phd isaac newton/K3
Single Mothers and Child Neglect, 1880-1920
Author(syf Linda Gordon
Source: American Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 2 (Summer, 1985yf S S 2
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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CHILD NEGLECT, 1880-19201
LINDA GORDON
University of Wisconsin, Madison
IN 1917 CORA SIMPSON, A TWENTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD MOTHER OF GIRLS AGED THREE
and one-and-a-half, came to the office of the Massachusetts Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Children (MSPCCyf seeking help.2 She was penniless, she
said, because her husband had deserted her. Some excerpts from her case record
may be of interest, both as an introduction to the issues that will be discussed here
and to the sources on which this essay is based:
August 1917. Mo . .. is in great need as she has no. .. income. She has previously
received temporary aid from A.C. [Associated Charities] . .. she had the fa. in ct. for n-s
[non-support] in March 1916 . .. Rosemary [age 1 1/2] is rickety as recorded by a Doctor
. . . the chn. were about half-starved during the winter; the mo. was about ready to give
the chn. up but she reconsidered this when Mrs. W. offered to take her into her home to
board but the expense was too great . . . Mrs. W. felt the fam. would have to go. Mrs. S.
... former landlady, reported that the chn. were really destitute when with her.. . . Miss
C., A.C., states that . . . a recent rumor that mo. had been imml. [immoral] had not been
substantiated . . . there were no relas. [relatives] to help mo.
In September 1918 Mrs. Simpson returned to the MSPCC asking for help with a
new baby, illegitimate.
'Revised Jan. 1985. The material in this paper comes from a study of the history of family violence, supported by the National Institutes of Mental Health. I am also grateful to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for support, to the staff of the MSPCC and BCSA for their courtesy, and to Ros Baxandall, Wini Breines, Nancy Cott, Ellen DuBois, Allen Hunter, Elizabeth Pleck, and Pauline Terrelonge for helpful critical readings. 2Confidentiality requirements prevent the use of actual names in this paper. This case history is taken from case records of the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, now in the Univ. of Massachusetts/Boston Archives. The records are not open to the public except with the permission of the MSPCC.
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Mo. is weaning baby and thinks she might go to work and start a home for herself and
chn. with aged colored woman to care for chn. during day.. . . Miss B., A.C., seemed to
think that mo. was an immoral woman . . . does not feel like reestablishing fam. but will
try to get rela. in NY to help or may place two of chn.. . . mo to go service with the third.
This history did not end happily. No relatives would agree to board the children for
free. In May 1919 Cora Simpson was earning fifteen dollars a week as a seamstress
and was paying over half of that to two different women for the board of her girls,
keeping the baby with her in the tailor shop. In July of that year she was evicted,
accused by her landlord of earning "by illeg. means." She left her three
children with friends and disappeared. Her children became wards of the state and
were placed in an orphanage.'
This case is one of approximately a thousand sampled in a study of family
violence and its social control in Boston from 1880 to 1960.4 As a case of child
neglect it is far more typical than the fewer but more publicized cases of abuse. As
a case involving a single mother, it is also typical, because single mothers are
consistently overrepresented as neglectful parents.
This essay is a contribution to the historical understanding of two intersecting
contemporary social problems, single motherhood and child neglect, neither of
which has a significant written history. An attempt to understand why single
mothers appeared so often negligent illuminates both the historical construction of
modern single motherhood and the modern concept of child neglect. In fact, these
two social problems were mutually constructed. The very definition of child
neglect arose as part of an ideology about proper family life that automatically
conceived of single mothers as inadequate parents. Even accepting, momentarily,
the definitions of adequate parenting imposed by child protection agencies (and
they will be subjected to criticism belowyf these agency responses to neglectful
single mothers were circular, blaming the mothers for child neglect but declining to
help them become adequate mothers.
This contradiction was not merely a "bias" of charity and social workers. It
resulted from the newly anomalous structural position of single mothers in an
urbanizing society. The many "Mrs. Simpsons" in agency case records faced
economic and social difficulties different from those of previous, more rural
generations of single mothers. These included both objective difficulties in manag-
ing the tasks of earning and childraising simultaneously, and a new lack of
3Case code number #2503. I cite references to the cases using a coding system devised during this research. A researcher with permission to use the records should consult me for a key to the code. 4Case records from three child welfare agencies were sampled for every tenth year from 1880 to 1960. Jan Lambertz, Paul O'Keefe, Anne Doyle Kenney, Nancy McKerrow, and Martha Coons contributed to this research and to my understanding of it, but I alone must remain responsible for the conclusions in this paper. Hence when I refer to research data, I consider the project collective and use the word "our"; when I refer to findings and arguments, I use "I" or "my."
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sympathy for their strategies. The lapse in sympathy resulted from the fact that the
single mothers often sought to establish themselves as heads of households, an
aspiration that seemed reprehensible to those holding traditional views about
normative family life, even though it was often the best and arguably the only
means of preventing children's suffering.
In order to examine this double-bind in which so many single mothers found
themselves, I will introduce, first, the MSPCC and similar child-saving agencies,
second, the circumstances of the single mothers in this study, and third, definitions
of child neglect at the turn of the century.
In the 1870s an organized campaign arose against cruel or inadequate parenting.
The MSPCC, one of the vanguard organizations dedicated to "child protec-
tion, " was established in 1878; by 1880 there were thirty-four such societies in the
United States and fifteen elsewhere.5 Childraising, of course, has never been a
completely private activity, and the Massachusetts colony had regulated it by
statute since at least 1642.6 The 1870s, however, brought a marked increase in
concern about child mistreatment, partly owing to the visibility and intensity of
urban poverty. In Boston, large-scale immigration (particularly from Italy, Ireland,
and Canadayf meant that the harsh conditions experienced by poor children com-
bined with the culturally different patterns of immigrant neighborhoods to con-
vince a Protestant, English-American elite that there was a virtual epidemic of
child abuse. Initiated by relatively conservative Boston feminists and male moral
reformers, the MSPCC was simultaneously an upper-class charity and a
paragovernmental enforcement agency. Its agents-all educated, Protestant, and
male, expanding in number from about five in the 1880s to nearly twenty by the
World War I era-investigated reports of cruelty to children, prosecuted parents,
and seized children found in neglectful homes. Recognized statutorily as an
appropriate temporary guardian for neglected or abused children, the MSPCC
quickly became Boston's defacto arbiter of acceptable means of childraising, its
recommendations virtually always accepted by the courts.
