Читать книгу Family, Welfare, and the State - Mariarosa Dalla Costa - Страница 10

THE CRISIS OF 1929 SIGNALLED, for the first time in U.S. history, a breakdown in the relationship between employment and unemployment. This breakdown, however, would not seem definitive to American capitalists, or to the Rooseveltian state that would march into war with the illusion of a lasting solution to the problem of employment. But except for the absorption that took place during the war, unemployment would prove to be an endemic fact in the U.S. economy.

With the sudden explosion of mass unemployment in 1929, the reproduction of labor power also went into crisis, and therefore, so did the “generality” of family structure that was attained for the first time in 1914 with Henry Ford’s landmark “Five-Dollar Day” (FDD) strategy.¹ By instituting a policy in his factories, which has since become a famous argument for efficiency management, Ford indirectly defined the quantity and quality of domestic work necessary to sustain the productivity of factory labor.

Between 1914 and 1924, the state significantly curbed immigration, primarily as a reactionary response to workers’ struggles that developed in the first decade of the century and to the militant activity of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).² This forestalled the possibility of the aggressive encouragement of immigration that had characterized the previous period of productive development. Increasingly, the quantitative and qualitative reproduction of labor power would become a problem that would have to be solved internally.

The shift in perspective on wages reflected by Ford’s policy reveals a certain awareness of the necessity of providing reproductive support to workers in the most rationalized sectors. That is, to working-class families dependent upon, on the one hand, the man’s ability to earn a wage capable of supporting a wife and a home,³ and on the other, the working-class housewife whose job must become, more and more exclusively, the production and reproduction of labor power.⁴

It is important to emphasize that not only did the level of the new wage implemented by Ford express a capitalist response to the costs of reproducing labor power,⁵ but this increase was accompanied by an apparatus of control over family management, and thus over reproduction itself. The Five-Dollar Day—which wasn’t paid to workers who had been on the job for less than six months, or to young people under twenty-one years of age, or to women—was still portrayed as a “benefit” one might not qualify for or which could be taken away if one didn’t lead a “moral” or hygienic life. The wage could be withheld or revoked, for example, if one kept bad company, had family quarrels, faced an imminent divorce or had already filed for one, or if one was prone to gambling, the use of tobacco, alcohol, etc. As H. Beynon notes, this era marked the beginning of cooperation between university-trained experts (sociologists, psychologists, psychotechnicians) and employers.⁶ Ford used a “sociology department” and a corps of inspectors and controllers whose task was to enter the homes of workers, investigate their lives, and how they spent their pay. The “benefit” of the FDD could, in fact, be denied to any workers whose conduct was such that this wage level was deemed a handicap rather than an incentive for moral rectitude.⁷

Women were not amongst the beneficiaries of the FDD because according to Ford’s declared hopes, they should get married. The Fordian wage was supposed to be managed by the housewife, who would be relieved by the industrial production of necessary goods (i.e., necessary for the reconstitution of the labor force) of the many old tasks that previously burdened her. Now these goods were available for purchase in the form of commodities. Therefore, they would no longer be acquired through a woman’s ability to supply them directly, but rather through her ability to manage wages.⁸

In the overall effort of rationalization that characterized the beginning of the century, the revaluation of the housewife, and more specifically, the redefinition of her duties, met the need to re-establish the institution of the family which had been greatly weakened as an agent of social reproduction in the previous century.⁹ The beginning of the twentieth century marked the discovery of domestic work as work, but much of the feminist movement was co-opted by the forces that drove the moral valorization of housework. “The Movement for Domestic Science” reflects the intersection of feminism and reformism. In correspondence with rationalization in the factory, the rationalization of domestic work—that is, of the process of reproduction of labor power—sought maximum results with minimum expenditure.

