Maternalism Reconsidered

Motherhood, Welfare and Social Policy in the Twentieth Century

Marian van der Klein, Rebecca Jo Plant, Nichole Sanders, Lori R. Weintrob, Marian van der Klein, Rebecca Jo Plant, Nichole Sanders, Lori R. Weintrob

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780857454676
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Beginning in the late 19th century, competing ideas about motherhood had a profound impact on the development and implementation of social welfare policies. Calls for programmes aimed at assisting and directing mothers emanated from all quarters of the globe, advanced by states and voluntary organizations, liberals and conservatives, feminists and anti-feminists – a phenomenon that scholars have since termed 'maternalism'. This volume reassesses maternalism by providing critical reflections on prior usages of the concept, and by expanding its meaning to encompass geographical areas, political regimes and cultural concerns that scholars have rarely addressed. From Argentina, Brazil and Mexico City to France, Italy, the Netherlands, the Soviet Ukraine, the United States and Canada, these case studies offer fresh theoretical and historical perspectives within a transnational and comparative framework. As a whole, the volume demonstrates how maternalist ideologies have been employed by state actors, reformers and poor clients, with myriad political and social ramifications.

CHAPTER 1

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INTRODUCTION

A New Generation of Scholars on Maternalism

Rebecca Jo Plant and Marian van der Klein

Today as much as ever, mothers and motherhood are categories to be reckoned with in political debates. In nations across the globe, policymakers and commentators discuss whether mothers should be compensated for the care work they perform; whether women should be offered incentives to prevent population decline, or, alternately, be pressured to slow population growth; whether governments should take special measures to protect women due to their reproductive capacity; and to what extent, if any, mothers tend to vote en bloc. Regardless of the type of governmental regime and the role envisioned for mothers, the language that politicians and bureaucrats employ when addressing questions related to mothers and children often seems remarkably similar and strikingly familiar. Though their appeals are frequently dismissed as empty political rhetoric, they echo longstanding gendered discourses that have deep roots in both cultural beliefs and material life.

Since the late nineteenth century, calls for child and maternal welfare programmes and mothers’ rights have emanated from all quarters of the globe, sometimes successfully, sometimes in vain. They have been advanced by liberals and conservatives, feminists and anti-feminists, men and women, a wide variety of religious groups and democratic, fascist and communist regimes. Moreover, as the celebration of Mother’s Day in various countries reveals, discourses of motherhood not only encompass economic and political issues, but are also embedded in cultures of esteem and honour. In seeking to understand the myriad ways in which motherhood has figured within public life and social provisions, many scholars have embraced the paradigm of maternalism. It is this slippery construct that the essays in this volume attempt to analyse, test and refine.

‘Maternalism’ as an Analytical Category

In the early 1990s, scholars first began employing ‘maternalism’ as an analytical tool that helped to explain the emergence of modern welfare states in the U.S. and Western Europe. This literature was part of a broader trend among feminist scholars toward reassessing the gendered origins of welfare states. Indeed, two of the first and most influential edited collections to reflect this new scholarly movement – Linda Gordon’s Women, the State, and Welfare (1990), which focuses on the U.S., and Gisela Bock and Pat Thane’s Maternity and Gender Policies (1991), which focuses on Western Europe – did not advance the concept of maternalism.¹ Yet both volumes raised issues that would emerge as central concerns of the first wave of scholars who embraced and promoted the maternalist paradigm. Central among these issues was the role that women’s voluntary organizations played in pressing for and implementing welfare measures. Rejecting the concept of the ‘patriarchal’ welfare state as overly simplistic and ahistorical, along with social control models that left little room for agency, numerous scholars began to devise more nuanced ways of conceptualizing women’s relationships – as both advocates and beneficiaries – to welfare measures in different national contexts.

Several factors helped to fuel the burgeoning interest in motherhood, public policy and the state. During the 1970s and into the 1980s, many feminist scholars neglected women’s roles in the formation of modern welfare states, focusing instead on the relationship between women and the labour market. This resulted in a tendency to marginalize questions of motherhood – a tendency that historians and social and political scientists subsequently sought to correct. Moreover, by the 1990s, people both within and outside the academy had increasingly acknowledged the fact that, despite significant gains in the workforce, many women continued to struggle with their own personal ‘maternal dilemma’ – the difficulty of balancing motherhood and individualism.² This growing recognition probably influenced the types of questions that scholars asked and the general climate in which feminist scholarship developed. Finally, and perhaps most critically, the restructuring of welfare policies in various nations – and the potentially ominous consequences for mothers and children – prompted many scholars to turn their attention to the historical roots and ideological underpinnings of such systems.

