In the nation's image: The gendered limits of social citizenship in the depression era

Journal of American History

Volumn 86, Issue 3, 1999, Pages 1251-1278

  Kessler Harris, Alice ^a  

^a Och Spine at New York Presbyterian Hospitals   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0012076225     PISSN: 00218723     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2568614     Document Type: Article

References (146)

1. Lord Snell, Baron of Plumstead, address to the Fifth National Conference of the American Association for old Age Security in spring 1932, quoted in Abraham Epstein, Insecurity: A Challenge to America (New York, 1938), 31.
2. The British welfare state served others less well. See the evocative memoir of Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman (London, 1984);
3. and Elizabeth Wilson, Women and the Welfare State (London, 1977).
4. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, 1992), 162; Appadurai notes that nations are sometimes constructed from ideas about blood and kinship and at others out of cultural connections. See
5. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1991);
6. Eric Hobsbawm, "Mass-Producing Tradition," in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge, Eng., 1992), 263-308;
7. and Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought in the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Minneapolis, 1986).
8. Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 402-3.
9. Homi K. Babha, "DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation," in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Babha (New York, 1990), 292.
10. For access to the history of these programs, see Edward Berkowitz, America's Welfare State: From Roosevelt to Reagan (Baltimore, 1991);
11. Colin Gordon, New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics in America, 1920-1935 (Cambridge, Eng., 1994);
12. and Stanley Vittoz, New Deal Labor Policy and the American Industrial Economy (Chapel Hill, 1987).
13. Redistribution of income has been one of the acknowledged functions of the family-based income tax. See especially Edward J. McCaffery, Taxing Women (Chicago, 1997);
14. and the classic Boris Bittker, "Federal Income Taxation and the Family," Stanford Law Review, 27 (July 1975), 1389-1463.
15. Susan Pedersen, Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914-45 (New York, 1993);
16. Diane Sainsbury, Gender, Equality, and Welfare States (Cambridge, Eng., 1996);
17. Renate Howe, "A Paradise for Working Men but Not Working Women: Women's Wage Work and Protective Legislation in Australia, 1890-1914," in Protecting Women: Labor Legislation in Europe, the United States, and Australia, 1880-1920, ed. Ulla Wikander, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Jane Lewis (Urbana, 1995), 318-36;
18. Sophie Watson, ed., Playing the State: Australian Feminist Interventions (Sydney, 1990);
19. and Kathleen Canning, Languages of Labor and Gender: Female Factory Work in Germany, 1850-1914 (Ithaca, 1996).
20. On the idea and limits of the "good society," see John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Boston, 1958);
21. and more recently, Robert N. Bellah et al., The Good Society (New York, 1991), ch. 3. For Australian attitudes toward government, see
22. Marian Sawer, "Reclaiming Social Liberalism: The Women's Movement and the State," in Women and the State: Australian Perspectives, ed. Renate Howe (Melbourne, 1993), 1-21.
23. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 7.
24. Sydney J. Lemelle and Robin D. G. Kelley, eds., Imagining Home: Class, Culture, and Nationalism in the African Diaspora (New York, 1994), 2.
25. See also Robin D. G. Kelley, "'But a Local Phase of a World Problem': Black History's Global Vision," Journal of American History, 86 (Dec. 1999), 1045-77.
26. Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China (Stanford, 1994), 148-51.
27. Katherine David, "Czech Feminists and Nationalism in the Late Habsburg Monarchy: 'The First in Austria,'" Journal of Women's History, 3 (Fall 1991), 26-45, esp. 27;
28. Lata Mani, "Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India," in Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (New Brunswick, 1990), 88-126;
29. Mrinalini Sinha, "Reading Mother India: Empire, Nation, and the Female Voice" Journal of Women's History, 6 (Summer 1994), 6-44;
30. see also Samita Sen, "Motherhood and Mothercraft: Gender and Nationalism in Bengal," Gender and History, 5 (Summer 1993), 231-43;
31. R. Radhakrishnan, "Nationalism, Gender, and the Narrative of Identity," in Nationalisms and Sexualities, ed. Andrew Parker et al. (New York, 1992), 77-95;
32. Donna J. Guy, "'White Slavery,' Citizenship, and Nationality in Argentina," Nationalisms and Sexualities, ibid., 201-17;
33. Valentine M. Moghadam, "Revolution, Islam, and Women: Sexual Politics in Iran and Afghanistan," Nationalisms and Sexualities, ibid., 424-46.