The concept of the "single mother" is a recent one and, in some respects, it
'On the "discovery" of child abuse, see Joyce Antler and Stephen Antler, "From Child Rescue to Family Protection: The Evolution of the Child Protective Movement in the United States," Children and Youth Service Review, 1 (1979yf 177-204. 6Harriet M. Skillern, "A Socio-legal Analysis of the Massachusetts Stubborn Child Law," Diss. Brandeis Univ. 1977, 14. This point is important because some recent scholarship erroneously adopts a model in which state' and private-charity intervention into family life is assumed to be a new and unprecented development of the late nineteenth century. See, for example, Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World (New York: Basic Books, 1977yf and Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (New York: Norton, 1979yf For critiques, see Eli Zaretsky, "The Place of the Family in the Origins of the Welfare State," in Rethinking the Family, ed. Barrie Thorne (New York: Longman, 1982yf 188-224; Nancy Chodorow and Susan Contratto, "The Fantasy of the Perfect Mother," in ibid., 54-75; Linda Gordon, "Child Abuse, Gender, and the Myth of Family Independence: Thoughts on the History of Family Violence and Its Social Control 1880-1920," New York University Review of Law and Social Change, 12 (1983-84yf 523-37.
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is inferior as a category to the more specific, earlier labels of widow, deserted wife,
unmarried mother, and divorcee. These labels called attention to the mothers'
histories and thus to the circumstances that brought them to single motherhood and
influenced their subsequent behavior. Yet these labels were also moralistic: wid-
ows and deserted wives, it was assumed, claimed sympathy while unmarried and
divorced mothers deserved condemnation. Such labels continued a tradition of
distinguishing the deserving from the undeserving poor and, in the hands of the
child-savers, they operated to determine how the behavior of the women would be
evaluated morally and what sorts of help might be offered.
Specifically, who were these child-neglecting single mothers? Thirty-five per-
cent of them were widows. These were not only more numerous proportionately
than they are today, but they were also younger and more often had young children,
because illness and industrial accidents killed relatively more young men than they
do today.
Sixty-one percent were married women separated from their husbands. Of
these, twenty-eight percent had been deserted (they were so labeled either by
themselves or by MSPCC workersyf The problem of defining desertion requires
mention here. The high proportion of deserted women in this period, compared to
twentieth-century figures, results both from different forms of marital separation
and from different interpretations of separation. Women's economic dependence,
both their actual helplessness and their sense of helplessness when left without
husbands, made some wives call themselves deserted when a modem observer
might describe them as separated. It was simultaneously true that more separations
resulted from men's unilateral actions than is the case today, again because of
women's economic dependence, but also because men, particularly the poor
immigrants so often the MSPCC clients, were unaccustomed to the lone responsi-
bility for support of their families and, when faced with failure, often ran from the
obligation.
There was an equally indistinct boundary between deserters and those husbands
who were present but nonsupporting. In fact, many separated couples in these case
records colluded in presenting their story as one of desertion in the hopes of
winning sympathy and material aid for the wife; many husbands dropped in and out
of their families, appearing occasionally by the week, the month, or even the year.7
Other husbands lived with their families but did not support them adequately.
Only ten percent of these separated mothers were legally divorced. The primary
significance of divorce for these women was that it allowed legal remarriage.
Many separated women in fact reconstituted marriage-like relations and often,
moreover, claimed to be married when visited by social workers. (However, the
child-saving agencies always traced marriage registrations, a boon to researchers if
7#2042, #2053, #3041, for examples.
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hardly to clients.yf Their children, nevertheless, were illegitimate. The proportion
of never-married women was less than five percent, and the majority of illegitimate
children in agency records were born to married women. (Indeed, the category
"illegitimate" tells nothing about whether the children actually had fathers in
their households or their lives.yf
As a result of these definitional complexities, the boundaries between woman-
and man-headed families were not fixed. Many women labeled single by the
agency were in de facto common-law marriages;8 and other women, considered
married, ran their households and supported their children alone. Furthermore,
these conditions were shifting and many mothers were only temporarily single.
* * *
Just as the definition of a single mother was complex, so was the definition of
child neglect. Laws prescribed procedures and penalties in cases of child neglect
(and all cruelty-to-children cases were brought under the neglect laws, even if they
were cases of abuseyf but offered no objective definition of the problem. The
Massachusetts 1882 statute for instance, broadly defined a neglected child as one
"growing up without education or salutary control, and in circumstances
exposing him to lead an idle and dissolute life, or is dependent upon public
charity."9 Lacking statutory specificity, judges gave extraordinary power to the
MSPCC to define standards of proper parenting. From the case records it is
possible to identify five operative categories of what was actually considered
children's maltreatment: (1yf physical neglect, including malnutrition, poor cloth-
ing, poor housing, dirtiness; (2yf medical neglect, i.e., the failure to maintain good
health standards or to seek professional medical treatment for illness; (3yf lack of
supervision, including leaving children alone or not disciplining them; (4yf over-
work, i.e., demanding too much labor (paid or unpaidyf of children and/or keeping
them from school; and (5yf moral neglect, the failure to provide suitable moral
standards in environment and training, including exposure to illicit sex or exces-
sive drinking, and failure to send them to church. (Emotional neglect would be
added as a category in the mid-twentieth century.yf
Neglect could not be identified without substantial class, cultural, religious,
even personal bias. For example, immigrants from poor and rural backgrounds
were not accustomed to seeking professional medical treatment. The poor also
lacked access to many domestic standards considered minimal by social workers,
such as separate beds and bedrooms, clean linen, and regular baths. MSPCC
agents, all of them white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants, prosperous and well-educated,
8There was no legal recognition of common-law marriage in Massachusetts. 9Acts of 1882, ch. 181, Sec. 3.
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often disdained and misinterpreted the cultural and parental views of their clients,
most of them Catholic, poor, and ill-educated. For example, the MSPCC agents
disliked wine drinking, garlicky food, and loud voices. They did not believe that
children should be allowed to play outside on dirty city streets. They did not
believe that young children should be in the care of other young children.
