There’s a seldom-told history of how Americans mobilized to protect the family from encroaching market forces in response to the Industrial Revolution, eventually leading to the creation of an American social policy framework oriented to the family. When I taught American history to high school seniors, the curriculum never mentioned these reformers, sometimes called “maternalists,” despite their outsized influence on public policy for decades and the widespread popularity of their causes.
Mother’s pensions, for example, “spread like ‘wildfire’” across the country and were adopted by most state legislatures by 1920. (By comparison, the average Progressive-era legislation took two decades for 20 states to adopt, according to historian Mark Leff, who writes that no other reform of the era “mustered a better legislative record.”)
The context for this family-centered activism was the pressures families faced as many of them migrated from rural life on farms to urban life working in factories. This would eventually give way to better working conditions and higher material standards of living, but not without serious strain on human relationships. Mothers, fathers, and children alike now labored outside of the home. Settlement house leader Jane Addams told the story of a young child who was tied to the leg of the table every day for three years because his mother deemed it safer than the streets while they were away at work; his brother would untie him briefly midday when he was on his lunchbreak from the factory. The result was a crippled child.
In the face of these circumstances, the settlement house movement grew, and Americans, particularly women, did what they historically have done so well—form associations in response to the troubles that ail us. As the work of Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol details, their collective work went beyond cultural change. Particularly influential were the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, the National Congress of Mothers, and the Parent Teacher Association (PTAs). Through the cooperation of these groups, maternalists successfully lobbied for public policy that would protect home life and family bonds. This included workplace regulation, mother’s pensions, and the 1921 passage of the Shepphard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act, which created a network of federally-funded maternal and prenatal health clinics staffed by nurses in white pinafores who visited new mothers in their homes, focusing their outreach in underserved rural areas and significantly reducing infant and maternal mortality rates.
In the 1930s to 1950s, the maternalists went to Washington. In his book, The American Way: Family and Community in the Shaping of an American Identity, historian Allan Carlson tells the story of their reign. When the Children’s Bureau was created in 1912, Julia Lathrop became the first woman to be bureau chief of a federal agency and helped to pioneer new forms of legislation, like child allowances for military families. As U.S. Secretary of Labor from 1933 to 1945, Frances Perkins became the first female presidential Cabinet member, an architect of the New Deal, and a fierce advocate of the family wage (much to the chagrin of equity feminists). Maternalist Grace Abbot helped to draft the Social Security Act of 1935, which in addition to the sections on old-age and unemployment benefits that we associate with social security today, included provisions specifically for women and children. Title IV established Aid to Dependent Children, and Title V gave grants to the states for “promoting the health of mothers and children, especially in rural areas and in areas suffering from severe economic distress.” And 1939 amendments to the Social Security Act added survivor and dependent benefits, further solidifying the family-oriented nature of the system by shifting focus from the individual worker to protection of the family unit. As Carlson writes, “The measure shifted the system from an ‘individualistic’ to a ‘communitarian’ basis.”
On the whole, the influence of the maternalists, as Carlson convincingly argues, gave rise to an era of legislation that prioritized family stability and laid the groundwork for the revitalization of family life in the post-war period. Marriage, birthrates, and homeownership rates increased. Divorce rates decreased. Working-class families moved into the middle class.
The story of how this family-oriented system eventually crumbled is a story worth exploring elsewhere. As no one needs telling, the trends above have reversed. We need a new framework for family prosperity, not borrowed wholesale from the maternalists, but nonetheless inspired by their vision of family responsibility and its vital connection to the American experiment of self-government.
For today, the family faces different but not dissimilar conditions. While families benefit from participation in free markets, they also suffer at their overreach. Especially for those in the service economy, irregular hours and just-in-time scheduling can make the idealized (and important-for-young-children) rhythms of family life impossible. Families with young children at home often require two working adults to pay the bills; parents may work opposite shifts to avoid child care costs, to the detriment of their marriages. Stagnating wages and high costs of family affordability, particularly when it comes to housing, healthcare, and transportation, contribute to low fertility rates that lag behind fertility desires.
When people do have children, they may not have the means to take time off to recover from childbirth and establish breastfeeding and bonding, a practice universal among mammalian species. The deprivation of that time for mothers and infants in this country is something viewed as appalling by people of other Western nations.
It’s possible that through civic renewal and public-private cooperation, a family ecology can be nurtured.
Through my work interviewing working-class young adults over the past decade, I came to know Tonya, who returned to work at Dunkin’ Donuts just three days after the birth of her second child. At this stage in my own postpartum experience, I was still wearing hospital pads and snuggling with my baby skin-to-skin, as my husband and family members brought me meals, and sleeping as often as I could in between breastfeeding. Yet despite a complicated pregnancy and pre-eclampsia, Tonya went against doctor’s orders and was reporting for 4 a.m. shifts to bake the donuts and coffee to power a nation.
She was understandably livid when she learned through a meme on social media that America is the only industrialized nation in the world without some form of paid leave. She says she wants to do something about it, so that her daughters will grow up in a world that is more hospitable to parents and more welcoming of children.
Indeed, some signs point to the possibility of a “family policy renaissance” on our own horizon. According to one American Compass report on the topic, between 2021 and 2023, “the share of parenting-age Americans who say the federal government should ‘provide more support for families with children’ has risen from 67% to 73%.” The most dramatic change has occurred among Republicans, with support jumping from 52% to 69% among those who identify as conservative.
Could common parental frustrations—and common joys—spark the renewal of engagement with and creation of civic associations working to lobby policymakers on behalf of the family? The ongoing “parent revolution” and recent “Strolling Thunder” march suggest this is possible. I also suspect that concern for the child has the potential to scramble political categories and draw new coalitional lines.
I imagine families meeting up at the park, pizza boxes piled like leaning towers, coolers filled with ice and juice boxes. Grandparents supervise playground play; parents meet under the pavilion to surface their shared concerns, to brainstorm possibilities, to make plans of action. This kind of civic engagement is essential if policy is to remain responsive to local needs rather than entrenched or burdensome.
This will also require that policymakers take seriously—legislatively, not just rhetorically—the strong rationale for public investment in the child as “the citizen of to-morrow” (as maternalist friend and ally Teddy Roosevelt put it)—and of the family as the child’s foremost institution of formation. Rather than dismissing as “welfare” even GOP policies like the Child Tax Credit that include work incentives, conservative policymakers can take the lead on legislation to strengthen American family life.
Of course, government alone will not fix all the problems that families face. But it’s possible that through civic renewal and public-private cooperation, a family ecology can be nurtured, sowing seeds of a new social revival like the one that occurred in the middle of the last century.
Amber Lapp is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies and co-investigator of the Love and Marriage in Middle America Project, a qualitative research inquiry into how white, working-class young adults form families and think about marriage.
Editor’s Note: This article is part of the “American System series” edited by David A. Cowan and supported by the Common Good Economics Grant Program. The contents of this publication are solely the responsibility of the author.