Widows and Orphans First

The Family Economy and Social Welfare Policy, 1880-1939

S. J. Kleinberg

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780252030208
• eBook ISBN: 9780252091636
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The experiences of widows and their children during the Progressive Era and the New Deal depended on differences in local economies and values. How did these widely varied experiences impact the origins of the welfare state? 

S. J. Kleinberg delves into the question by comparing widows' lives in three industrial cities with differing economic, ethnic, and racial bases. Government in Fall River, Massachusetts, saw employment as a solution to widows' poverty and as a result drastically limited public charity. In Pittsburgh, widows received sympathetic treatment. Few jobs existed for them or their children; indeed, the jobs for men were concentrated in "widowmaking" industries like steel and railroading. With a large African American population and a diverse economy that relied on inexpensive child and female labor, Baltimore limited funds for public services. African Americans adapted by establishing their own charitable institutions. 

A fascinating comparative study, Widows and Orphans First offers a one-of-a-kind look at social welfare policy for widows and the role of children in society during a pivotal time in American history.

1Widows: A Demographic and Economic Overview

There came a time when Grossmutter felt that there was no real home for her in any of the crowded houses of her children.

—Fifty Years of the General German Aged People’s Home (Baltimore, 1931)

Marie Besonet, a middle-aged widow, moved to Fall River from Quebec in the late 1870s so that her four oldest children could take jobs in the cotton mills. Her twelve-year-old daughter stayed home to help with the two youngest children, while one son toiled as a farm laborer. Despite being unemployed for three months in the previous year, the children earned enough among them to support a family of nine. They sacrificed their education for the good of the entire family. None of the children could read or write, though probably the four and five year olds would go to school in conformity with state requirements.¹

Forty years later Katy Perkins, age forty-five, supported her family as a bookkeeper while her three children (ages fourteen, ten, and six) attended school. Mrs. Perkins, born in Pennsylvania and resident in Pittsburgh, had received sufficient education to sustain her family.² Whatever domestic assistance fourteen-year-old Grace gave her mother, contemporary household technology and the smaller family size meant that she could go to high school rather than enter a factory, scrub floors, or stay “at home” to help with the housework and younger children.³

In the 1920s Maisie Ward, an elderly African American widow, lived with her daughter and son-in-law in their Baltimore home. She looked after one grandchild and helped around the house, while her daughter did day work and her son-in-law worked as a teamster. Mrs. Ward could neither read nor write, although the younger generation could, and her nine-year-old grandson attended school.⁴ Her daughter relied on Mrs. Ward to care for her son while she scrubbed and cleaned, demonstrating both the ways the two generations depended on each other and the contributions coresident relatives made to their families.

These vignettes reveal the multiple solutions that widows crafted to their common problems. Most turned to their families for support, although their particular strategies depended on age, race, place, personal attributes, and preferences. Widows without living children faced difficult prospects in old age, and a number ended their days in institutions for the elderly or destitute. The Allegheny City Home housed many widows and a few never-married women, including among the former Barbara Doultner, an ex-housewife from Germany. Neither of her two children survived into her old age, so sometime before she reached seventy she entered the home. There she joined, among others, Mary Gordon, who was childless, and Scottish-born Margaret Day, whose one surviving child offered her no help.⁵ Mrs. Day’s sad situation was uncommon but not unheard of. In 1916, 3 percent of the charity cases in Baltimore arose because children failed to provide for their parents. For example, the Charity Organization Society of Baltimore consulted “Mrs. L’s” minister when neither her children nor more distant relations would take her in. The minister facilitated her placement in the Aged Women’s Home.⁶ The lack of family or of help therefrom led a number of widows to enter the poorhouse they so feared.

In this chapter I map the basic demographic and economic shifts occurring in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a means of understanding how women responded to the financial challenges of widowhood, how family structures changed, and how local economic configurations affected widows’ strategies. I first consider the demography of widowhood before examining with whom widows lived and how they supported themselves and their families. Finally, I contrast widows’ experiences in Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Fall River in the light of the cities’ distinctive employment prospects for widows and children.

Evolving family structures, residential patterns, and widows’ efforts to find solutions to their problems provided, in effect, the aggregate demand side of social-welfare policy, the objective conditions to which reformers and government officials responded. The issues taken into account—household composition; widows’ employment; and variations across races, ethnicities, and cities—provided the context in which those policies evolved and signified the diversity of widows’ experiences even within broad national trends. Where the patterns differ greatly among the cities, the data are disaggregated; otherwise they are presented for the three cities together to give a portrait of urban widowhood.

The way that widows used their families as economic and social resources altered in response to industrialization.⁷ The balance between women’s and children’s economic contributions shifted with the transition to a commercial and industrial economy. In the early nineteenth century, when the separation of home and workplace began to impede women with family responsibilities from combining income production and domestic management, widows experienced a downward employment trend. The greater amount of capital needed to sustain businesses in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries meant that women, especially those who had been out of the labor market for many years, found it difficult to engage in the forms of petty entrepreneurial activities that had sustained their counterparts in the colonial or early national eras. In addition, few women could take over their late husbands’ jobs or enterprises, as had been commonplace in the smaller-scale economy of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Instead, they turned to their children as economic actors since industrialization provided plentiful opportunities for young people to earn a cash wage.⁸