Bias against single mothers also influenced the definitions of neglect. Looking
at the proportions of single mothers involved from several different angles, it
appears that single mothers were always overrepresented. They were slightly
overrepresented in cases of child abuse-that is, assault on children-and strongly
overrepresented in neglect cases. Single mother households were involved in 28
percent of all MSPCC cases between 1880 and 1920, but in 52 percent of child
neglect cases. 0 From a different perspective, considering single-parenthood as a
"stress" factor (like unemployment or illnessyf single-parenthood occurred in
50.5 percent of child-neglect cases, 25 percent of child-abuse cases. By compari-
son, 19 percent of all Boston families were headed by women." Nor can the
overrepresentation of single mothers be reduced to the greater economic and social
difficulties of immigrants. Although the proportion of foreign-born women who
headed households was larger than the overall average-8 percent of all Boston
women were family heads, 12 percent of foreign-born women-it would still not
account for the high proportion of single mothers among the neglect cases.
Comparison of the child-neglect cases involving single mothers to those involv-
ing two parents suggested that the former were more likely to be child neglecters
for two kinds of reasons: because their social and economic circumstances made it
harder for them to provide adequate parenting, and because the agencies involved
in defining the problem of child neglect (and in attempting to cure ityf were biased
against single mothers.
One indicator of discrimination against single mothers was the use of pejorative
labels. Such labeling can be measured in two ways: by comparing single mothers to
other clients, and by comparing the labels to actual behavior; in both, one must be
cautious in disentangling gender from class prejudices. Social workers of this era
were likely to believe the worst of working-class men, quick to label them depraved
or degenerate. By contrast, poor women benefited from assumptions of good
intentions, moral purity, and blameless victimization, if one can benefit from such
condescension. Women, however, could lose this high evaluation at any sign of
"'This statistic figured from our sampling of records from every tenth year; the MSPCC in its statistical compilations did not use the category "single mother." These percentages are of verified allegations, the unconfirmed having been eliminated. "Averaging the 1885, 1895, and 1905 censuses. Nineteen percent is probably an underestimate because many married women were single heads of household for substantial but nevertheless unrecorded periods of time. For example, in our case records, fifteen percent of individuals were classified as "married and living together off and on," but not counted as single household heads.
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failing. Women were, for example, more than twice as likely as men to be labeled
immoral by agency workers (this diagnosis was applied 68.9 percent of the time to
women, 31. 1 percent to menyf yet men more often conducted extramarital sexual
affairs. Single mothers were also more likely to be called immoral than other
women. Naturally single mothers were more likely than married women to have
nonmarital sexual relationships, but, as noted above, many of these relationships
were defacto marriages. Here across-the-board application of standards of propri-
ety came down harder on single mothers. In a similar pattern women were
somewhat less likely than men to be labeled intemperate (43.9 percent women,
56.1 percent menyf but qualitative reading of the case records suggested that
women were less likely actually to drink heavily. Single mothers were more often
called intemperate than other women, without evidence of indulging in heavier
drinking.
Furthermore, the weight of these labels was heavier for mothers than for fathers,
for single mothers than for other mothers. Sexual immorality or intemperance in a
mother was in itself grounds for child-negiect charges; not so in a father. When a
mother had adulterous relations with a boarder, she was immoral; when a father did
so with a housekeeper, she was the menace to the household morality.'2 In
two-parent neglect cases, the mother was more likely to be considered the culpable
parent. This pattern was particularly strong in moral neglect cases. For example,
even though mothers were less likely to be considered intemperate than fathers,
they were more likely to be charged with child neglect due to intemperance. Of
those charged with child neglect due to immorality, 77 percent were mothers and
23 percent fathers. The application of this double standard by child-protective
agencies was justified by their conviction that mothers had the greater moral
influence on children. The problem from the point of view of single mothers was
that they had to take on the responsibilities of men with neither the privileges of
men nor the leeway granted to male peccadillos. Police were more often involved
in complaints against single mothers than in those concerning two-parent families:
overall in this period police were drawn into 76.6 percent of all cases and into 87.4
percent of single-mother cases.
The best measurement of the MSPCC's attitudes towards single mothers was its
actions, especially its most drastic-removing children from their parents. In cases
of equal average severity, as defined by the agency social workers, children were
removed from 75 percent of single-mother homes and 54 percent of two-parent
'For a spelling out of this double standard, see Anna Ely Moorehouse, "The Neglected Children of Widowers," in Children in Need of Special Care: Studies Based on Two Thousand Case Records of Social Agencies, ed. Lucile Eaves et al. (Boston, 1923yf 55; or consider Mary Richmond's comment, "the danger of family disintegration is much greater where the mother, rather than the father, is the weak member," in her The Long View, ed. Joanna Colcord (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1930yf 450-51.
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homes. (There were very few single-father families, only 3.6 percent of the cases,
and they were eliminated in this comparison.yf Furthermore, controlling for situa-
tions in which parents themselves asked to have children removed,'3 children were
even more likely to be taken against the wishes of a single mother than of two
parents. In fact, single mothers were less likely to want the removal of their
children in the first place: only 15 percent of child-removal requests came from
single mothers, although they comprised 28 percent of all cases.'4 By contrast,
where a male-headed family was neglectful, neglect charges were less likely to be
brought. Rather, the agency's strategy was more often to get the father arrested,
usually for drunkenness or nonsupport, with a short or suspended sentence, or
alternatively to issue warnings; both strategies were intended to pressure the
parents into providing better care for their children.'5
Only one variable other than single motherhood was a better predictor of
court-ordered child removal: poverty. Yet this was just another aspect of the same
phenomenon, for single mothers were poorer than other parents. From 1880 to
1920, forty-four percent of single mothers were in economic deprivation,'6 as
compared to twenty-six percent of two-parent families. Only ten percent of
single-mother families reached the economic level defined as competence, as
compared to thirty-one percent of two-parent families. Of course, most of the
MSPCC's clients were poor, not because poor people treated their children worse,
but because they were more likely to be caught, and because poverty accounted for
a considerable proportion of what maltreatment of children was. The Society was
'3Parents asked this in eighteen percent of all cases, often seeking temporary placements during an illness, until a job could be found, in order to get a rest, or until the children were old enough for school or work. '1I can suggest two hypotheses to explain why single mothers, despite their greater poverty, were more committed to keeping their children at all times: (1yf single women gained in social status and self-respect from having children more than women in couples did; (2yf single women knew that they were more likely to lose custody of their children permanently if they gave them up even temporarily. '"The legal procedure in neglect cases was to have the child adjudged neglected and given over into the custody of an agency, or returned to the parents with a continuance under the supervision of an agency. Parents were neither convicted nor sentenced for child neglect; their punishment was, de facto, the loss of the child. Parents prosecuted for drunkenness or nonsupport did not necessarily or even usually lose their children. '6Detailed information about family earnings and expenditures began to be available in child protection case records only at the very end of this study, so that these attempts to characterize the standard of living of the clients is approximate. Five categories were established in this coding and researchers reading the cases were asked to make a judgment on the basis of all available clues in the case record. The categories were: deprivation, including those who lacked necessities for health, e.g. shoes, fuel, food subsistence, including those who maintained life and health with chronic insecurity and uncertainty; competence, including those who did not exhibit insecurity or uncertainty about ability to keep family members adequately housed, warmed, clothed, and fed, and who could afford at least some items defined as nonnecessary, e.g. a watch; middle class, including those with standards, aspirations, or employment that set them above manual laborers; and prosperous, including those who could afford substantial luxuries.