It is perhaps not surprising that academics in the United States – where maternalist reform had been a powerful force in the early twentieth century and where attacks on the welfare state surged in the late twentieth century – pioneered the scholarship on maternalism. In a widely cited 1990 article that compared maternal welfare provisions in the United States, Great Britain, France and Germany, historians Seth Koven and Sonya Michel introduced the concept of maternalism to welfare scholarship, defining it as ‘ideologies that exalted women’s capacity to mother and extended to society as a whole the values they attached to that role: care, nurturance and morality’.³ Soon thereafter, historians Molly Ladd-Taylor, Linda Gordon, Robyn Muncy and political scientist Theda Skocpol all charted a middle-class women’s movement that emerged around the turn of the century and managed to exert a surprising degree of influence in an era when women still lacked the vote. As they and other scholars demonstrated, the efforts of Progressive Era maternalist reformers resulted in the establishment of mothers’ pensions in numerous states, the 1912 founding of a federal Children’s Bureau and the 1921 passage of the Sheppard-Towner Infancy and Maternity Protection Act, which provided expectant mothers with health information and support from professionally trained nurses.⁴ Meanwhile, European scholars began identifying similar women’s movements prior to World War II in Germany, France, Scandinavia and, to a lesser extent, in Great Britain.⁵ Maternalism quickly became a familiar category of analysis for studying developments in these regions and drawing attention to the gendered character of welfare states.⁶

The introduction of the concept of maternalism has enriched both the field of gender history and the history of welfare states. Historians of maternalism not only widened the niche occupied by widows and orphans in welfare history, but also made clear that a discourse grounded in normative gender roles could still be about agency, and in fact had historically been used to promote social change. In other words, they showed that women’s quest for social justice could no longer be considered the exclusive province of ‘equal rights feminism’. As a paradigm, maternalism also helped to attenuate the emphasis on oppression, which had long been prominent in women’s history, especially in the history of mothers and housewives. Behind victims, scholars began to discern recipients of benefits and politically savvy female reformers. Finally, the concept of maternalism served to advance the field of welfare history by highlighting the close interaction between the public and private sectors that characterized the early phases of welfare state formation in many nations. As Eirinn Larsen has noted, because the rubric of maternalism places ‘the activism of private organizations … on equal footing with the action of political parties, trade unions, and official bureaucrats’, it led researchers to ‘notice and integrate the contributions of those who did not have formal political rights’. Thus, the concept of maternalism helped to ‘challenge both the state-centrism and the limited definition of “politics”’ that had previously characterized the history of welfare states.⁷

The readiness with which scholars latched on to ‘maternalism’ suggests that many found it to be a highly useful concept – one that filled a linguistic void in its capacity to describe certain movements and policies more accurately than other available terms. ‘Maternalism’ offered a way of discussing and analysing women’s varied associational and political activities without becoming overly fixated on the loaded question of what can or cannot be properly designated ‘feminist’.⁸ Today, some scholars prefer to define maternalism as a particular form of feminism, one that highly values and seeks support for women’s roles as caregivers. Others, however, define maternalism much more broadly, as an ideology that posits motherhood as a social and civic role, but one that lacks intrinsic political content.⁹ To their minds, maternalism could serve conservative, even reactionary ends just as readily as it could accommodate support for suffrage and other feminist demands. Both of these perspectives are reflected in the essays featured here.

While such competing perspectives on maternalism reflect the differing views of individual authors, they also suggest the ways in which distinctive national contexts, historical experiences and historiographies have led scholars to ask different questions and assume different attitudes toward maternalism. In the United States, discussions of maternalism tend to be more immediately political, due at least in part to the intense debates over welfare ‘reform’, ongoing struggles over maternity leave and the seemingly endless debate over how – or even if – women should combine employment and motherhood. Perhaps as a result, American scholars often feel compelled either to defend or criticize maternalist paradigms. In Europe, historians of maternalism tend to be more preoccupied with the phenomenon’s unsavoury historical connotations: maternalist movements are often associated with fascist practices or outmoded, politically conservative views on issues pertaining to sex and reproduction.¹⁰ Generally speaking, scholars of Latin America regard maternalism in a more favourable light. They tend to portray it as compatible with (and at times even inseparable from) feminism or broader movements for social justice.¹¹ It is also notable that maternalist movements in Latin America appear to have been even more tightly connected to children’s well-being than was the case in Europe and the United States. For example, whereas the leading maternalist organizations in the United States boasted names like the National Congress of Mothers or the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, the most prominent organization in Brazil – described by Maria Lúcia Mott in Chapter 9 – was called the Cruzada Pró Infância (Pro-Childhood Crusade).