34. The rape of women by soldiers in wartime is a classic example of the embodiment of male power over a victimized female/nation. On this, see especially Rhonda Copelon, "Gendered War Crimes: Reconceptualizing Rape in Time of War," in Women's Rights, Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives, ed. Julie Peters and Andrea Wolper (New York, 1995), 197-217.
35. Wikander, Kessler-Harris, and Lewis, eds., Protecting Women, 1-27;
36. Anna-Birte Ravn, "'Lagging Far Behind All Civilized Nations': The Debate over Protective Labor Legislation for Women in Denmark, 1899-1913," Protecting Women, ibid., 210-34;
37. Margarete Grandner, "Special Labor Protection for Women in Austria, 1860-1918," Protecting Women, ibid., 150-87;
38. Regina Wecker, "Equality for Men? Factory Laws, Protective Legislation for Women in Switzerland, and the Swiss Effort for International Protection," Protecting Women, ibid., 63-90;
39. Ulla Jansz, "Women or Workers? The 1889 Labor Law and the Debate on Protective Labor Legislation in the Netherlands," Protecting Women, ibid., 188-209; Howe, "A Paradise for Working Men but Not Working Women."
40. Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (New York, 1982);
41. Anna Shola Orloff and Theda Skocpol, "Why Not Equal Protection? Explaining the Politics of Public Spending in Britain, 1900-1911, and the United States, 1880s to 1920," American Sociological Review, 49 (Dec. 1984), 726-50;
42. Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 1992).
43. Anna Shola Orloff, "Gender and the Social Rights of Citizenship: The Comparative Analysis of Gender Relations and Welfare States," American Sociological Review, 58 (June 1993), 303-28;
44. Gwendolyn Mink, Wages of Motherhood: Inequality in the Welfare State, 1917-42 (Ithaca, 1995);
45. Suzanne Mettler, Dividing Citizens: Gender and Federalism in New Deal Public Policy (Cornell, 1998).
46. A similar argument might be made for the use of race where influential work has revealed how political structure influenced outcomes; see Jill Quadagno, The Transformation of Old Age Security: Class and Politics in the American Welfare State (Chicago, 1988), 125-59;
47. Frank Friedel, "The South and the New Deal," in The New Deal and the South, ed. James C. Cobb and Michael V. Namorato (Jackson, Miss., 1984), 17-36;
48. and James T. Patterson, Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal (Lexington, Ky., 1967).
49. On the issue of ideology, see George Fredrickson, The Comparative Imagination: On the History of Racism, Nationalism, and Social Movements (Berkeley, 1997), 58-59.
50. My perspective here is closer to that of some European social scientists; see Anne Phillips, Engendering Democracy (Cambridge, Eng., 1991), 60-91;
51. and Helga Maria Hernes, Welfare State and Woman Power: Essays in State Feminism (Oslo, 1987), 135-63.
52. Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 409-84;
53. a similar argument was made by Daniel Levine, Poverty and Society: The Growth of the American Welfare State in International Comparison (New Brunswick, 1988), 167-80
54. ; and see Kathryn Kish Sklar, Anja Schuler, and Susan Strasser, Social Justice Feminists in the United States and Germany: A Dialogue in Documents, 1885-1933 (Ithaca, 1998).
55. C. B. McPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (London, 1962).
56. For the development of these ideas among workers, see Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York, 1984).
57. The best exploration of free labor is still Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York, 1970);
58. and see Jonathan Glickstein, Concepts of Free Labor in Antebellum America (New Haven, 1991), 1-22;
59. and Robert Steinfeld, The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350-1870 (Chapel Hill, 1991), 147-72. For the gendered content of these ideas at the turn of the century, see
60. Alice Kessler-Harris, A Woman's Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences (Lexington, Ky., 1990), 33-56.
61. Abraham Epstein discounted the African American community as a force: Abraham Epstein, Insecurity: A Challenge to America: A Study of Social Security in the United States and Abroad (New York, 1936), 24.
62. For the political trajectory of these debates, see Roy Lubove, The Struggle for Social Security: 1900-1935 (Cambridge, Mass., 1968);
63. Martha Derthick, Policymaking for Social Security (Washington, 1979);
64. Arthur Altmeyer, The Formative Years of Social Security (Madison, 1966);
65. and Edwin E. Witte, The Development of the Social Security Act (Madison, 1963).