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sensitive to allegations that it kidnapped poor people's children, and its stated
policy was that it never removed children from their homes for poverty alone. Yet
poverty was never alone. The characteristic signs of child neglect in this period-
dirty clothing, soiled linen, lice and worms, crowded sleeping conditions, lack of
attention and supervision, untreated infections and running sores, rickets and other
malformations, truancy, malnutrition, and overwork-were often the direct results
of poverty.
Two excerpts from case notes may provide a glimpse of what the child-savers
encountered in neglectful homes:
1904. In the kitchen . .. about a dozen empty beer bottles. Two whiskey bottles one
partly full the other empty. A beef bone in a pan on the stove looked as if it was cooked a
month ago.. . . dry bread crusts on the table and 3 or 4 dirty dishes. In the bed room was
an old bedstead with two very filthy mattresses on it with what was once two pillows. But
they were so dirty and greasy it would be impossible to tell what they were made of. At the
head of the bed was a vessel full of filth which from its look had not been emptied for a
month.. . . Two younger children in the kitchen nearly naked as dirty as they could well
be and covered with vermin. [#1544A.]
1919. The odor in the house was very bad and the kitchen was very dirty. The chn.s'
clothes were dirty and ragged and meant for much older chn. Mo. came down stairs
wearing a loose kimono and carrying a thin frail looking 7 months old baby who was very
dirty. . . . The house had no fire and the chn all seemed to have colds. Mo. seemed
unconcerned. . . . Said the chn sleep in clean beds at night but seemed reluctant to show
them. Hazel, Gladys, and Morris sleep in the bed which she showed agt. [These children
are 7, 8 and I 1. ] There was a very dirty mattress and no clothing. The floor was littered
with rubbish. Hazel had been sent home from sch. recently because teacher said she was
dirty but mo. had washed the dress just the day before. The air in the front room was
stifling, the floor was covered with rubbish and . . . filth. Marion . . . wore no under-
clothing was wearing a shoe on one foot and no shoe or stocking on the other. Alice . . .
had no underclothing on . . . no stockings. [#3050A.]
In addition, cases abounded of children treated with apparent callousness. Small
children were found wandering on the streets at midnight, abandoned in the winter,
and left alone in dark and unheated tenements without food. Babies were found
undiapered or with their diapers unchanged, unfed and sucking on wet rags, with
intestinal worms crawling visibly on diapers and skin and maggots attacking open
sores. Drunken or sick mothers were unable to get out of bed to tend to needy
children.
Such cases require reconsideration of the distinction, made above, between
agency bias and objective neglect. Actual neglect defies such neat categorization.
The "bias" of social workers could be described as prediction based on
experience of the objective difficulties. Furthermore, neither the social workers
nor contemporary researchers studying the case records could easily distinguish
children's deprivations caused by poverty from those caused by parental indiffer-
ence or hostility; parental indifference and hostility were among the most common
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products of poverty, and in addition, parents' depression was implicated both as
cause and effect of poverty. Further, the social workers' standards of what consti-
tuted deprivation were "biased." In the originating conception of child-saving
work, the notion of children's "rights" to a certain standard of treatment was
the product of specific class and cultural experience. The irony embedded in
child-saving work was that the reformers wanted to guarantee children a living
standard often better than that of their parents, yet they wanted to preserve parental
independence in child-raising.
If social workers could not usually distinguish neglectful parenting from the
nature of single motherhood itself, that coalescence of problems reflected histori-
cal change. In agrarian economies, first, there were fewer single mothers, due
mainly to lower illegitimacy and desertion rates. Second, greater household
flexibility, community responsibility, and variable labor requirements allowed
single mothers and their children to be integrated into extended or augmented
households, even among the poor. The conditions single mothers encountered in
Boston were quite different. Very few of the mothers in these case records were
able to live in other family households.'7 Sixty-nine percent of those in the
MSPCC cases were dependent on their own earnings for their own and their
children's survival. Before the development of state mothers' pensions in the
decade from 1910 to 1920, these women faced alone the task of earning a living
while maintaining homes and supervising children.
Yet jobs were scarce and wages low. Boston was not a mill town hungry for
women's and children's labor power. There was some light-industry factory
work-candy making, for example-and sweated garment work. (Clerical work
had not yet expanded and was still primarily male.yf The most common women's
occupation was, of course, domestic service. Yet for all these jobs young
unmarried women were preferred. The scarcity of employment, moreover, de-
pressed female wages for jobs other than domestic service even lower than in more
industrial cities. 8
A second problem facing working mothers was the lack of child care. Day
nurseries were rare. It should not be surprising that inadequate supervision of
children was cited in eighteen percent of MSPCC cases overall but in forty-three
percent of single-mother cases. Lack of child-care resources was the reason that
'70f course these case records capture the experience of the least fortunate, by definition; those with stronger social support networks were much less likely to come to the attention of social agencies. Yet our subject is the least fortunate. "8Carroll D. Wright, The Working Girls of Boston (Boston, 1889yf 81 and passim.
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mothers, unlike childless women, preferred home work to outside jobs. They took
in boarders, or washing, and did babysitting for others. Limiting the availability
and the income of such work was the fact that the poor could afford very little for
these services, while the rich preferred to have them done in their own homes.
