Maternal societies in France: Private charity before the welfare state

Journal of Women's History

Volumn 17, Issue 1, 2005, Pages

  Adams, Christine ^a  

^a ST MARY'S COLLEGE OF MARYLAND   (United States)

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EID: 40949128872     PISSN: 10427961     EISSN: 15272036     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (88)

1. F. K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 101;
2. and Anne Firor Scott, "Women's Voluntary Associations: From Charity to Reform," in Lady Bountiful Revisited: Women, Philanthropy, and Power, ed. Kathleen D. McCarthy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 36.
3. Sonya Michel and Seth Koven, "Womanly Duties: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of the Welfare States in France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, 1880-1920,
4. " American Historical Review 95 (October 1990): 1079-80, 1093.
5. See also Kathleen D. McCarthy, "Introduction," in Women, Philanthropy, and Civil Society, ed. Kathleen D. McCarthy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 2.
6. See Rachel G. Fuchs, Poor and Pregnant in Paris: Strategies for Survival in the Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992);
7. e République (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1990);
8. and Sarah A. Curtis, "Charitable Ladies: Gender, Class and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Paris," Past and Present 177 (November 2002): 121-56.
9. Robert Forster, "The French Revolution and the 'New' Elite, 1800-1850," in The American and European Revolutions, 1776-1848,
10. ed. Jaroslaw Pelenski (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1980), 189.
11. Frances Gouda, Poverty and Political Culture: The Rhetoric of Social Welfare in the Netherlands and France, 1815-1854
12. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995), 5.
13. Susan Grogan makes a similar point in "Philanthropic Women and the State: The Société de charité maternelle in Avignon, 1802-1917,
14. " French History 14 (2000): 319
15. e siècle," in Femmes dans la cite, 1815-1871,
16. ed. Alain Corbin, Jacqueline Lalouette, and Michèle Riot-Sarcey (Grâne: Créaphis, 1997), 17.
17. Stuart Woolf argues that from the time the Society was appropriated by the Napoleonic court, it became an appendage of the imperial administration. See "The Société de charité maternelle, 1788-1815," in Medicine and Charity Before the Welfare State, ed. Jonathan Barry and Colin Jones (London: Routledge, 1991), 109;
18. e siècle. (Paris: Association pour l'étude de l'histoire de la Sécurité sociale, 1996-1997), 2:622.
19. See Alisa Klaus, Every Child a Lion: The Origins of Maternal and Infant Health Policy in the United States and France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), esp. 129-35.
20. Rachel G. Fuchs, "The Right to Life: Paul Strauss and the Politics of Motherhood," in Gender and the Politics of Social Reform in France, 1870-1914,
21. ed. Elinor Accampo, Rachel G. Fuchs, and Mary Lynn Stewart (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 82-105;
22. and Rollet-Echalier, La Politique à l'égard de la petite enfance, 378-79.
23. The vast and rich literature includes Gisela Bock and Pat Thane, eds., Maternity and Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of the European Welfare States, 1880s-1950s (London: Routledge, 1991);
24. Linda Gordon, ed., Women, the State, and Welfare (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare 1890-1935 (New York: Free Press, 1994);
25. and Koven and Michel, Mothers of a New World, among many others. Duprat's "Pour l'amour de l'humanité": Le Temps des philanthropes: La philanthropie parisienne des Lumières à la monarchie de Juillet (Paris: Editions du C.T.H.S., 1993) and Usage et pratiques de la philanthropie do examine philanthropie activity in Paris from the late eighteenth century through the 1840s, but do not look at provincial charities.