66. Barbara Nachtrieb Armstrong, Insuring the Essentials: Minimum Wage, plus Social Insurance - a Living Wage Program (New York, 1932). Barbara Nachtrieb Armstrong interview by Peter A. Corning, Dec. 19, 1965, transcript, pp. 30, 34, 38, Columbia University Oral History Research Collection (Butler Library, Columbia University, New York).
67. Later J. Douglas Brown added, "We felt benefit as a matter of right was far more to be preferred than one for which there would be a needs test." J. Douglas Brown interview by Peter A. Corning, Feb. 5, 1965, transcript, pp. 2, 23, Columbia University Oral History Research Collection. Armstrong interview, 275-76. 22 Witte, Development of the Social Security Act, 132.
68. Barbara Nachtrieb Armstrong to J. Douglas Brown, memorandum, Nov. 6, 1934, file: Nov. 1934, Box 14, J. Douglas Brown Papers (Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University Library, Princeton, N.J.). Published with permission of Princeton University Library.
69. For her account of the press incident, see Armstrong interview, transcript, pp. 87, 154, 164. Marion B. Folsom interview by Peter A. Corning, June 19, 1965, transcript, p. 53, Columbia University Oral History Research Collection. Brown interview, transcript, p. 21.
70. J. Douglas Brown, "British Precedent and American Old Age Insurance," American Labor Legislation Review, 27 (March 1937), 19, 20. Brown interview, transcript, p. 63.
71. The racial exclusion was not invisible to leaders of the African American community, though that of women was. See Mary Poole, "Securing Race and Ensuring Dependence: The Social Security Act of 1935" (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, forthcoming).
72. Edwin E. Witte testimony, U. S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Finance, Economic Security Act, Hearings on S. 1130, 74 Cong., 1 sess., Jan. 24, 1935, p. 85.
73. Altmeyer, Formative Years of Social Security, vii, 5, 6.
74. This story is told in Alice Kessler-Harris, "'Designing Women and Old Fools': The Construction of the Social Security Amendments of 1939," in U.S. History as Women's History, ed. Linda Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar (Chapel Hill, 1995), 87-106.
75. The most relevant exploration of dependence is Linda Gordon and Nancy Fraser, "A Genealogy of 'Dependency': Tracing a Key Word of the U.S. Welfare State," in Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the Postsocialist Condition, by Nancy Fraser (New York, 1997), 121-50.
76. Katherine B. Lenroot interview by Peter A. Corning, June 1, 1965, transcript, p. 7, Columbia University Oral History Research Collection. Grace Abbott told the Senate hearings on the Social Security Act that she fully supported both old-age insurance and unemployment insurance, as designed. She expected the income of most mothers to come not from those programs, but from those specially designed for women with children. Grace Abbott testimony, U.S. Congress, Hearings before the Senate Committee on Finance on S. 1130, the Economic Security Act, 74:1 (Feb. 18, 1935), 1083-86.
77. My thinking on this has been influenced by Mink, Wages of Motherhood; Linda Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (New York, 1994), 145-82;
78. Mimi Abramovitz, Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present (Boston, 1988), 215-66.
79. On the idea of the two-track state, see Barbara Nelson, "The Origins of the Two-Channel Welfare State: Workmen's Compensation and Mothers' Aid," in Women, the State, and Welfare, ed. Linda Gordon (Madison, 1990), 123-51.
80. I. M. Rubinow, "The Social Security Act: An Appraisal," National Municipal Review, 25 (March 1936), 143.
81. The best general account is Daniel Nelson, Unemployment Insurance: The American Experience, 1915-1935 (Madison, 1969).
82. Edwin E. Witte, "Organized Labor and Social Security," in Labor and the New Deal, ed. Milton Derber and Edwin Young (Madison, 1961), 252-53.
83. American Federation of Labor, Report of the Proceedings of the 51st Annual Convention, Vancouver, Oct. 1931, pp. 370, 369.
84. Report of the Proceedings of the 51st Annual Convention, Ibid., 369.
85. Report of the Proceedings of the 51st Annual Convention, Ibid., 369.
86. American Federation of Labor, Report of the Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Convention, Cincinnati, Nov. 1932, p. 246.
87. American Federation of Labor, Report of the Proceedings, 1932, pp. 326-27, 334, 342.
88. American Federation of Labor, Report of the Proceedings, 1931, p. 369.
89. Olander quoted in Kenneth Casebeer, "The Workers' Unemployment Insurance Bill: American Social Wages, Labor Organization, and Labor Ideology," in Labor Law in America: Historical and Critical Essays, ed. Christopher L. Tomlins and Andrew J. King (Baltimore, 1992), 237.