Thus few women successfully earned a living in this way. Better pay could be
gotten from manufacturing piece work, usually hand sewing or hand assembly in
the garment or millinery industries, but the working conditions were worse. Piece
rates were low and women worked twelve to sixteen hours a day, neglected
housekeeping and child-care, and put young children to work with them in order to
make a living wage. Few women managed on this basis. A 1913 study of working
women in nine cities, including Boston, showed that only twenty-eight percent of
widows lived on home work. In comparison to work outside the home, home work
produced lower earnings, longer hours, more stress, and more health damage. 19
Other kinds of home work led to "immorality." Taking in boarders was
frowned upon by the MSPCC and most agencies as a source of immoral influences,20
although boarders' payments were vital to a large proportion of households. In
Boston the boarding clientele was predominantly male, and many mothers in the
MSPCC cases did indeed appear to be having sexual relationships with
"boarders" -such allegations were made against forty-one percent of single
mothers-which offense automatically made them "unfit" mothers.2' These
"star boarders," as landladies' lovers were called, also figured prominently in
MSPCC cases as abusers of children, another danger facing the mothers. Single
mothers with abusive lovers or boarders faced a dilemma similar to that of wives
with abusive husbands: their desire to keep their children and need for help in
supporting them made them less able to protect themselves and their children from
molestation or abuse.
Some of the most lucrative home work was illegal-notably prostitution and
bootlegging, both common among single mothers; even before Prohibition many
women manufactured and sold home brew. Both were virtually automatic grounds
'9Mary E. Richmond and Fred S. Hall, A Study of Nine Hundred and Eighty-five Widows Known to Certain Charity Organization Societies in 1910 (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1910yf 22; Irene 0. Andrews, The Relation of Irregular Employment to the Living Wage for Women (New York: New York State Factory Investigating Commission, 1915yf Emily C. Brown, Industrial Home Work
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Women's Bureau Bulletin #79, 1930yf Louise C. Odencrantz, Italian Women in Industry (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1919yf Mary Van Kleeck, Artificial Flower Makers (New York: Survey Associates, 1913yf 20Helen Glenn Tyson, "The Fatherless Family," in Frank D. Watson, ed., Social Work with Families: Social Case Treatment, Vol. 77 and Supplement of Annals, American Academy of Political and Social Science (Philadelphiayf May 1918, 85. 2'Included here are allegations made by MSPCC workers, relatives, or neighbors. One should not assume, however, that these were boarders who became lovers, thereby proving the moral dangers of taking boarders. They may as well have been lovers, or "common-law" husbands, whom the women were trying to disguise to social workers as boarders.
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for child-neglect charges. In several MSPCC cases women turned parts of their
flats into informal bars or speakeasies.22 In other cases already crowded families
gave up space to small-scale commercial operations in return for help with the
rent. 23
In seeking outside jobs the presence of relatives or friends to care for children
was crucial to success. A deserted wife or a widow might manage if her parents or a
sister would take her and her family in, and others might even manage to maintain
their own household with babysitting help. Yet such solutions were usually
unstable. Many mothers resented the indignity of becoming a dependent again,
subject to another head of household; babysitters, even relatives, were themselves
often unreliable and neglectful.
Most domestic servants were required to live in, and at best, in some cases,
might be allowed to bring a nursing baby. Older children would have to be placed
elsewhere. Employers sometimes "helped" their maids by applying to the
Society for placement of older babies.24 In these cases the mother's choice was to
sign away her child or to lose her job. For such reasons mothers seized the
opportunity to do nonresident house cleaning, or "day work," as it was called.
One common form of day work was laundry. Several MSPCC cases offered the
irony of filthy children in unwashed bedding whose mothers washed, bleached,
and ironed for others. Day housecleaning work gradually increased in this period,
not in private homes but in office buildings. This "day work," as it was called,
was usually night work. (In a 1913 study, forty-eight percent of widows worked at
night.yf Since arranging child care then was even harder than in the day, many
children were left unattended, unless the mother also had boarders, lodgers, or
relatives in her home. The MSPCC cases contain numerous examples of mothers
trying to hide the fact that they worked nights so as not to have to answer questions
about what they did with the children. Night cleaning furthermore deprived
mothers of sleep and often meant that they worked around the clock.
In these circumstances mothers often leaned on their children to bring in
income. This expectation continued traditional family economy patterns for many
clients, but in their new urban situation, child labor was defined as neglect. Its
frequency, nevertheless, was evidenced by the important role of the truant officer
in referrals to the MSPCC. Other neglected children did illegal peddling or stealing
(as, for example, from the coal scuttles of rich houses or railroad yardsyf these
children's mothers were often even more "neglectful" than the authorities
imagined, not only failing to prevent such mischief but actively encouraging it.
22That is, they sold liquor not only by the bottle but also by the drink. 23In one 1917 case, two rooms of a four-room tenement were sublet to a peddler who stored his fruits and vegetables there. Yet the two children were malnourished. 24#08 14A. 2"Richmond and Hall, A Study of Nine Hundred and Eight-five Widows, ch. 10.
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In trying to provide adequate parenting, single mothers were often caught in a
series of double binds. Their very attempts to nurture children could produce
neglect. Doing home work led to overworking children, depriving them of atten-
tion and supervision, and overcrowding the apartment, with the likelihood of
failing to provide adequately for children despite these hardships. Going out to
work might require leaving children alone and vulnerable, or placing them with
unloving and irresponsible babysitters. Looking for a male breadwinner might lead
to immoral relations. Trying to protect children from the abuse of others might
deprive the family of a breadwinner. Agency policies made it risky for single
mothers to be honest, and they attempted to conceal their jobs, their babysitters,
their lovers, their pregnancies, and even their illnesses for fear of losing their
children.26
What might agencies such as the MSPCC have done to aid neglectful single
mothers? It is important to remember the historical context in answering. Before
1920 not even the most radical reformers welcomed full-time employment for
women or day care for children. In the last decade of this period mothers' pensions,
sometimes called widows' pensions, were established by many states, representing
the first large-scale charitable and governmental recognition that single mothers
comprised a category of people needing help. The debate over mothers' pensions
split the charities and correction establishment, many of its leading spokespeople,
including MSPCC leaders, opposing this reform. Even its supporters expressed
anxiety about woman-headed households. Still, the child-savers' opposition to
mothers' pensions was not a simple product of concern about children's depriva-
tions, and indeed it was in some aspects dissonant with the goal of protecting and
nurturing children.