In the attempt to Americanize immigrant communities, this directive would be given to women by social workers’ and a method of control of workers’ wages would be directly established.¹⁰ These efforts would not be put into effect everywhere in the same way however. Ford, hoping that compulsive Americanization would bring about a more immediate productivity of the worker at the factory, interpreted Americanization more brutally and, hence, with shorter breadth. The International Institute was established in 1911 as a division of the YWCA to assist immigrant women. Together with social workers, local chapters of the International Institute developed programs dedicated to the recovery of community, a central theme in the social sciences and in the social progressivism of the Protestant tradition. In this way, they were able to facilitate a less violent, and therefore more reliable, cultural incorporation of immigrants into American society.¹¹ Overall, one can see how an invitation to the scientific management of domestic work in the first two decades of the century largely constituted an invitation to parsimony. In 1912, Wesley C. Mitchell, a leading academic who became economic adviser to Roosevelt, wrote:

… So long as the family remains the most important unit for spending money, so long will the art of spending lag behind the art of making money.… The young wife seldom approaches her housework in a professional spirit. She holds her highest duty that of being a good wife and a good mother. Doubtless to be a good manager is part of this duty; but the human part of her relationship to husband and children ranks higher than the business part.… She cannot divide her duties as a human being so sharply from her duties as a worker. Consequently, her housekeeping does not assume objective independence in her thinking, as an occupation in which she must become proficient.¹²

In agreement with other economists of the time, Mitchell considers with satisfaction the trap in which women were caged. The wife’s primary incentive to work was the “human relationship” she had with her family members. Meanwhile, since the beginning of the century, certain feminists had already raised the question of the possibility for women to live independently, without a husband.¹³ That is, with autonomous sexual choices, living in their own homes, and refusing to sacrifice themselves for their children.¹⁴ They also raised the issue, albeit sporadically, of retribution for domestic labor—either as a share of the husband’s wages or as direct provision by the state.¹⁵

The issue, however, could not have been isolated if the socialist newspaper Chicago Evening World hadn’t printed (also in 1912) an article which emphasized this new quality of the women’s struggle:

Women who are housewives are not paid wages directly from a capitalist boss; consequently they do not always see their connection with the economic system. It is a bit indirect, but nevertheless it is a close connection. When a boss buys the labor power of a worker, he also buys the labor power of his wife. The harder the work that man is asked to carry out, the more that is required from his wife. A worker who gets up early to have breakfast with the light on and goes out to the factory or mine for the whole day could not perform his duties if it were not for the faithful, personal service and care of the woman who keeps his house. She gets up in the early hours to make his breakfast, packs his lunch box and puts all the prepared things in his hands. His time must be spared, his energy saved. Both belong to the boss. She must consume herself to save him.… Women who have received a salary were the first among the female sex to awaken to the realization of their political and economic necessity, since their connection with the capitalist structure of society was direct and evident. The housewives are waking up more slowly, but they are awakening. They begin to see that the capitalist boss of the mine or factory actually controls the labor power of women in the home, taking hold of her life day by day, without pay or recognition.¹⁶

During this time the state developed massive social reforms. With the concession of the need for investment in human capital, the state focused its reformation activity above all on women and children. With regard to education, there were initiatives that focused on countering the disintegration of human relationships, especially noticeable in rapidly expanding urban areas. A general lamentation was the fact that the family and the church no longer functioned as they had before, so the school was looked to as the new primary site for socialization and education. In 1902, John Dewey took the idea of the social center to the conference of the National Education Association, where he argued that schools should be “means for bringing people and their ideas and beliefs together, in such ways as will lessen friction and instability, and introduce deeper sympathy and wider understanding.”¹⁷ He thought that the use of schools as social centers would improve the quality of life in cities, providing recreational alternatives to the brothels, saloons, and dance halls.¹⁸ Education thus became a fundamental sociopolitical sector of American life.

As for women, their work and the family, state intervention was widespread. The Department of Agriculture, together with the Home Economics Association, sent thousands of women, with or without pay, to teach other women the basics of modern domestic efficiency. Recalling how the Movement for Domestic Science and its introduction in schools had a counterpart in Germany in the 1920s, G. Bock and B. Duden stress how the Smith-Lever and Smith-Hughes Acts constituted milestones in the history of the Movement for Domestic Science since they cemented a permanent relationship between the movement itself and the federal government.¹⁹ For example, legislation was developed with regard to the control of food.²⁰ Directives were given on health, hygiene, education, and good family order. Measures were also taken in the field of welfare. For the first time, a system of family allowances and tax differentiation in relation to marital status and family was promoted.

