The Endowment of Motherhood
The Fabian proposal for endowment of motherhood gradually gained credibility in Britain, partly due to the relentless efforts of a middle-class feminist named Eleanor Rathbone. In an article published in the Economic Journal in 1917 and, later a book entitled The Disinherited Family, Rathbone reviewed English and European precedents for public support.30 She also summarized British experience during World War I, when the government had paid soldiers' wives separation allowances that were explicitly based on family size rather than merely on rank.
Children's welfare had improved discernibly as a result.Unlike many political advocates, Rathbone framed her practical arguments in theoretical terms, castigating the entire economics profession for its lack of attention to childrearing:
I do not think it would be an exaggeration to say that if the population of Great Britain consisted entirely of adult, self-propagating bachelors and spinsters, nearly the whole output of writers on economic theory during the last fifty years might remain as it was written, except for a paragraph or phrase here and there, and those unessential to the main argument.31
For empirical support, she drew on a genre of working class budget studies that had been widely cited by advocates of a male family wage, noting wide variation in family size. Since not all workers had four dependents, the demand that a man should receive a wage sufficient to support that number, she editorialized, implied ‘‘phantom wives and children.'' If trade unions were successful in garnering a family wage for all male workers, she calculated, the nation's wage bill would provide for about 16 million phantom children, while many real children in families larger than this supposed norm would go wanting.
Further, Rathbone argued, the counter-claim that all men without dependents were saving up to support them later was suspect.
Bachelors were likely to spend their surplus on football, cigarettes, and other luxury items. Unlike Rowntree and others who consistently described wives as dependents, Rathbone emphasized the importance of women's domestic labor. With some irony, she noted that the provision of ‘‘phantom wives” was not completely farfetched, because a man who lacked a wife had to pay someone to do his cooking, washing, and housekeeping for him—a landlady, a mother, or some other female relative.32 Women’s domestic labor on behalf of a husband concerned her less than the labor of mothering, which was essentially unremunerated.The economics establishment remained unmoved. Francis Edgeworth expressed his disapproval of family allowances in The Economic Journal on the grounds that they would sap male incentives to work and would encourage a growth in the ‘‘least desirable classes.’’33 Alexander Gray of the University of Aberdeen leveled even more scornful criticisms.34 Still, Rathbone cleverly deployed economic reasoning to argue that the organization of childrearing was inefficient as well as unfair. She also developed a strategic analysis of political divisions among women, who could, she argued be sorted into two major groups, those who worked for wages (primarily younger unmarried women) and those who provided non-market services such as childrearing in the home. Female wage earners were competing with the men who provided the market income that many wives, mothers, and children relied on, generating conflict. A family allowance system could unify women around the principle of equal pay for equal work without penalizing mothers, who could receive the additional support needed to raise children from the state instead of hoping for higher wages for their husbands.
Rathbone argued that men would instinctively resist any effort to provide public rather than spousal support for childrearing. She explained this resistance in polemical terms, describing male desire for domination over women as ‘‘the Turk complex’’—an irrational, uncivilized selfishness embedded in human nature but particularly rife in Islamic culture.35 Her wording reflected the strategic racism that she shared with many of her contemporaries, as well as frustration with those unwilling to engage her arguments: ‘‘When a proposal presents itself which is obnoxious to the hidden Turk in man, he stretches up his hand from his dwelling in the unconscious mind and the proposal disappears from the upper regions of
”36
consciousness.
While this theory of masculine ideology won few adherents, Rathbone’s case for family allowances gradually gained traction. The Family Endowment Society that she founded wrested endorsements from major women’s groups and helped her gain a seat in Parliament. Though her efforts were initially unsuccessful, the devastation of World War II gave her countrymen a more profound appreciation of the work of creating and maintaining soldiers and citizens. Like other participants in that War—the United States notably excepted—Great Britain put modest publicly-financed family allowances into place in 1945.