90. American Federation of Labor, Report of the Proceeding, 1931, pp. 372, 373, 374;
91. see also Florence Hanson of the Teachers Union: "I believe . . . unemployment insurance will increase the freedom of the worker and his self-respect, and that unemployment insurance will be of great strength to trade unionists": Report of the Proceeding, ibid., 383.
92. American Federation of Labor, Report of the Proceedings, 1932, pp. 373, 339.
93. John R. Commons, "Unemployment Compensation and Prevention," Survey, 47 (Oct. 1, 1921), 8-9;
94. John R. Commons, "The True Scope of Unemployment Insurance," American Labor Legislation Review, 15 (March 1925), 43-45;
95. John R. Commons, Myself. The Autobiography of John Commons (Madison, 1964).
96. Quadagno, Transformation of Old Age Security; Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue (New York, 1978), 21-50.
97. Epstein, Insecurity, 101.
98. U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Education and Labor, Social Insurance, Hearings on S. 3475, 74 Cong., 2 sess., April 14, 1936, p. 2. The progress of the bill can be traced in Casebeer, "Workers' Unemployment Insurance Bill," 231-59; the rationale for the bill and the final text can be found in the hearings, cited above, as well as in Mary Van Kleeck, "The Case for H.R. 7598," typescript, Nov. 14, 1934, folder 534, box 28, Mary Van Kleeck Collection (Sophia Smith Archives, Smith College, Northampton, Mass.). This was apparently prepared for the New Masses but, as far as I can tell, was never published.
99. Casebeer, "Workers' Unemployment Insurance Bill," 232.
100. Van Kleeck, "Case for H.R. 7598," 7.
101. Still, even within the labor movement the Lundeen bill had many champions, including two of the large female unions (the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union), the Textile Workers Union, the United Mine Workers of America, and the Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers Union. Van Kleeck, "Case for H.R. 7598," 7; see also Mary Van Kleeck, "Security for Americans, V: The Workers' Bill for Unemployment and Social Insurance," New Republic, 81 (Dec. 12, 1934), 123. Witte attributed the defeat of this bill to the labor movement, writing "Thanks to labor's clear denunciation, the 'thunder' for this measure never became more than a tinpan disharmony, which fooled scarcely anyone": Witte, "Organized Labor and Social Security," 255.
102. American Federation of Labor, Report of the Proceedings of the Fifty-Sixth Annual Convention, Tampa, Florida, Nov. 16, 1936, p. 5.
103. This, as Nancy F. Cott and others have pointed out, was inherent in the Jeffersonian ideal as in that of free labor. See Nancy F. Cott, "Marriage and Women's Citizenship in the United States: 1830-1934," American Historical Review, 103 (Dec. 1998), 1448;
104. see also Kessler-Harris, Woman's Wage, 6-56;
105. and Susan James, "The Good Enough Citizen: Citizenship and Independence," in Beyond Equality and Difference: Citizenship, Feminist Politics, Female Subjectivity, ed. Gisela Bock and Susan James (New York, 1992), 48-67.
106. Donald Sassoon then goes on to say of the 1950s, "It was as if the supporters of welfare socialism and of consumer capitalism had come together in identifying the family as the central unit around which social welfare policies and markets should develop": Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1996), 193.
107. Lena Sommestad, "Welfare State Attitudes to the Male Bread-Winning System," International Review of Social History (Assen), 42 (Supplement 5, 1997), 153-74;
108. the existence of a real, as opposed to mythical, male breadwinner is now in question. For the United States, see Jean Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Labor, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York, 1990);
109. and for more recent attitudes see the discussion in Helen Safa, The Myth of the Male Breadwinner: Women and Industrialization in the Caribbean (Boulder, 1995), 37-58, 169-86.
110. Anna Igra, "Other Men's Wives and Children: Anti-Desertion Reform in New York, 1900-1935" (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 1996);
111. Lawrence B. Glickman, A Living Wage: Workers and the Making of American Consumer Society (Ithaca, 1997).
112. Mink, Wages of Motherhood; Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled;
113. Kessler-Harris, Woman's Wage, 57-80.
114. Randolph E. Paul, Taxation in the United States (Boston, 1954), 110-237;
115. Harold M. Groves, Federal Tax Treatment of the Family (Washington, 1963).
116. U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Ways and Means, Revenue Revision, 1934, 73 Cong., 2 sess., Dec. 15, 1933, p. 111.