As these varying perspectives suggest, the meaning of ‘maternalism’ has not become clearer over time. To the contrary, the term has been defined in a variety of competing ways from the outset, and the confusion surrounding it has only multiplied in recent years. For instance, scholars of welfare states have often defined ‘maternalism’ in relation to equal rights feminism; that is, they have viewed it as a distinct ideology that has provided women with an alternative, less controversial foundation for political mobilization, or as a set policies that focus specifically on women and children (in contrast to ‘paternalist’ policies directed at men as workers and/or breadwinners). A quite separate stream of literature, which focuses on the experiences of domestic workers, uses ‘maternalism’ to characterize individual relationships situated within the domestic realm, rather than voluntary movements and state interventions. According to this usage, ‘maternalism’ has historically allowed elite women to assert their authority over less powerful women within a domestic context, while cloaking that authority in the mantle of maternal concern. Judith Rollins appears to have been the first scholar to employ the term in this manner; she argued that employer–employee relationships in the Boston area were shaped by ‘rituals of deference and maternalism’.¹² Subsequently, other scholars of domestic workers, in countries ranging from Lebanon to South Africa, have described ‘maternalism’ as a means by which female employers have maintained class and racial boundaries and perpetuated inequality.¹³ Writing about Sri Lankan housemaids in Lebanon, Nayla Moukarbel puts it baldly: ‘Maternalism presupposes a relationship of domination, and not just one of protection and care. The emphasis the female employer puts on the emotional aspect of the relationship is, in fact, a form of manipulation.’¹⁴ These scholars depict ‘maternalism’ in unambiguously negative terms, yet they are describing a very different phenomenon to scholars who have analysed ‘maternalism’ as a critical component of emerging welfare states.

Even when the focus is narrowed to literature concerning policies and politics, the wide range of ways in which ‘maternalism’ is currently being used can be dizzying. Historians of maternalist welfare movements have typically employed it to refer simultaneously to programmes designed to improve the plight of mothers and children and to female activism aimed at securing said policies and programmes. But others have used ‘maternalism’ to describe myriad political movements in which women have pressured governments or pursued social reforms unrelated to welfare policies. For example, historians and other scholars have applied the term to las madres de La Plaza Mayo, the Argentine women who famously protested the ‘disappearance’ of their loved ones under the military dictatorship of Jorge Rafael Videla.¹⁵ Malathi de Alwis has analysed a similarly maternalist movement – the Sri Lankan Mothers’ Front, which mobilized in the 1990s to demand ‘a climate where we can raise our sons to manhood, have our husbands with us and lead normal women’s lives’.¹⁶ U.S. scholars have identified as ‘maternalist’ movements ranging from the anti-nuclear group Women Strike for Peace to the breastfeeding advocacy group La Leche League to the environmental activism of the Love Canal Homeowners’ Association.¹⁷ Given that women in all these cases portrayed their activism as an expression or extension of their maternal role, the designation ‘maternalist’ seems entirely appropriate. But here again, this body of literature bears only a tenuous relationship to the scholarship on welfare states.

In recent years, scholars who focus on state policies toward women and children have also extended, modified and challenged the concept of maternalism in new ways. The essays in this volume are exemplary in this regard. Broadly speaking, one can point to three major developments in the historiography on maternalism and the welfare state. First is the growing interest in studying how states have sought to construct men’s and women’s roles in relation to one another. Thus, whereas many earlier studies concentrated primarily on ‘women and the welfare state’, more recent scholarship has emphasized the gendered character of welfare states more broadly. Indeed, some researchers have argued that it is necessary to move ‘beyond maternalism’ in order to explore more comprehensively the ways that varied governmental regimes have intervened in families or mobilized familial imagery for political ends. In their edited collection Families of a New World: Gender, Politics, and State Development in a Global Context, Lisa Pollard and Lynne Haney contend that ‘maternalism’ tends to obscure the ways in which the state also sought to shape men’s roles and behaviour.¹⁸ In a related manner, Marian van der Klein’s essay in this volume (Chapter 3) interrogates Skocpol’s distinction between ‘maternalist’ and ‘paternalist’ states by showing how maternalist policies, even in the U.S., were always constructed in relation to the concept of a male breadwinner. Given that mothers’ pens...