The state was no longer just a legislator but also an administrator, even if social planning essentially remained utopian.²¹ It would only be with the New Deal, and with attempts to plan class dynamics, that the problem would truly be addressed. Hitherto, planning was carried out within a limited social framework, and with the same capitalist awareness that viewed the social framework as totally extraneous to the sphere of production. The state’s new role as arbiter of social relations was soon accepted, but not without resistance. By the early 1920s the movement for the Americanization of immigrants ended. Direct repression and the hunt for red subversives (the Red Scare of 1919–1920) expressed the new attitude of capital.²² Its reaction in the 1920s, from factory repression to social moralization, was entirely aimed at the establishment of a new “work ethic”:

The highest type of laborer is the man who holds a steady job. He is part of an industry; he has an occupation. He is a citizen in a community; generally the father of a family; probably a member of one or more lodges, and very frequently of a church.²³

It is significant that in this period, the YWCA’s International Institutes polarized their activity with respect to second-generation women and promoted initiatives aimed at their socialization. If women’s management of wages and the home remained a constant topic of discussion, a change of interlocutors and the mode of action could be sensed. Now, one looked to the daughters of immigrants. On the one hand it meant taking action to make the generational contrast between immigrant parents and children less disruptive, and on the other, it meant pursuing a nonconflictual emergence of the new figure of the American daughter, wife, and mother. At a convention of the International Institutes in 1924, having to decide which field to work in for the future, the majority of institutions opted for the problem of second-generation girls. A commission was created for that purpose in 1925, namely the Commission on the Study of the Second Generation Girl, and in 1928 it changed its name to the Commission on First Generation Americans. The reason that led to the change was explained as the following: when you say second generation you think of the past. When you say first-generation Americans, you think about the future.²⁴

As for the social sciences, from 1905 to 1909 the American Journal of Sociology saw a rise in the percentage of population studies (on immigration) to the level of nine percent compared to one percent for the period 1900 to 1904. With the outbreak of the war in Europe, American sociologists focused their discussions on the need to control immigration. Mostly based on criteria put forward as scientific, they denied the possibility that immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe could be assimilated, and pressed for the urgent restriction of immigration. This is especially true of the time of the United States’ entry into the conflict, as is evident in the AJS, which officially defined what sociology was. The other fact which was emphasized was the absolute exclusion from the journal of socialist- or radical-inspired materials which, however, found hospitality in other large-circulation journals and newspapers.²⁵

The family ideology was arguably perfected in the 1920s. The affectionate and “disinterested” nature of women, along with their unpaid work, was increasingly and subtlely put in opposition to the cooperative nature of work in a factory, labor that accumulated and took advantage of social knowledge and loaded itself with potential for revolt.

Whereas in the years before World War I the middle-class housewife could usually count on the cooperation of housekeepers and relatives, afterwards it became increasingly difficult to find women willing to perform waged domestic work.²⁶ Relatives and housekeepers looked instead to the new employment opportunities for women. World War I proved to be that watershed moment for the ideology and structure of the American family.²⁷ We can appreciate how before the war, at the level of the middle classes, when the housewife was essentially the administrator of the home, it was not difficult to propagate an ideology of domestic labor as real work. It was presumed that this labor wasn’t burdensome, except possibly to a very limited extent. After the war, however, the same middle-class housewife got involved in the direct management of domestic work, given the growing absence of housekeepers. Administration and provision of that labor became a single entity.

For all of the 1920s, what was referred to as the “industrial revolution in the home” was far from lightening the load of tasks around which women’s work was articulated. Yes, some technological innovations were introduced in the home and became increasingly widespread, such as electric lighting, electric irons, gas cookers and washing machines (though not yet with an automatic cycle). The bathroom mania which exploded in those years was certainly also in relation to the use of electricity for heating water and rooms. Equally, the use of electricity in refrigeration, especially in railway cars that transported goods, allowed noteworthy amounts of fresh products to enter the market, which enabled many women to set aside the job of preserving fruits and vegetables during the summer.²⁸ There was a growing spread of a series of products on the market that the new generation of housewives would have to get to know and learn to buy for the first time.²⁹ Meanwhile, the usual tasks of raising and caring for children and reproduction of the husband became more diverse and complex. The functions of socialization acquired an ever more important place in domestic work itself. Not only did each material task have to be weighed, planned, measured, and coordinated even more, but the overall set of duties—both material and immaterial—in which domestic work was structured further widened.³⁰ All this constituted a new workload which would have to be carried out by women without pay.