Age and stage in the family life cycle complicated widows’ abilities to fashion solutions to the issues widowhood engendered. By the early twentieth century increasing numbers of young widows were entering the labor force and achieving a stable economic situation through their own efforts. At the same time, however, the situation for older widows, who lived longer and had fewer children than their counterparts of previous generations, grew financially more precarious. They were less able or willing to preserve independent households, and they increasingly took up residence in the homes of married daughters and sons or with members of their extended families. Once widows moved into their children’s households instead of heading their own, they came to be viewed as dependents, which contributed to social concern about their well-being.⁹

The Demography of Widowhood

The problems facing widows represented a potential breakdown in the social order and undermined the belief that men should support their families both during their lifetimes and thereafter.¹⁰ Indeed, social-welfare initiatives for widows and orphans arose during the Progressive Era despite, not because of, the substantial proportion of the population they constituted. This proportion was not a new phenomenon, however; widows made up approximately 10 percent of the adult female population in the colonial and early national eras and 11 percent between 1890 and 1940. The overall stability of these figures nevertheless masks a shift in the composition of this group. Between 1890 and 1940 the proportion of widows who were under the age of forty-five declined from 24 to 11 percent, while that of widows over sixty-five rose from 32 to 45 percent. Nor was widowhood distributed evenly across geographic, racial, and ethnic divisions. Although fewer than 10 percent of all native-born white adult females were widows, 15 percent of African American and foreign-born women were. There was also a slight urban bias, with 12 percent of urban and 10 percent of rural women suffering bereavement.¹¹

Urban areas had a special allure for some groups of widowed women. White widows spread evenly throughout urban and rural districts, yet African American widows clustered in cities both to find employment and to escape the stifling racial regime of the rural South.¹² In 1920, 18 percent of all urban African American women were widows. The urban migration occurred because, as one former South Carolina Sea Islander observed, there was “no way for women to make money” in the rural South.¹³ The city offered possibilities not to be found in the country, a fact understood by widows such as Ellen Calloway; sometime between 1895 and 1900, when she was forty-one, Calloway left South Carolina and moved herself and four of her surviving six children to Pittsburgh. Mrs. Calloway and her fifteen-year-old daughter took jobs as day servants so that the younger children could attend school. Lacking entrepreneurial opportunities, Mrs. Calloway deployed her domestic talents, along with those of an older daughter, to support her family.¹⁴

Southern farming practices posed particular problems for African American widows. Blacks rarely owned the land they farmed. They depended on whites’ willingness to accept them as tenants, which was unlikely in the case of widows with young children.¹⁵ It was a common perception that women were not strong enough to farm on their own. “When you live on the farm, the man is the strength. Must be a man to till the land.” Even when they owned land, their relatively small holdings left them vulnerable to human and natural disasters. Hannah Pinkney, a wife at the age of eighteen and a widow with three children to support by twenty-three, held on to her farm for a few years, but successive storms saturated the land and destroyed her crops. She “despondently left her three children” with their paternal grandparents and moved to the city to find work in 1896.¹⁶ Some exceptional widows managed to till the soil, especially if they had adolescent children, but many migrated to urban centers.¹⁷

Widowhood pervaded the lives of black women. Among widows between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four, the proportion of African American women exceeded that of white women four to one; among those thirty-five to forty-four years old, the ratio was two to one. As a result, a greater proportion of African American women had sole support of young children than did native- or foreign-born white women, a fact that mainstream charities and government overlooked but that the black community recognized clearly.¹⁸ Not all single mothers were widows, of course. Divorce levels accelerated in post–Civil War America, while out-of-wedlock births also created mother-child families. Some black women reported themselves to census takers as widowed even though they were separated or never married, as did some white women.¹⁹ Nevertheless, the declared levels of young widowhood increased among urban black women during the period studied here. In 1880 nearly one-third of the African American widows in Baltimore and Pittsburgh were under the age of forty-five, while about one-fourth of all white widows were. This disparity broadened in the early twentieth century, when the younger age group contributed over two-fifths of the African American widows in these cities but just over one-fourth of native-born whites and less than one-fifth of those born abroad (see table 1).²⁰

Increased longevity and decreased family size prolonged widowhood as a solitary state in the twentieth century, when female life expectancy rose and birth rates fell.²¹ In 1900, for example, only 4 percent of the entire American population over the age of fifty-five lived alone, while 29 percent lived with their spouses only. By 1920 the proportion of single-person households had risen to 9 percent.²² Many more urban widows were on their own; in 1880 one in eight widows in the three cities investigated here lived alone, whereas one in four did so by 1920.²³

Three widows in their fifties can serve to typify these changes. The Irish immigrant Bridget Docherty represented the older-style urban family economy. In 1880 she kept house for her six children; the eldest four worked in Fall River’s cotton mills, and the two youngest (ten and thirteen) attended school. Mrs. Docherty could have expected her children to remain at home and support her for at least another fifteen years.²⁴ Like many women of her generation, she would see her nest empty entirely (if it ever did) only in her last years of life. Her prolonged child-bearing career meant that she would remain the head of the household with several children at home to support her through much of her old age.

Table 1. Age Distribution of Widows by Race/Nativity, 1880 and 1920, in Baltimore, Fall River, and Pittsburgh

Source: Data from manu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Widows: A Demographic and Economic Overview
• 2. Widows’ Children and the Cult of True Childhood
• 3. The Transition from Charity to Widows’ Pensions
• 4. The Implementation of Widows’ Pensions
• 5. Widows and Orphans First? The New Deal and Its Legacy
• Notes
• Index