Family, Welfare, and the State. Mariarosa Dalla Costa
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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