Consequently, there was a decisive turning point in the ideology of the family. It emphasized domestic work as a labor of love and, correspondingly, stigmatized its transgression as a fault.³¹ Even advertising targeted at women was polarized in this way.³² Cleaning perfectly to destroy the very last germ is not work but a way to cherish loved ones. Not doing so is being a bad wife and a bad mother.³³

Paradoxically, while a series of important technological innovations were implemented in the home, as we have just seen, the social sciences diminuitized the importance of technological rationalization at the domestic level compared to previous years. These centered the subject entirely on the woman’s role—her capacity for dedication and sacrifice.

While the number of children that women had to care for continued to decline (with a particularly sharp pace in the decades from 1920 to 1940), social psychology prescribed the devotion of a new attention to children and adolescents, binding the mother to new modes of child-rearing which would often make her feel guilty for having to contravene them and for not considering herself competent enough.³⁴ In 1928, John B. Watson, the founder of the behaviorist school of psychology in the United States, published his Psychological Care of Infant and Child in which he intended to persuade mothers of the seriousness of their task. This book exerted considerable influence. In correspondence with the new commitment expected from parents, training courses for parents were instituted and directed particularly at mothers. Here we must emphasize that the work commitments of many American women in those years were complicated by the fact that they came from rural areas. In fact, at that time there was a mass exodus from the countryside to the cities. Consequently, women who came to live in towns faced not only the challenge of having to manage the home in a totally different environment, but also one that demanded a much higher standard of family life, and thus a much higher level of consumption was required.³⁵

Therefore, these were the first women responsible for the new way of functioning required of families—both in terms of consumption and of family values more generally—as a necessary guarantor for the adaptation of the whole society to the new productive and political phase that opened up after the war. From this came the impetus for many women to take on an outside job. The famous theory of the “pin-money worker” (one who works for the superfluous), would immediately accompany their search for paid work as well as being the leitmotif in the Depression years when the needs of their family income would become even more stringent.³⁶

What follows are some characteristics of female employment in the period we are considering. Only five percent of women employed due to the war had entered the labor market for the first time on that occasion. The others, for the most part, were transfers. And at the end of the war, the reverse substitution was just as fast. Women’s employment, which had experienced a significant increase only in the first decade of the century, would continue to represent, from 1910 onwards, about one-fifth of total employment. In 1930, the number of employed women would be approximately 10.6 million compared to approximately 38 million men.

The most important aspect of women’s employment from 1910 onwards was the percentage change in the individual sectors. In the white-collar sector, this percentage increased from 23.3 percent in 1910, to 38.5 percent in 1920, to 44.0 percent in 1930. In the field of personal and domestic services, it decreased from 31.3 percent in 1910, to 25.6 percent in 1920, and then rose to 29.6 percent in 1930. In the area designated as laborers and semiskilled operatives, this percentage decreased from 45.4 percent in 1910, to 35.8 percent in 1920, to 26.5 percent in 1930. The years from 1910 to the Great Crisis delineated new profiles of female employment, with the white-collar sector emerging more markedly in 1940.

The other peculiar aspect of women’s employment during this period concerns that of married women. The percentage of employed married women, calculated in relation to the female population, experienced a significant increase from 1900 to 1910, rising from 5.6 percent to 10.7 percent, but fluctuating a little before the Great Depression. It would drop to 9.0 percent in 1920 to climb to 11.7 percent in 1930. With regard to these women, from 1910 to 1920, one notes not so much an increase in the percentage employed, rather the fact that employment expanded greatly in the white-collar sector, from 21.5 percent in 1920 to 32.5 percent in 1930, whereas in previous years, expansion was mostly concentrated in the more unskilled areas.³⁷

There are a few more details still to mention with regard to women’s employment. During the 1920s, compared to the previous decade characterized by strong industrial expansion, female workers had to fall back on defensive struggles to maintain their jobs and their earlier political victories.³⁸ From 1910 to 1920 this front saw aggressive struggles that achieved some notable successes both in traditionally progressive states (New York, Massachusetts) and in the South. In the same period, there developed a series of federal and state investigations on the excessive length of the workday of children and women, and especially with regard to night work. But in the 1920s, while it can be assumed that a small proportion of women had now irreversibly entered the labor market, and that capitalist restructuring tended to maintain female employment at the compressed levels given, state focus was leaning rather toward the strengthening of the family.