26. See, for example, the essays in Gender and the Politics of Social Reform; Allan Mitchell, The Divided Path: The German Influence on Social Reform in France after 1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991);
27. Rollet-Echalier, La Politique à l'égard de la petite enfance; and Philip Nord, "The Welfare State in France, 1870-1914," French Historical Studies (spring 1994): 821-38.
28. Koven and Michel, "Womanly Duties," 1099.
29. Jane Jenson, "Representations of Gender: Policies to 'Protect' Women Workers and Infants in France and the United States Before 1914," in Women, the State, and Welfare, 152-77. On maternalism and its feminist underpinnings, see Koven and Michel, "Womanly Duties," and Koven and Michel, "Introduction," Mothers of a New World. Maternalist claims, which focused on women's rights as mothers, were similar to those of the "familial" or "relational" feminists that Karen Offen discusses in "Depopulation, Nationalism, and Feminism in Fin-de-Siècle France," American Historical Review 89 (June 1984): 648-76;
30. A Political History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 21-22.
31. On Rousseau's influence, see Camille Bloch, L'Assistance et l'Etat en France à la veille de la Révolution (Paris: Alphonse Picard et fils, 1908), 98.
32. 17, AAP.
33. See Duprat, Le Temps des philanthropes, 75-80, for an analysis of the membership of the organization.
34. Camille Bloch and Alexandre Tuetey, Procès-Verbaux et rapports du Comité de Mendicité de la Constituante, 1790-1791
35. The Vicomte de Falloux cites this article of the bylaws in his "Biographie de Madame de Pastoret," Annales de la charité (1846): 234.
36. See biographical note by Madame de Maussion. The Register of the Society for Maternal Charity, 1790-93, recounts the flight of various members of the organization from France as conditions grew increasingly dangerous. Mss. 996, rés. 34, 68, BHVP.
37. Bloch, L'Assistance et l'Etat, 448-49;
38. A. Cornereau, Notice sur la Société de charité maternelle de Dijon (Dijon: Darantière, 1900), 13-14.
39. Léonie Chaptal, "Le Centenaire de 1814:
40. La Revue hebdomadaire no. 9 (28 February 1914): 514.
41. L. de Lanzac de Laborie, Paris sous Napoléon, 8 vols. Assistance et bienfaisance approvisionnement (Paris: Plon, 1908), 5:134;
42. F. Gille, La Société de charité maternelle de Paris (Paris: V. Goupy et Jourdan, 1887), 9.
43. Paul Delaunay, La Société de charité maternelle du Mans et ses origines (Le Mans: Monnoyer, 1911), 7-8.
44. Grogan, "Philanthropic Women and the State," 299.
45. Christine Adams, "Constructing Mothers and Families: The Society for Maternal Charity of Bordeaux, 1805-1860," French Historical Studies 22 (winter 1999): 70-71. The comptes rendus, beginning in 1805, can be found at D11096, Bibliothèque municipale de Bordeaux, hereafter BMB.
46. Woolf, "The Société de charité maternelle," 100.
47. Lanzac de Laborie, Paris sous Napoléon, 5:148-49.
48. Also see Adams, "Constructing Mothers and Families," 80.
49. See Gabriel Vauthier, "La Société maternelle sous l'Empire," Revue des Etudes Napoléoniennes 2 (1914): 72-75.
50. For further analysis of these issues, see Christine Adams, "The Provinces Versus Paris? The Case of the Society for Maternal Charity of Bordeaux," Proceedings of the Western Society for French History 23 (fall 1996): 420-27.
51. Procès Verbaux, 22 December 1810, Fonds Français Mss. 11368, Bibliothèque nationale de France, hereafter BN.
52. see Evelyn Ackerman, Health Care in the Parisian Countryside, 1800-1914 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 67-76.
53. Procès Verbaux, Séance of 14 August 1811;
54. Fonds Français Mss. 11368, BN.
55. See Delaunay, La Société de charité maternelle du Mans, 13-14;
56. Claude-François-Etienne Dupin, Histoire de l'Administration des secours publics (Paris: Alexis-Eymery, 1821), 313 and 335.
57. France, Commission d'enquête sur le service des enfants assistés, Enfants assistés: Enquête générale ouverte en 1860, dans les 86 départements de l'Empire (Paris: Imprimerie impériale, 1862), 186-90.
58. Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), chap. 6.
59. Dupin, Histoire de l'Administration des secours publics, 334.
60. Enfants assistés: Enquête générale, 184-85.
61. In 1821, Dupin noted that the state paid out more than seven million francs per annum. Histoire de l'Administration des secours publics, 313. During the nineteenth century, the financial responsibility for abandoned children was highly decentralized, which makes it difficult to determine precisely how much the central government paid specifically for enfants assistés. The central government refused to (or could not) bear the entire cost, which meant that departments were responsible for the care of children abandoned within their borders. Rachel C. Fuchs, Abandoned Children: Foundlings and Child Welfare in Nineteenth-Century France (Albany: SUNY Press, 1984), 157.
62. Alisa Klaus, Every Child a Lion, 111.
63. in the British context, see Ellen Ross, "Good and Bad Mothers: Lady Philanthropists and London Housewives Before the First World War," in Lady Bountiful Revisited, 174-98.
64. 15 3806-3811, AN, for the distribution of funds among maternal societies.
65. Charles Des Alleurs, Histoire de la Société de charité maternelle de Rouen (Rouen: Alfred Péron, 1854), 94-95.
66. Règlement pour la Société de la charité maternelle (Paris: Imprimerie impériale, 1811).
67. 2 80, ADBR.
68. For example, at the end of 1838, la baronne Pasquier, vice-president of the Society for Maternal Charity of Paris, acting on behalf of the Queen, requested a complete list of the personnel of the provincial societies, along with detailed information on their husbands. Des Alleurs, Histoire de la Société de charité maternelle de Rouen, 73.
69. This was a lengthy bureaucratic process. See Christine Adams, "In the Public Interest: Charitable Associations, the State, and the Status of utilité publique in Nineteenth-Century France" (paper delivered at the annual meeting of the Society for French Historical Studies in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 3-5 April 2003). On the significance of the status of utilité publique for charitable associations, see Léon Béquet, Régime et législation de l'assistance publique et privée en France (Paris: Paul Dupon, 1885), 306-10.
70. For further discussion of this issue, see Adams, "In the Public Interest."
71. Cornereau, Notice sur la Société de charité maternelle de Dijon, 27;
72. Maria Luddy and Kathleen McCarthy point out that women's involvement in philanthropy provided them with personal and group authority and power. See Luddy, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 3;
73. and McCarthy, "Parallel Power Structures: Women and the Voluntary Sphere," in Lady Bountiful Revisited, 1-31.
74. Letter to Mesdames les Distributrices des secours de la Société de charité maternelle, 7 September 1813, 3, 312 Q 1, Archives Municipales de Bordeaux.
75. Duprat, "Le Silence des femmes," in Femmes dans la cité, 86.
76. Chaline, "Sociabilité féminine et 'maternalisme, '" 74-75.
77. Koven and Michel, "Womanly Duties," 1085.
78. Peter Mandler, "Poverty and Charity in the Nineteenth-Century Metropolis: An Introduction," in The Uses of Charity: The Poor on Relief in the Nineteenth-Century Metropolis, ed. Peter Mandler (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 20.
79. Rollet-Echalier, Politique à l'égard de la petite enfance, 378-79.
80. and Klaus, Every Child a Lion, 114.
81. Philanthropic Women and the State," 317.
82. Gilles, La Société de charité maternelle de Paris, 228-23.
83. Jenson, "Representations of Gender," 170.
84. Offen, "Depopulation, Nationalism, and Feminism," 672-76.
85. On infant and maternity legislation passed under the Third Republic, see Fuchs, "The Right to Life," 96-99;
86. and Bock, "Poverty and Mothers' Rights," 416.
87. See essays in Koven and Michel, Mothers of a New World;
88. and Bock and Thane, Maternity and Gender Policies.