Bell, Aid to Dependent Children.

54. Evans, Sara M., Bom for Liberty: A History of Women in America (New York, 1989), 172.Google Scholar

55. Chafe, William H., The American Woman (New York, 1972), 36.Google Scholar

56. Ladd-Taylor, Molly, Raising a Baby the Government Way: Mothers' Letters to the Children's Bureau, 1915–1932 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1986), 23.Google Scholar

57. On women and politics during the 1920s, see Cott, Nancy F., The Grounding of Modem Feminism (New Haven, 1987)Google Scholar; Lemons, J. Stanley, The Woman Citizen: Feminism in the 1920s (Urbana, Ill., 1973)Google Scholar; Rothman, Sheila, Woman's Proper Place (New York, 1978)Google Scholar; Chafe, The American Woman; Evans, Born for Liberty.

Nancy F. Cott suggests that current scholarship underestimates the racial, class, ideological, and strategic divisions among women's groups before 1920, as well as the extent of continuity in political participation after 1920. “Across the Great Divide: Women in Politics Before and After 1920,” in Tilly, Louise A. and Gurin, Patricia, eds., Women, Politics, and Change (New York, 1990), 153–76.Google Scholar

58. Cited in Parker, Jacqueline K. and Carpenter, Edward M., “Julia Lathrop and the Children's Bureau: The Emergence of an Institution,” Social Service Review 55:1 (March 1981): 62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

59. Parker and Carpenter, “Julia Lathrop and the Children's Bureau.” Regarding the early history of the Children's Bureau, see also Leiby, A History of Social Welfare and Social Work in the United States, and Trattner, From Poor Law to Welfare State.

60. U.S. Department of Labor, Children's Bureau, The Children's Bureau (Washington, D.C., 1937)Google Scholar; Parker and Carpenter, “Julia Lathrop and the Children's Bureau.”

61. Ibid; Lemons, The Woman Citizen; Ladd-Taylor, Raising a Baby the Government Way. For efforts to combat juvenile delinquency and to reform juvenile courts, see Rosenthal, Marguerite G., “The Children's Bureau and the Juvenile Court: Delinquency Policy, 1912– 1940,Social Service Review 60:2 (June 1986): 303–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

62. After the law had been declared unconstitutional, Lathrop persuaded the War Labor Policies Board to require government contractors to abide by its provisions. This was a substantial but short-lived victory, as the war ended a few months later. A second child labor act, enacted in early 1919, imposed an excise tax on products made with child labor to discourage manufacturers from hiring children. Legislators went this route because they believed the government's power to raise revenues would hold up better in court. This measure, however, shifted administrative responsibility from the Children's Bureau to the Treasury Department. Costin, Lela, Two Sisters for Social Justice: A Biography of Grace and Edith Abbott (Urbana, Ill., 1983), 110–17Google Scholar. The bureau was later instrumental in passage of the child labor provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.

63. Trattner, From Poor Law to Welfare State, 184-

64 Parker and Carpenter, “Julia Lathrop and the Children's Bureau.”

65. Eliot, Martha M., “The Children's Bureau: Fifty Years of Public Responsibility for Action in Behalf of Children,” American journal of Public Health 52:4 (April 1962): 576–87CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Hanlan, Archie, “From Social Reform to Social Security: The Separation of ADC and Child Welfare,” Child Welfare 45 (November 1966): 493500Google Scholar; Schlesinger, Edward R., “The Sheppard-Towner Era: A Prototype Case Study in Federal-State Relationships,” American Journal of Public Health 57:6 (June 1967): 1034–40CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Witte, Edwin O., The Development of the Social Security Act (Madison, Wise., 1963)Google Scholar; Costin, Two Sisters for Social Justice; Rothman, Woman's Proper Place.

The Bureau's entry into the field of maternal and infant health prompted calls for it to be transferred to the Public Health Service so that (female) social workers would have to report to (male) physicians.

66. Costin, Two Sisters for Social Justice, 104–5.

67. Ibid., 104.

68. Lubove, Roy, The Professional Altruist: The Emergence of Social Work as a Career, 1890–1930 (Cambridge, Mass., 1965)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Robyn Muncy, “Gender and Professionalization in the Origins of the U.S. Welfare State: The Careers of Sophonisba Breckenridge and Edith Abbott, 1890–1935,” Journal of Policy History 2:3 (1590): 290–315; Hanlan, “From Social Reform to Social Security”; Leiby, A History of Social Welfare and Social Work in the United States; Trattner, From Poor Law to Welfare State.

69. The Children's Bureau was not, however, staffed exclusively by women. Lewis Meriam was the Bureau's first assistant chief and Ethelbert Stewart its first statistician. Recognizing her status as an outsider (as a woman, an academic, and a stranger to national government), Lathrop chose Meriam precisely because he was a Washington insider who could help her negotiate with other bureaus. Parker and Carpenter, “Julia Lathrop and the Children's Bureau.”