The anxiety about single mothers within the social work and especially the
child-saving establishments could be seen in four related discourses: about deser-
tion, illegitimacy, women's employment, and mothers' pensions. In confronting
each issue, social workers aimed to punish and deter immorality, to protect
children, and to encourage the construction of proper families. In practice, pursu-
ing all these aims often produced contradictions, and this was particularly the case
when woman-headed households were an option.
Desertion was perceived as an escalating and urgent social problem by the turn
of the century and had been incorporated into the MSPCC program as ipso facto a
26E.g. #2001, #2500, #3302. See the excellent description of the worker-client relationship producing dishonesty in Jane Addams's Democracy and Social Ethics (New York: Macmillan, 1907yf ch. 2.
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major form of cruelty to children.27 In practice, the case records show, the Society
worried about desertion not only from the perspective of children's deprivations
but also as a violation of the proper roles of men and women. Desertion was a result
of a father's weak and cowardly evasion of masculine responsibility.28 Therefore
aid to wives and children of deserters had to meet the criterion that it did not further
undermine the father's role as breadwinner, his duty to support, and his authority
over his family. The Society's moralistic and punitive attitude towards deserters
often required accepting, as a consequence, that the deserter's wife might have to
suffer also. As Mary Richmond, influential spokesperson for the "scientific
charity" tendency with which the MSPCC identified, argued, "It is absurd to
go into a home and do for it what the legal and recognized head . . . has deliber-
ately shirked . . . and then to suppose . . . that you have not interfered between
man and wife.' '29 Even blaming men unilaterally for their cowardly desertion did
not benefit their wives: the most anti-male rhetoric, such as that of Ada Eliot, who
considered the problem to result from men's "brute-like" nature, nevertheless
argued against relief to support homes without men.30
MSPCC policy was to force deserters to pay rather than to seek aid for single
mothers. In pursuing this policy it expanded its role and its control over its clients.
Although it had declined to accept jurisdiction for arranging relief, it took
responsibility for obtaining court orders requiring deserted or nonsupporting
fathers to make support payments. Then, adding yet a new responsibility, the
MSPCC arranged for fathers to turn over payments to the Society, which it then
doled out to the mother, supervising her expenditures in the process.3' The
MSPCC became a virtual collection agency as its staff billed and dunned and tried
to extradite deserters. It was influential in lobbying for legislation to increase the
criminal penalties for nonsupport and desertion.32 Since many deserters had not
disappeared but were merely nonsupporters, the agency policies sometimes,
ironically, increased an irresponsible husband's control over his family. For
example, one estranged husband would make his payment to MSPCC, then force
his wife to return the money to him so that he could circulate it back through the
27MSPCC, AnnualReport, 1908. 17; Mary Conyngton, How to Help:A Manual of Practical Charity (New York: Macmillan, 1909yf 150-51; Helen Foss, "The Genus Deserter: His Singularities and Their Social Consequences-A Study of Local Fact and Interstate Remedies," Charities, 10, 2 May 1903, 456-60. 28Zilpha D. Smith, Deserted Wives and Deserting Husbands. A Study of 234 Families Based on the Experience of the District Committees and Agents (Boston: Associated Charities, 1901yf 9-13. 29Richmond, The Long View, 80, this essay orig. 1897. 30Eliot, "Deserted Wives," Charities Review, 10 (Oct. 1900yf 347. 31The policy is explained in Annual Report, 1894; examples of actual agreements between the Society and fathers are in MSPCC, Early Correspondence, Univ. of Massachusetts Archives, e.g., agreement with Jeremiah Doherty, 25 Nov. 1892, folder 27. 32Annual Reports, 1894, 1908, 1911; State Rep. William T. Forbes to Theodore A. Lothrop, General Sec. of MSPCC, letter dated 12 Aug. 1930, MSPCC Archives, Boston, Massachusetts.
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agency for his next payment.33 Numerous estranged husbands offered to support
their families if their wives would let them return to the household, although their
wives had been requesting MSPCC aid precisely to get free of abusive husbands.34
Since the definition of desertion was elusive, and some deserted wives colluded
with their husbands, hid their whereabouts, and/or let them return to the household
periodically,35 it was difficult to distinguish desertion, nonsupport, and unemploy-
ment. MSPCC policies punished all of these indiscriminately. Thus in a 1920 case
a one-legged father, periodically unemployed, had broken his wooden leg and lost
his job again. The social worker knew this but did not call on the family because
"it is her intention to try and develop initiative in the family."36 In a 1912
neglect case, children had been out begging and the agency threatened to remove
them if they did not stop. The mother wanted to leave her good-for-nothing
husband if there was a way she could do so without losing her children, but the
agency recommended against aid to the family because it would encourage the
father's laziness.37
Treating all these problems as somehow willful and unilateral on the husband's
part brought further hardships. For example, the MSPCC often urged wives to
prosecute husbands for nonsupport. Their success would bring ajail sentence, thus
punishing the culprit and, it was argued, setting a deterrent example; but it also
deprived the family of support. Many mothers lost their children because a jail
sentence intended to reform the family took the father away.38 Furthermore,
prosecutions required wives to testify against their husbands, a procedure that
could weaken the chances for future reconciliation, and that intimidated wives
fearful of or ambivalent about their husbands.
Another indicator of distrust of woman-headed families was the treatment of
illegitimacy. If the illegitimate mother kept her child, she ran a risk of failing to
provide good mothering because of her immorality. Yet if she were helped to get
rid of her child, was not her immoral behavior being rewarded? Still, to force an
unwilling girl to keep her child was not necessarily in the best interests of the child,
and the child-savers believed that children ought not to be punished for the
circumstances of their conception. Furthermore, most charity workers, even if
they believed in punishment for sexual immorality, also perceived the unwed
mother as herself a child in need of help and wanted to give girls-gone-wrong a
chance to reclaim an honorable life.40
33#340 1. 34#0305, #0314A, #1080. 35#2042, #2053, #3041, for examples. 36#2565, research by Nancy McKerrow. 37#2042. 38#3361, research by Nancy McKerrow. 39#0501, #0524, #0815A. 40A good view of this contradictory impulse in The First Massachusetts Conference of Charities, 1903, pamphlet, reprinted from Charities, 28 Nov. 1903, 8-11, 23-31; see also MSPCC, Annual Report, 1892.
