Creating a
Maternalist Welfare State
Industrialization,
Progressivism, and Suffrage
1
The Gilded Age
•
Mark Twain, 1873 novel
– definition of gilded - “to give an attractive
but often deceptive appearance”
•
The Second Industrial Revolution
– U.S. 1st in productivity
• 1865 - $2 billion; 1900 - $13 billion
• manufacturing 1/3 of world's goods
•
Technology
– Coal vs. water power
– Age of electricity
• Lightbulb 1879
– Telephone (1876)
•
Scale of business
– From family-owned, independent businesses
and farms to large-scale corporations
– National markets
• Transcontinental Railroad 1869
2
1
nation of wage workers
• in 1870, 5 million out of 13 million wage workers
• by 1900, 2/3 of all Americans worked for wages
3
Taylorism:
Scientific
Management
• deskill labor - take all
important decisions out
of the hands of workers
• standardize routines assembly line
• Change nature of work
“Anyone with a weak head and a strong back
can load machine coal….But a man has to
think and study every day like you was
studying a book if he is going to get the best
of the coal when he uses only a pick.”
Kentucky miner
“A man never learns the machinist’s trade
now….The trade is so subdivided that a man
is not considered a machinist at all. One man
may make just a particular part of a machine
and may not know anything whatever about
another part of the same machine.” A
machinist, 1883
Such a worker “can not be master of a craft,
but only master of a fragment.”
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2
Change in
workforce
•
Women workers
– 8.6 million worked outside of
home - 3x the number in 1870
– 25% of workforce by 1900
•
Single women
– 40% native-born white
– 60% nonwhite
– 70% immigrant
•
Married women
– 3% of whites (1900)
– 26% among African Americans
– Unseen work
•
Labor market segmentation
– Sex-typing (“living wage vs.
secondary worker)
– domestic service (29% in 1900)
– factory work
– 10% clerical positions and sales
– 10% professionals by 1920
• 77% teachers in 1910
5
child labor
• 1/5 nationally (under 16)
– ¼ million younger than 10
• family as economic unit
• Regional difference
– 1/4 North Carolina cotton mill
workers compared to 1/20
Massachusetts operatives
– 40% of labor costs compared
to New England
– Deemphasis on public
education in the South
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3
Internal
migration:
Rural-Urban
• manufacturing in countryside
before Civil War
– by 1890, 90% of manufacturing in
cities
• becoming an urban nation
– by 1890, 1/3 of all Americans in
cities
• Young Women’s Christian
Association (YWCA, 1867)
• African Americans
– 7,000/year from 1870-1910
– Great Migration 1915-1920,
500,000
“My dear Sister: I am well and thankful to say I am doing
well….I got here in time to attend one of the greatest
revivals in the history of my life - over 500 people joined the
church….The people are rushing here by the thousands
and I know if you come and rent a big house you can get all
the roomers you want….I work in Swifts packing Co. in the
sausage department. My daughter and I work for the same
company - We get $1.50 a day and we pack so many
sausages we don’t have much time to play but it is a matter
of a dollar with me….Tell your husband work is plentiful
here.”
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Chicago, Illinois
New vs. Old Immigrants
•
•
24 mill. From 1860-1920
Old Immigrants
•
New Immigrants
•
More New Immigrants
–
–
–
–
•
pre-1880, 85% from Western and Northern Europe
post-1880 80% from Eastern and Southern Europe
approx. 1 million immigrants from Asia 1850-1934
approx. 1 million from Latin America, mostly after 1910
1910- 53% of all wage workers were foreign-born with 2/3
from Southern and Eastern Europe
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4
• 5.5 million
families
earned less
than $500
annually
• bottom 44%
held 1.5% of
the nation’s
wealth
The Working Class
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Tenement housing
• home as second
workplace
10
5
streets as second home
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Knights of Labor (1869-)
•
750,000 in 1886, largest in 19th
century
– 10% women and 20,000-30,000
African American members in
separate assemblies
•
Emancipation from wage slavery worker control of their own labor
•
•
•
•
child labor reform
Eight-Hour League
Anti-immigration
Haymarket Square (1886)
– worker cooperatives
Terence Powderly
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6
American Federation of Labor
(1886• The “Aristocracy of
Labor” - exclude
unskilled labor
• “bread and butter”
unionism (wages, hours,
working conditions)
• 10% of workers by 1900
Samuel Gompers
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Progressive Reformers
•
Idealism
– Religion
• Federal Council of Churches (1908) aimed at “promoting the application of the
law of Christ in every relation to human life.” (Social Gospel)
– Channeled towards secular reform
– Reject Social Darwinism
•
Faith in scientific investigation and management
– Wisconsin Idea and Robert M.. La Follette
• “The close intimacy of the university with public affairs explains the democracy,
the thoroughness, and the scientific accuracy of the state in its legislation.”