State interest in strengthening the domestic role of women, and motherhood in particular, by providing financial support in the absence of male wages was significant. This interest was developed by individual states with efforts such as legislation on mothers’ pensions. This legislation began in 1910 and extended to all but four states by 1930.

This legislation was aimed primarily at insuring the children of “deserving widows” but in some cases its application was extended to include the children of women who had been abandoned or divorced by their husbands, or whose husbands were in prison, hospitalized for mental illness, or permanently disabled. The movement for mothers’ pensions was supported by women’s organizations, and also by the courts that dealt with juvenile delinquency and noted the high percentage of children of single mothers among the cases submitted. Even at that time, the development of legislation on mothers’ pensions was considered a phenomenon which more than any other testified to the “irresistible development of social insurance principles in the United States”—even though it was influenced by “moral and economic considerations” rather than by insurance criteria.³⁹ The problem increasingly tended to be inscribed in a definition of poverty as a widespread phenomenon that could not be entrusted to voluntary charity.

In the spirit of “justice” and “democracy” that animated reformers, one could feel the urgency of making the transition from private charity to responsibility of the individual state, or even, as some demanded, the federal government. In correspondence with the awareness of the “environmental” origins of poverty, many felt that in order to face the problem it was necessary to mobilize the financial, organizational, and intellectual potential of the community that only state administrations, and not volunteer agencies, could have. The mothers’ pensions were born together with the Board of Public Welfare (BPW), which tried to discredit the philanthropic practices of volunteer agencies and which redefined governmental welfare functions in an urban-industrial context.⁴⁰ There were two pivotal principles around which the debate on the mothers’ pensions grew: (1) the individualization of assistance, and (2) the superiority of home life. This superiority was seen as providing an advantage economically as well as in the quality of child-rearing.

In 1909, at the Conference on the Care of Dependent Children, a principle that would become the cornerstone of welfare policy in this field was formulated: “Home life is the highest and finest product of civilization. Children should not be deprived of it except for urgent and compelling reasons.”⁴¹ President Theodore Roosevelt agreed that “poverty alone should not disrupt the home.”⁴² Therefore, during the Conference on the Care of Dependent Children, a series of directives were formulated so that in cases where it was not possible to keep the natural mother and child together, one got as close as possible to a similar relationship. For example, adoption was suggested whenever practicable, and where recourse to public institutions was necessary, the construction of “cottage units” was recommended, with no more than twenty-five children per assistant so as to safeguard the possibility of interindividual attention.

Again, I assert that the family remained the fundamental social institution. Nevertheless, the awareness that the new conditions of life related to industrialization and the urban context, to the extent that they often took away the family’s ability to meet individual needs, started to make inroads in the political establishment. Accordingly, the state increasingly sought to carry out projects toward integrating family income. The legislation of mothers’ pensions can be considered a very significant step with regard to the enactment of the Federal Maternity Law in 1921 which, G. Bock and B. Duden observe, may hardly be considered less significant than women’s suffrage in 1920.⁴³

In the era of mass production—not just in the material sense but also its reproduction on a psychic level, including its discipline and socialization—in which the correlate production of a new labor power required a specific relationship between the family and the labor market, the state needed to both regulate the labor market and strengthen the family. Its new interest and activity with regard to the mother, the family, childhood, and educational institutions foreshadowed the imminence of the passage from “residual” to planned intervention in the area of social assistance. That meant that the new profile of the welfare state could be defined only in carrying out the state role of planner that would recompose and refound, in a different relation, the production of commodities and the production and reproduction of labor power. This would redefine the relationship between the centrality of the family and above all the woman in it, the labor market, and the state.