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Starting in the 1 890s the MSPCC and other progressive agencies came to believe
that, even without marriage, mother and child ought to be kept together.4' This
belief represented a victory for the sentimental cult of motherhood; charity workers
believed that the experience of childbirth and the opportunity to be with the infant
would create love and a sense of responsibility in the mother, and that this
maternalism could in itself help to reform wayward girls.42
In practice, however, agency actions in response to unwed motherhood were
divided and confused. The entire basis of the sentimental outlook rested on a view
of these mothers as girls, and in the MSPCC cases they were rarely that: most were
previously married women, and many were currently living in marriage-like rela-
tions. Thus the traditional first course of action-to arrange a marriage-was
inappropriate; even if the mothers were girls, they would not usually have been at
the agency had a marriage been possible.43 The next best solution was to mobilize
the mother's parents or other relatives to take her in with the child. Yet neither were
these arrangements usually possible, often because the illegitimate mother had
other children or because the relatives had poor and crowded households. A 1920
Boston survey showed that only twenty percent of illegitimate mothers aided by
agencies were able to live with their parents, and of those only half did so with their
child."4 Another study showed that mother and child usually lived with her parents
for a short time only.45 Extended-family solutions did not resolve the long-range
problem of single motherhood.
Grandparents failing, the MSPCC often tried placements in service positions.46
Such placements were also temporary, limited to the child's infancy, and they often
4"This reform over the earlier manner of dealing with illegitimacy represented a differential treatment for the poor, since prosperous girls who got "in trouble" continued to be moved away during the later stages of pregnancy, to deliver their babies in private homes, to surrender the babies, and return to normal life without damage to their futures. See Joan Brumberg, "'Ruined' Girls: Changing Community Responses to Illegitimacy in Upstate New York, 1890-1920," Journal of Social History, 18 (1985yf 247-72. 42Boston Conference on Illegitimacy, untitled article, Survey 30, 13 Sept. 1913, 707-08; Anna T. Wilson, "Foundlings and Illegitimate Children," in International Congress of Charities, Correc- tions and Philanthropy, The Care of Dependent, Neglected and Wayward Children, ed. Anna Garlin Spencer and Charles Wesley Birtwell (Baltimore, 1894yf 57-68; First Massachusetts State Conference of Charities, 11. 43Alberta S. B. Guibord and Ida R. Parker, What Becomes of the Unmarried Mother? A Study of 82 Cases (Boston, 1922yf 37, for example. 'Ida R. Parker, A Follow-up Study of 550 Illegitimacy Applications (Boston: Research Bureau on Social Case Work, 1924yf Of course this low figure reflects the fact that unmarried mothers who had supportive relatives were less likely to need agency help and would not appear in the records. 45The peak number of babies were with grandparents and illegitimate mothers at age nine months. Emma 0. Lundberg and Katharine F. Lenroot, Illegitimacy as a Child-Welfare Problem, Report of the U.S. Department of Labor, Children's Bureau (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1920yf II, 144. 46Wilson, "Foundlings and Illegitimate Children"; David F. Tilley, [untitled statement], in First Massachusetts Conference, 9; George L. Jones, "How Does Our Treatment of the Unmarried Mother with the Second Child Differ from our Treatment of the Unmarried Mother with her First Child," National Conference of Charities and Corrections, Procedures, 1919, 81-85.
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provoked great resistance on the part of the mother, owing to the lack of personal
freedom she experienced as a live-in domestic.
Even when resident in other households, single mothers often needed to earn.
Yet MSPCC workers were also critical of women's employment and of the
nonmaternal child care it usually required. Many child-welfare workers believed
there was no point in keeping mother and children together if someone else had to
take care of the children. In practice MSPCC policy was all or nothing: it arranged
placements in institutions or foster homes, not in day nurseries or with babysitters.
Several MSPCC workers simply ordered women to stay home and look after their
children, and women sometimes tried to hide their employment from agency
visitors.
Even social workers who wanted single mothers to become self-supporting
expected women to remain economically dependent when living with husbands.
Whenever a husband was in the home, no matter how poor, disabled, or irresponsi-
ble, charity workers were hostile to wives taking employment. This position did
not always reflect the mother's judgment. One MSPCC record read:
Mother . .. desiring to obtain elderly woman to come into her home and care for the
chn as mo has to go out and do day work; sometimes earns as much as $18 a week. Fa has
not had a steady position for quite a period of time, but is doing the best he can, and mo
has no fault to find. . .. [I] made it quite evident to mo that the desirable thing was for her
to stay at home and care for the chn and have fa obtain a steady position. [#3565A.]
Economic contributions from wives, they believed, would weaken a man's sense
of his responsibility. Women who were wage earners before marriage tended to be
"'unfit for married life: [women] from the very fact of being economically
independent may be led to assert her independence in ways which will in
themselves be provocative of household friction."48 Joanna Colcord, for the
Russell Sage Foundation, wrote in 1919: "Many a non-supporter got his first
47E.g. #2024, #3041; MSPCC newsletter The Square Deal II, 1, Feb. 1919, 8. In one case of a nonsupporting husband, from an agency similar to the MSPCC, the record reads: "The woman was willing to work-had applied for day nursery care, but [the agency worker] had persuaded the nursery not to accept their children." Quoted approvingly by Joanna Colcord in her Broken Homes: A Study of Desertion and its Social Treatment (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1919yf 189. The objections to women's employment stemmed from deep convictions about women's domesticity. This view was not a "sexist" attitude. Seeing women's employment as, at best, a misfortune was common among feminists as well, a result of the nearly universal understanding of motherhood as women's unique and essential calling. For example, Florence Kelly, "The Family and the Woman's Wage," National Conference of Charities and Corrections, Proceedings, 1909, 118-21; Jane Addams, Presidential Address, "Charity and Social Justice," in ibid., 1910, 6-7. George Mangold, a nonfeminist, makes exactly the same argument in his ChildProblems (New York: Macmillan, 1910yf 89-90, as does Conyngton, How to Help, 185. 48Colcord, Broken Homes, ch. 2; Conyngton, How to Help, 185; Earle Eubank, A Study of Family Desertion (Chicago: Dept. of Public Welfare, 1916yf 13.
