The Fabians
No group did more to enliven debates over state support of parenthood than the Fabian Society, a loose-knit group of British intellectuals that assembled in 1893 to pursue democratic socialist ideals.
They took their name from the story of a Roman general named Fabius who had patiently waited for his enemies to overreach themselves. They sought reform, not revolution and most of them showed more wit than patience. Among the best known were H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw, both brilliant writers and popular- izers of political economy.The Fabians as a group were initially reluctant feminists, but added a clause to their creed in 1907 insisting on equal citizenship of men and women. 19 They typically described unregulated capitalism as selfishness run amuck, a problem that could be solved by intelligent state regulation by experts like themselves. Their distinctly technocratic point of view betrayed more confidence in bureaucratic process than democratic participation. A remarkably unselfconscious confidence in the superiority of the white race—and unapologetic nationalism—animated their fears of fertility decline.
H. G. Wells, famous for his science fiction novella, The War of the Worlds, devoted volumes of fiction and non-fiction to the need to reconcile women's need for independence with their traditional mothering role by offering them a childcare stipend.20 He was convinced that childrearing created a public good: ‘‘People rear children for the State and the future,” he thundered, and ‘‘if they do that well, they do the whole world a service, and deserve payment just as much as if they built a bridge or raised a crop of wheat.’’21 Some feminists objected on the grounds that public stipends would encourage women simply to stay home and breed, rather than develop their capabilities through paid employment.22
The Fabian Women’s Group, however, felt that public support would allow women to reconcile personal independence with a commitment to a form of work that was unremunerated.
It was not marriage, after all, but mothering that was to be rewarded. As Mrs. Pember Reeves put it, ‘‘the woman who shrinks from the feeling that her wifehood is a means of livelihood will proudly acknowledge that her motherhood is a service to the state.’’23 The broader demand for state services, such as meals for schoolchildren, represented a compromise that reflected concerns about the health and quality of the nation’s future work force.A similar convergence of feminist and socialist concerns was personified in Beatrice Webb. An elegant patrician who married the self-made civil servant Sidney Webb, Beatrice’s early political views were distinctly conservative.24 She initially regarded the feminist demand for suffrage as selfish, and went on record against it until 1903. Her change of heart was closely related to her emerging vision of women’s activism as a force for social amelioration. In a letter to the suffragist Millicent Fawcett, she explained that ‘‘The raising of children, the advancement of learning and the promotion of the spiritual—which I regard as the particular obligations of women—are, it is clear, more and more becoming the main preoccupations of the community as a whole.’’25
The notion that the state should guarantee a decent standard of living for every child fit perfectly with Fabian emphasis on the efficiency of public provision. It also provided a way of reconciling the ideals of Victorian femininity with the reform of the state. As Beatrice put it in one of her autobiographical tomes, ‘‘We saw that to the Government alone could be entrusted the provision for future generations, to which neither producers nor consumers would attend as such. In short, we were led to the recognition of a new form of state, and one which may be called the ‘house-keeping state,’ as distinguished from the ‘police state’.’’26
The future generations that concerned the Webbs were those to whom they were linked by ties of citizenship and race.
Citing Pearson, Sidney Webb warned in 1907 that, in the absence of public support for childrearing, the country would fall to the Irish and the Jews.27 Later, in 1919, Beatrice reframed the argument, suggesting that the nation might be forced to resort to alien immigration on a large scale.28 One could argue that such rhetoric simply represented political expedience. But the concept of the nation (and the predominant racial-ethnic group within it) as a family relied on strict boundaries between those who were and were not kin.Many of George Bernard Shaw’s plays, including the famous Pygmalion which became the basis for the Broadway musical cum Hollywood hit, My Fair Lady, explored the intersections between class and gender. Near the end of his life Shaw offered a charming, if somewhat pedantic, reprise of Fabian views in a book he described as his ‘‘last will and testament to humanity’’, the Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism.29 The book patiently explained that both British and U.S. society as a whole would benefit from the reduction of monstrous inequality within their own borders. It also pointed out that markets could never reward individuals who produced goods that would not be bought and sold, such as children. Like his fellow-Fabians, Shaw endorsed state endowment of parentage. He also prescribed two additional public policies: limits on the number of children a family could raise, and public instruction in methods of contraception.