117. Community property states derived their laws largely from Spanish law, which provided that property acquired during marriage was jointly owned by both partners. They included Arizona, California, Idaho, Louisiana, New Mexico, Nevada, Texas, and Washington. Oklahoma converted in 1942. The major Supreme Court cases are Lucas v. Earl, 281 U.S. 111 (1930); Poe v. Seaborn, 282 U.S. 101 (1930); and Hoeper v. Tax Commission, 284 U.S. 206 (1931).
118. This argument is more fully developed in Alice Kessler-Harris, "A Principle of Law but Not of Justice: Men, Women, and Income Taxes in the United States," Southern California Review of Law and Women's Studies, 6 (Spring 1997), 331-60.
119. Committee on Ways and Means, Revenue Revision, 1934, 641;
120. see also Revenue Revision, 1934, ibid., 127, 631.
121. Revenue Revision, 1934, Ibid., 111.
122. Congressional Record, 73 Cong., 2 sess., Feb. 16, 1934, p. 2659.
123. U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Subcommittee of the House Committee on Ways and Means, Community Property Income Hearings HR 8396, 73 Cong., 2 sess., May 1-7, 1934, p. 313;
124. see also Committee on Ways and Means, Revenue Revision, 1934, 126, 639.
125. Committee on Ways and Means, Revenue Revision, 1934, 126-27.
126. U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Ways and Means, Hearings on Revenue Revision of 1942, 77 Cong., 2 sess., March 3, 1942, pp. 1-2, 7-8, 9.
127. Dorothy Kenyon quoted in "Re: Joint Income Tax Returns," Independent Woman, May 21, 1942, p. 155. This argument emerged among others too; for example, the Princeton economist Harley Lutz argued that the principle of mandatory taxation only of married couples heaped ridicule on the Treasury's cherished principle that the tax be levied on "ability to pay." Why stop there, he asked; "In many families there are grown sons and daughters with good incomes. Why not require the father to report all of this income together with his own?":
128. New York Times, July 6, 1941, p. 7.
129. Anna Kelton Wiley, "Joint Returns Requirement Dropped," Equal Rights, 27 (July 1942), 55.
130. Anna Kelton Wiley, "Joint Returns Requirement Dropped," Equal Rights, 27 (1942), 55. Ibid.
131. "Re: Joint Income Tax Returns," 155. Godfrey Nelson, "Joint Tax Return under Fire Again," New York Times, April 12, 1942, p. 1;
132. and see the dismissive response to the assertion that Britain had a mandatory joint income tax: "We all know the status of English women": Congressional Record, 77 Cong., 1 sess., Aug. 1, 1941, p. 3715.
133. Congressional Record, 77 Cong., 1 sess., July 21, 1941, p. A3532;
134. Congressional Record, ibid., Aug. 1, 1941, p. 3704.
135. The comment of Edith Nourse Rogers equally demeans the status of European women: "If the mandatory joint-income tax return - which the committee inserted in the bill in secret sessions behind closed doors without giving the women of the country any opportunity to voice their opinions - becomes law, married women in the United States will be returned to the old common-law status of chattels of their husbands, the position married women have occupied in Europe for centuries": Congressional Record, ibid., 3715.
136. Congressional Record, Ibid., Aug. 8, 1941, p. 3839.
137. United States News article inserted into Congressional Record, 77 Cong., 1 sess., July 22, 1941, p. 3546.
138. Congressional Record, 77 Cong., 1 sess., Aug. 1, 1941, pp. 3524, 3688.
139. Byron C. Hanna, "No Penalties on Marriage and No Premiums on Divorce," typescript of talk given June 23, 1941, p. 3,
140. File: correspondence, June 16, 1941-Oct. 31, 1941, National Woman's Party Papers, 1913-1972 (microfilm, 179 reels, Microfilms Corp. of America, 1977-1978), reel 71.
141. Dorothy Kenyon quoted by Henry C. Dorris, New York Times, March 26, 1942, p. 21.
142. Congressional Record, 77 Cong., 2 sess., July 17, 1942, p. 6325.
143. John F. Kennedy, Jan. 20, 1961, inaugural address in David Burner, John F. Kennedy and a New Generation (Glenview, 1988), 58. The slogan perfectly suited the idealism of antiwar protesters and civil rights activists of the 1960s, and it also served the purposes of Wall Street brokers of the 1980s and 1990s.
144. American Federation of Labor, Report of the Proceedings, 1936, p. 5.
145. Max Weber quoted in Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 17.
146. American Federation of Labor, Report of the Proceedings, 1936, p. 5.