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impulse in that direction when his wife became a wage-earner in some domestic
crisis." Her advice to the wives of nonsupporting husbands: "If your husband
comes home crying, and says he can't find any work, sit down . . . and cry until he
does.' 4
Although mothers' pensions were a welfare provision specifically for single
mothers, the controversy around this reform, oddly, disguised its gender and
family implications. The social-work establishment debated the merits of public-
versus-private responsibility for charity, and "outdoor" versus "indoor
relief" (the traditional British terms for giving aid to people in their own homes
versus institutionalizationyf as deterrents to pauperism.50 Gender issues were
obscured in this controversy relative to their explicitness in, say, arguments about
protective legislation.
Nevertheless, a closer look at the debate, and at the practice of agencies like the
MSPCC, reveals an anxiety about the potential effects of such pensions on gender
roles. C.C.Carstens, General Agent of the MSPCC and at the time the most
influential man in the United States' child-saving movement, was an opponent of
aid to single mothers, and family-centered concerns were primary for him: his
purpose was to abolish the class of single mothers, not establish it. "The
enthusiast in favor of widows' pensions . . . is likely to hold lightly the ties of
kinship."' Carstens's implicit definition of kinship here, one shared by many
opponents, must have been marriage, for the very goal of mothers' pensions was to
preserve filial ties. When Mary Wilcox Glenn argued that the pensions would
"lessen the family's sense of responsibility for its own," by "family" she
meant fathers.52 Similarly ideological was Edward Devine's definition of "fam-
ily" when he argued, "The breaking up of a family by an outside agency is
justified only when it is merely the outward expression of a destruction which has
already taken place . . . separation of husband and wife. . . .'5Only a definition
that equated "family" with "married couple" could produce this conclu-
49Colcord, Broken Homes, 154. 50Many commentators have defined the mothers' pension controversy exclusively in these terms. See, for example, Mark H. Leff, "Consensus for Reform: The Mothers' Pension Movement in the Progressive Era," Social Service Review, 47 (1973yf 397-417; James Leiby, A History of Social Welfare and Social Work in the US (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1978yf Muriel W. Pumphrey and Ralph E. Pumphrey, "The Widows' Pension Movement, 1900-1930: Preventive Child-Saving or Social Control, " in Social Welfare or Social Control? Some Historical Reflections on "Regulating the Poor," ed. Walter I. Trattner (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1983yf 51-66. Only one previous work, to my knowledge, has noticed any of the gender dimensions of this controversy: Ann Vandepol, "Dependent Children, Child Custody, and the Mothers' Pensions: The Transformation of State- Family Relations in the Early 20th Century," Social Problems, 29 (1982yf 221-35. 51C. C. Carstens, Public Pensions to Widows with Children (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1913yf 28. 52National Conference of Charities and Corrections, Proceedings, 1914, 453. She added that pensions were not "virile!" 53Devine, "The Breaking Up of Families," Charities Review, 10 (1900yf 461.
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sion that mothers' pensions were "an insidious attack upon the family, inimical
to the welfare of children. . . .
Mothers' pensions caught on widely and quickly, despite substantial social-
work opposition, not only because they made sense for children, but also because
agency clients were stubbornly demanding them. They did so not necessarily in
those words or terms, but in searching for any aid that made it possible for them to
keep and support their children. Thirty-four percent of single-mother cases were
brought to the MSPCC by the mothers themselves asking for help. As reported
above, they were less likely to ask for the placing out of their children than other
parents. Their most common requests were for "separation and maintenance"
orders, legal recognition as heads of family, child-support payments from fathers,
regular relief payments, and, less commonly, help in finding daytime child care.
Yet the response of the MSPCC, a nationally leading agency in child protection,
was disproportionately to deny material or counseling help to these mothers and to
recommend the removal of children. This apparent discrimination against single
mothers resulted simultaneously from observation of actual conditions making it
difficult to combine breadwinning and childraising, from ideological anxieties
about pauperization, and also from fear of destabilizing male and female roles.
The bias against single mothers was a result not of malevolence but of fear and
genuine concern for children. Nevertheless, the result was a contradiction: the
failure of child-saving agencies to do the best they could to secure the welfare of
neglected children. In an era of insistence on the vital importance of mothering,
child-savers frequently recommended the institutionalization of children in prefer-
ence to granting aid to their mothers. In 1900 the majority of children in institutions
were only "half-orphans."'' Between 1880 and 1920, seventy-four percent of
the neglected children of single mothers were taken from those mothers by the
MSPCC. Even assuming that a substantial proportion of these mothers would have
remained permanently incompetent parents, many others were affected primarily
by remediable problems such as poverty and overwork. Furthermore, mothers
would have had to be extremely abusive to have done worse by their children than
the usual institutions.56
At the same time, the rise of the child protective movement, in bringing out
these contradictions, stimulated reform. Despite their intentions, child savers had
54Devine, "Pensions for Mothers," from American Labor Legislation Review, 3 (June 1913yf reprinted in SelectedArticles on Mothers' Pensions, comp. Edna D. Bullock (New York, n.p., 1915yf 177. 55Homer Folks, The Care of Destitute, Neglected and Delinquent Children (New York: Macmillan, 1902yf 134. 56Despite the enunciation of a policy of family placements for children, up through 1920 the majority was institutionalized; see Andrew Billingsley and Jeanne M. Giovannoni, Children of the Storm: Black Children and American Child Welfare (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972yf 69-70.
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created agencies to which single mothers came pleading their desires and arguing
their own proposals. One result of that pressure, both from the steady, stubborn,
manipulative clients and from desperate, hysterical clients, both from "good"
mothers and from "bad," was the rapid change of social-work opinion to favor
mothers' pensions by 1920. In this way the MSPCCs, despite their highly ideologi-
cal and culturally specific notions of good parenting, may in the long run have been
beneficial even to parents of whom they disapproved.
My purpose in this article has not been to criticize child welfare work of the past,
but to explore a previously unexamined aspect of the development of modem
norms about proper family life. There has been a continuing tendency within both
family scholarship and social welfare policy to treat single motherhood as aber-
rant, rather than common and "normal." Similarly, child neglect has been
conceived as a product of parents' ill health, socio-economic stress, and defective
family structure, rather than as in good measure a structural aspect of female
poverty. Scholars and policy makers have assumed that stable families are eco-
nomically independent, and that families needing "outside help" to support
children could not be stable in the long run. The high incidence of urban woman-
headed families for over a century, and the severe material problems that faced
responsible and energetic as well as irresponsible and depressed single mothers,
suggest the need to question whether economic independence should be the
highest goal or even the desirable norm for good childraising.
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