• Social sciences
– Scientific analysis of human activity offers solutions to waste and inefficiency
– Taylor
• Role of experts
•
Belief in activist government
– Regulate the economy
– Solve social problems
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7
The New Woman
•
Educated women
–
–
–
–
•
40% of all college students women by 1900
4% pf all American women (18-21)
50% never married (10% of female pop.)
“Boston marriages”
Married women
– Declining birth rate (7 in 1800 to 3.5 in 1900)
– Childless women
• 50% of married African American women
• 25% of white women
•
Club Movement
– General Federation of Women’s Clubs (1890)
• 200 clubs, 20,000 women
• 1920 1 million
– National Association of Colored Women (1896)
• Three dozen
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Cross-class cooperation and
voluntarism to state programs
•
Settlement Houses (400 by 1910)
–
–
–
–
•
Public health
–
–
–
•
“White List” – consumer support for improving
working conditions
Protective Legislation
–
–
•
Educational lectures
Low-cost health services
State-provided services
National Consumers’ League (1899)
–
•
Jane Addams and Hull House (1889)
Middle-class educated women
Living and working in immigrant and racialized
communities – “Americanization”
Inventing social work
Florence Kelley – focus on women and children
Max. hours and min. wages
Muller v. Oregon (1908) upheld 10 hour
workday for women
–
–
“The physical well-being of woman becomes an object
of public interest and care.”
Brandeis brief – sociological jurisprudence
16
8
Women’s Trade Unions
•
•
•
•
•
International Ladies Garment
Workers Union (1900)
– Ethnic immigrant women
– 1909 Uprising of the 20,000
– “I am a working girl, one of
those who are strike against
intolerable working conditions.
I am tired of listening to
speakers who talk in general
terms.”
• Clara Lemlich
Women’s Trade Union League
(1903)
– “The eight hour day; a living
wage; to guard the home”
Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire
(3/25/1911)
– 146 died, 47 jumped
New York State Factory
Commission
– 56 laws dealing with fire
hazards, unsafe machines,
homework, and wages and
hours for women and children
1920 – female garment workers
42% of all unionized women
–
“A cousin of mine worked for the Triangle Shirtwaist Company and she got me
on there in October of 1901. It was probably the largest shirtwaist factory in the
city of New York then…..We started work at seven-thirty in the morning, and
during the busy season we worked until nine in the evening. They didin’t pay
you any overtime and they didn’t give you anything for supper money….The
employers didn’t recognize anyone working for them as a human being….If you
went to the toilet and you were there longer than the floor lady thought you
should be, you would be laid off for half a day and sent home. And, of course,
that meant no pay. You were not allowed to have your lunch on the fire escape
in the summertime. The door was locked to keep us in. That’s why so many
people were trapped when the fire broke out….After the 1909 strike I worked
with the union…so I wasn’t at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory when the fire
broke out, but a lot of my friends were….It’s very difficult to describe the
feeling because I knew the place and I knew so many of the girls. The thing
that bothered me was the employers got a lawyer….One hundred and forty-six
people were sacrificed, and the judge fined Blank and Harris seventy-five
dollars!” Pauline Newman, organizer for the ILGWU.
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ILGWU 6th largest union in AFL
From Maternalism to
Feminism
• Maternalist welfare – saving
women and children
– Children’s (1912) and
Women’s (1920)
Bureaus in the Labor
Department
• Feminism (1914)
– “We intend simply to be
ourselves…not just our
little female selves, but
our whole big human
selves.” Marie Jenny
Howe, 1914
• “Voluntary Motherhood” to
“Birth Control” (1913)
Margaret Sanger outside the
first birth control clinic,
which she founded in Brooklyn,
1916.
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9
Patriotism vs. Protest
•
•
National American Woman Suffrage Association (2 million)
– Formed 1890
– Carrie Chapman Catt
National Woman’s Party
– Alice Paul
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Women and
Peace
• Women’s Peace Party (1915)
• “This war was an old man’s
war; that the young men who
were dying, the young men
who were doing the fighting,
were not the men who wanted
the war, and were not the men
who believed in the war.”
– Jane Addams, 1915
20
10
suffrage
•
•
Maternalism, Nativism, and Racism
19th amendment (1920)
21
The Maternalist State
• “Municipal Housekeeping” leads to new
conception of state responsibilities
– Public education
– Social welfare
– Regulations regarding work conditions
• Social Reform and Social Control
– Idealism and social divisions
• Maternalism and Feminism
– Gender difference and gender sameness
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