Polarized Families, Polarized Parties. Gwendoline M. Alphonso
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was no great number of things that engaged her outside of the home. All the household tasks were in the home.” Congressman Donovan used Williamson’s words to instead extoll traditional separate-sphere motherhood, saying, “In other words, her life and duties were concentrated upon her home, were they not? She attended to what was her business.”33
In addition to gender, the debates over women’s suffrage also reveal diverging, often sectional, ideologies of state, which were deeply imbricated with the gender and family ideals of the Hearth and Soul family approaches. Illustrating a more conservative ideal of state, conservative legislators opposed to women’s suffrage condemned reformers’ faith in government as a cure for social ills. One such example can be found in the words of southern Senator Nathan Bryan (D-FL), deriding the position of suffragist Senator Henry Ashurst (D-AZ) in this way: “[According to Ashurst] just so surely as at midnight there is a centrifugal force which in due time will whirl the world into the gladsome presence of the morning, just that surely in the fullness of time will poverty be abolished. Sweatshops, crowded slums, and starving children will be only a horrid memory … the extension of the ballot to women will be a helpful influence in assisting to solve this great problem in the future.” “Politicians who promised the negroes of the South, immediately after the war, that they, each one, should have 40 acres and a mule,” said Senator Bryan, “were pikers alongside the Senator from Arizona.”34 Opposing a redistributionist state, Bryan challenged the support given to the suffrage movement on the basis that such “people have actually believed that the Government will fix the wage they shall receive; that the independent, upstanding citizen, who has heretofore relied upon his own intelligence and brawn and muscle, and asked no favors of the Government or of anybody, will pass away, and, instead, the State will support everybody and will fix the wages by law.”35
Antisuffrage opposition to government involvement in home involved upholding certain traditional and laissez-faire values over state assistance: parental independence and (male) individual autonomy above all else. In several committee hearings, particularly on regulatory issues such as vaccination and disease control, child labor regulation, compulsory schooling, and the establishment of juvenile courts and other state institutions, witnesses and members of Congress using a Soul family values framework used language reminiscent of late twentieth-century neoliberalism to argue that “no one has such vital interest and concern in the welfare of the child as the parents themselves.”36 Witnesses espousing parental autonomy and responsibility often testified in favor of business and industries. They even testified against federal censorship of the budding motion picture industry, chiding parents for shirking their responsibilities and placing an “impossible undertaking” on the federal government “by having it attempt to look after the proper upbringing of their own and everybody else’s children and grandchildren.” The federal government, they said, “would not only be required to keep the children from all contamination while the parents allowed them to wander about the community but it would have to come closer home and take up the matter of the wearing of Indian suits by children and the playing with toy pistols and pop guns.”37
Progressive arguments for intertwined domestic and political spheres among suffrage supporters were part of the emerging social-progressive faith in an interventionist state. These legislators asserted a Hearth family framework insofar as they claimed that the national state had a legitimate responsibility in child (and therefore family) economic welfare, particularly when parents were incapacitated; they used the state’s interest in child welfare to justify regulatory measures directed at employers and industry, as well as delinquent parents, and to provide assistance to dependent families, all of which sought to re-create the “ideal of home life” for vulnerable children.38
During congressional hearings, the Hearth family economics framework was thus referred to in many more examples of lower-income rather than higher-income families, a large proportion of the former also cited as single-mother families. Moreover, in 23 percent of family examples that focused on family economic conditions, legislators raised family health and living conditions as well as child labor regulation in 19 percent of these cases, women’s equality in 10.5 percent of cases, and juvenile institutions such as work homes and orphanages in 9 percent of such Hearth family cases.39
Progressive legislators championed enhanced federal government involvement on grounds that unlike individual parents, local communities, and even state governments, the federal government alone could conduct large-scale investigations, gather data, coordinate policy efforts, and thereby stimulate state action on several issues, critical to the welfare of families.40 Conservative legislators more concerned with family values, such as family self-regulation and parental autonomy, were openly critical of the reformist faith in centralized planning, redistribution, scientific inquiry, and universal standards and instead valued local knowledge and the right of communities to regulate themselves.41 Illustrating a localism that would come to endure in the Soul family approach, these conservatives argued that local entities such as family, locality, and community played a more important role in real-world social behavior, not national-level policies that were based on artificially universal assumptions of human nature.42 Twenty-two percent of family examples invoking the Soul family values frame promoted parental rights, 7 percent of these cases advocated for limited government, and 6 percent supported traditional gender protections.
However, when it came to issues of sex, sexuality, and biological reproduction, highlighted in 24 percent of all Soul family cases (the largest bloc of all Soul family examples), conservative legislators promoted positive state intervention to preserve traditional family practices. Family sexuality concerns were inextricably bound with anxieties over race. The next section reveals the extent to which the emerging Soul family values approach was preoccupied with questions of sex and race, prompting conservatives to call for positive engagement of the national state, a position that ran contrary to their otherwise antistatist and laissez-faire-ist ideology.
Sex and Race—Intermarriage and Other Sexual Questions: A Positive-State Soul Family Approach
For conservatives, family values, not economics or material services, was the rightful focus of policy. White supremacy was central to the traditional family values they sought to uphold and underpinned much of their Soul legislative focus. This was especially evident among legislators from the South. The nineteenth-century South had embraced an organic patriarchal family ideal that was substantively different from the northern, contractual view of domestic relations. The southern family ideal had roots that extended far back into slavery, infusing racial and sexual power dynamics onto the patriarchal authority of male slaveowners over members of their household, free and slave. As historian Peter Bardaglio writes, “The sexual access of slaveholders to their wives and (to their) bondswomen provided the under-girding of patriarchy as a [family] system that shaped both race and gender relations … important as the household was as a private institution in the Victorian South, it was even more important as a political institution in the broadest sense: it not only constituted the chief vehicle for the exercise of power in southern society but also served as the foundation of southern public beliefs and values.”43 The political southern family ideal then was an amalgam of southern racial and gender ideals, whose patriarchal values preserved southern (white male) power, a slave-based economy, and a hierarchical social order.
Yet patriarchal authority of the head of household was not considered absolute or universal in the antebellum South or impervious to state intervention. Instead, there existed a localized southern domestic ideology, wherein the authority of patriarchs over their households was subjected to a metaphorical “social peace,” an overarching public order that permeated all southern private domestic relations.44 Within this framework, the state was indispensable in regulating family behavior in defense of the traditional social order. Southern legal historians describe a “strong element of coercion that enforced inclusion in this system. Although everyone had a place, coercion was essential to keep people in their places.”45 They note the “coercive side of state intervention,” especially for “poor white and free black families,” which continued to prevail despite the eventual introduction of the contractual model of domestic relations into the South in the postbellum period.46
In the