Family, Welfare, and the State. Mariarosa Dalla Costa

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