70. Abbott, Edith, Social Welfare and Professional Education (Chicago, 1942Google Scholar [1931]); U.S. Department of Labor, Children's Bureau, The Children's Bureau; Parker and Carpenter, “Julia Lathrop and the Children's Bureau.”

71. Trattner, From Poor Law to Welfare State, 205.

72. Witte, The Development of the Social Security Act, 164.

73. Social Security Board, Social Security in America: The Factual Background of the Social Security Act as Summarized from Staff Reports to the Committee on Economic Security (Washington, D.C., 1937), 248.Google Scholar

74. Quadagno, Jill, The Transformation of Old-Age Security (Chicago, 1986), 115Google Scholar. See also Abbott, The Child and the State, 241.

75. Brown, Public Relief, 1929–1939; Witte, The Development of the Social Security Act.

76. Ibid.

77. Quoted in Hanlan, “From Social Reform to Social Security,” 499.

78. Ware, Susan, Beyond Suffrage: Women in the New Deal (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 101.Google Scholar

79. Cates, Jerry, Insuring Inequality: Administrative Leadership in Social Security, 1935–54 (Ann Arbor, 1983).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

80. Quoted in Hanlan, “From Social Reform to Social Security,” 500. Lenroot also questioned her own decision to compromise on this issue and suggested that her predecessors at the Bureau might have fought harder.

However, one can infer from Muncy's study of Sophonisba Breckenridge and Edith Abbott that giving administration of ADC to the Children's Bureau could have had certain drawbacks. In particular, Bureau officials might have continued to define the problems of single women and their children rather narrowly. Muncy argues that “the women who were creating their own professions in the Progressive Era discovered that their male counterparts were more willing to cede them professional territory in instances where women and children were the only clients. The situation inclined professionalizing women to define social problems in ways that made women and children central, for instance, to emphasize mothers as the problem and potential solution to child protection. Such an emphasis empowered female caseworkers, policy makers, and bureaucrats, because if fathers were the problem, then professional women would have a harder time claiming authority over the solution.

“The special tragedy of this was that as female professionals were wrangling desperately for a spot in the professional world, their interest thus encouraged them—unconscious of their motive, I am sure—to blame their nonprofessional sisters for all children's ills, if anything to increase the burden of female responsibility for child care, to shorten the leash that tied most women to home and children.” Muncy, “Gender and Professionalization in the Origins of the U.S. Welfare State,” 291–92. Still, it is hard to imagine that the Children's Bureau would have made things any worse than what actually happened.

81. As of 1937, local departments of public welfare, public assistance, or charities, or local boards of supervisors, were directly responsible for administering ADC in Alabama, California, Colorado, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Utah, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. State departments of welfare were directly responsible in Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Maine, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Rhode Island (shared with local agency), Tennessee, Vermont, and West Virginia. Courts shared administrative responsibilities in California, Ohio, and Wisconsin. Social Security Board, Bureau of Public Assistance, Characteristics of State Plans for Aid to Dependent Children (Washington, D.C., 1938)Google Scholar; Davis, “The Evolution of the Institution of Mothers' Pensions in the United States.”

82. Quoted in Brown, Public Relief, 1929–1939, 371.

83. Hoey, Jane M., “Aid to Families with Dependent Children,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 202 (March 1939): 7481CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bell, Aid to Dependent Children; Brown, Public Relief, 1929–1939.

84. Bell, Aid to Dependent Children; Myrdal, An American Dilemma; Quadagno, The Transformation of Old-Age Security.

85. Social Security Board, Bureau of Public Assistance, Effect of Federal Participation in Payments for Aid to Dependent Children in 1940,” Social Security Bulletin 4 (May 1941): 2729Google Scholar; Abbott, The Child and the State.

86. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States.

87. This schedule was based on payments given to families of veterans killed during World War I. But, as Witte pointed out to Congress, the widows of these veterans received an additional thirty dollars per month, whereas ADC made no provision for single mothers. Witte, The Development of the Social Security Act.

88. Abbott, From Relief to Social Security; Bell, Aid to Dependent Children; Social Security Board, Bureau of Public Assistance, “Effect of Federal Participation in Payments for Aid to Dependent Children in 1940.”

89. Altmeyer, Arthur J., The Formative Years of Social Security (Madison, 1966)Google Scholar; Derthick, Martha, Policymaking for Social Security (Washington, D.C., 1979).Google Scholar

90. Weir, Margaret, Orloff, Ann Shola, and Skocpol, Theda, “Understanding American Social Policies,” in op. cit., eds., The Politics of Social Policy in the United States (Princeton, 1988), 3, 4.Google Scholar

91. Cates, Insuring Inequality; Derthick, Policymaking for Social Security.

92. Rothstein, Bo, “The Success of Swedish Labor Market Policy: The Organizational Connection to Policy,” European Journal of Political Research 13:2 (June 1985): 153–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar