The Feminist History of “Child Allowances”

By: Lucie Levine May 12, 2021

The Biden administration’s proposed “child allowances” draw on the feminist thought of
Crystal Eastman, who advocated “motherhood endowments” 100 years ago.

Joe Biden’s new stimulus package includes provisions for a “Child Allowance” that
economists estimate could cut child poverty in the United States by half. The allowance—
paid out in monthly installments of $300 per month for each child under the age of 5, and
$250 per month for older children— has champions on both the Left and the Right. The
policy takes its cues from an even more generous proposal drafted by Mitt Romney, known
as The Family Security Act.

Despite bipartisan interest in reducing child poverty, Republican lawmakers, including Mike
Lee and Marco Rubio, have dismissed Child Allowances by claiming that “an essential part
of being ‘pro-family’ is being ‘pro-work,’” and warning that the monthly allowances will
discourage parents from seeking paid employment.

That fear, however, is substantially unfounded: the allowance is neither enough to live on,
nor is it tied to wages, so the benefit is not depleted by earned income. But the fact that such a
fear exists is telling. It is a fear that categorically separates “family” and “work,” and
revolves around the assumption that the only forms of valuable labor deserving of
compensation are those performed outside the home. That is, the only forms of valuable labor
are those performed in spheres not traditionally associated with women—and women of color
in particular—as care work is in the US.

By offering monetary benefits to parents of young children, the Child Allowance has the
potential to help challenge assumptions around the meaning and value of work. “One of the
bigger symbolic purposes of the child allowance is to say the work a parent does is valid—
it’s valid as work,” Samuel Hammond, director of poverty and welfare policy at the center-
right Niskanen Center, told the New York Times. “I do think it’s a market failure in capitalist
economies that there isn’t a parenting wage.”
The socialist feminist leader Crystal Eastman came to that conclusion a century ago. At the
time, “Child Allowances” were known as “Motherhood Endowments,” and were a part of
Eastman’s vision for women’s economic and social equality. Eastman (1881–1928) was a
labor lawyer, peace activist, socialist, and radical suffragist who, among other achievements,
drafted the first workers’ compensation legislation in the United States (~1910); co-founded
the Congressional Union for Women’s Suffrage (1913), and the Women’s International
League for Peace and Freedom (1915); co-founded the ACLU (1920); and co-authored the
original Equal Rights Amendment (1923).

She wrote in 1920:

What is the problem of women’s freedom? It seems to me to be this: how to arrange the
world so that women can be human beings, with a chance to exercise their infinitely varied
gifts in infinitely varied ways, instead of being destined by the accident of their sex to one
field of activity—housework and child-raising. And second, if and when they choose
housework and child-raising, to have that occupation recognized by the world as work,
requiring a definite economic reward and not merely entitling the performer to be dependent
on some man.

The idea of a Motherhood Endowment as a conduit to personal freedom through economic

empowerment, which would allow a woman to support herself and her children, without
forced dependency on a man, based on wages earned for the real and necessary work of
childrearing, stood in radical opposition to the arguments—and statutes—that underpinned
“Mother’s Pensions,” state-level grants made to single mothers in the United States between
1911 and 1935.

Eastman’s assertion that childcare was a form of work, as equal and necessary as any other.
Eligibility for the Pensions, and the amounts they offered, varied from state to state, but most
states required that applicants be “deserving mothers who are without the support of the
normal breadwinner.” Therefore, it was necessary that recipients be either widowed or
abandoned, or in the case that they were married, that their husbands be “incapacitated,”
either physically or mentally.
The goal of these pensions was to keep women in the home, and in the role of caregiver. In
most states, mothers who received the grants had to agree to give up outside work, on the
grounds that children became “delinquent” because their working mothers could not care for
them. The rationale was that “women and children ought to be supported,” and in exchange
for such support, needy mothers were expected to display their “natural dependency,” and
prove their moral rectitude. The implication was the opposite of Eastman’s assertion that
childcare was a form of work, as equal and necessary as any other: that “work” outside the
home disrupted women’s natural role as dependent caregivers, and should be discouraged by
state aid.

These prevailing social attitudes that women belonged in the home, that they were naturally
dependent on men, and that only certain categories of “morally fit” women deserved the
attention of the State, were part of a host of issues that Eastman believed she and her radical
feminist colleagues needed to fight against in the wake of the passage of the Nineteenth
Amendment (women’s suffrage).

Eastman maintained that the vote itself was not enough to bring political, social and
economic equality to American women. Indeed, she saw the suffrage victory as too narrow,
and noted that because mainstream feminists like Alice Paul had “hushed up” subjects “like
birth control and the rights of Negro women” during the battle for the ballot, American
women who had fought for the vote could not be “congratulating ourselves that the feminist
movement had begun in America. As it is all we can say is that the suffrage movement is
ended.”

In her landmark 1920 essay, “Now We Can Begin,” published in The Liberator, a “Journal of
Revolutionary Progress,” which she founded and edited with her brother, Max Eastman, she
laid out a four-fold platform for what the beginning of egalitarian American feminism might
look like: a balance of work, life, and labor both inside and outside the home.

The first pillar of her platform was freedom of occupational choice and equal pay. Second
was “a revolution in the early training and education of both boys and girls,” so that it would
be considered “womanly as well as manly to earn your own living, to stand on your own
feet,” and “manly as well as womanly to know how to cook and sew and clean and take care
of yourself in the ordinary exigencies of life.”
This “feminist education” was needed because women, who had in reality been working
outside the home for generations, saw their labor doubled when their male partners did not
share domestic responsibilities. “These bread-winning wives,” she wrote, “have not yet
developed homemaking husbands.” Instead “the woman simply adds running the home to her
regular outside job.” Equality meant not only opening up all avenues of traditional paid
employment to women, but also dignifying and “sharing the burden and joy” of all labor,
including domestic labor and childcare.

Her vision was strikingly egalitarian, and thereby aimed not only at empowering women, but
also at creating parity between men and women—and between anyone who chose to engage
in care work and anyone who did not. Of “Domestic Science,” she wrote in 1924, “why not
welcome the idea of a compulsory course… but insist that it be general—for boys and girls
alike?” That way, “those who like it, of either sex, can take it up as a trade.” Her point was
that all people should be equally prepared, and equally free, to make choices around what
type of personal and professional lives they wished to lead.

“Birth control” she maintained, “is just as elementary an essential in our propaganda as
‘equal pay,’” because, birth control, like equal pay, was a labor issue.
Accordingly, the third pillar of her program was “voluntary motherhood,” access to birth
control and information about family planning. “Birth control” she maintained, “is just as
elementary an essential in our propaganda as ‘equal pay,’” because, birth control, like equal
pay, was a labor issue. Birth control afforded women, “some freedom of occupational choice;
those who do not wish to be mothers will not have an undesired occupation thrust upon them
by accident, and those who do wish to be mothers may choose in a general way how many
years of their lives they will devote to the occupation of childraising.”

Eastman had two children with her second husband, Walter Fuller. The family practiced
“Marriage Under Two Roofs,” wherein Crystal lived with her children and supported them,
and Walter kept a separate apartment. As a voluntary mother and a breadwinner, Crystal
Eastman recognized that raising children was both an act of love and an occupation, which a
woman might choose, just as she might choose any other occupation. That recognition
brought Eastman “to the fourth feature” of her four-pronged program of equality: the
Motherhood Endowment. She wrote:
It seems that the only way we can keep mothers free, at least in a capitalist society, is by the
establishment of a principle that the occupation of raising children is peculiarly and directly a
service to society, and that the mother upon whom the necessity and privilege of performing
this service naturally falls is entitled to an adequate economic reward from the political
government. It is idle to talk of real economic independence for women unless this principle
is accepted.

Some women in the socialist feminist and pro-birth control movements at the time, including
the activist, nurse, and educator Margaret Sanger, saw childrearing not only as a service to
society, but as an unpaid service to the capitalist class, which actively blocked access to
information about birth control because it relied on working-class women to produce large
families so that their children could in turn staff sweatshops. A woman’s struggle for control
of her body was, in a literal sense, a struggle over the means of production.

Eastman’s claim that childrearing was a valid form of work, and that there should be “definite
economic rewards for one’s work when it happens to be ‘home-making,’” was broader than
that: she saw that a motherhood endowment could help ensure equal pay, because it would
remove justification for the “family wage” paid to men on the assumption that men were
supporting their families while women were not. Further, she believed that the motherhood
endowment would free women from the “dependent state” of performing unpaid labor,
arguing, along with her National Women’s Party colleague Doris Stevens, that “the home-
keeping, child-rearing wife” shared a “working-partner’s claim on the family income that her
household labor helped make possible.”

What separated her from so many other feminist thinkers of her generation, was that she saw
women’s desire for fulfillment on many fronts—through love and sex, through paid work,
and through family—as equally natural, and equally valid. She wrote in 1918:

Feminists are not nuns. That should be established. We want to love and to be loved, and
most of us want children, one or two at least. But we want our love to be joyous and free—
not clouded with ignorance and fear. And we want our children to be deliberately, eagerly
called into being, when we are at our best, not crowded upon us in times of poverty and
weakness.
Because she understood that many women wanted children at the same time they wanted
economic freedom, she believed the feminist movement would need to reconcile those two
objectives. “If the feminist program goes to pieces on the arrival of the first baby,” she wrote
“it is false and useless.” The motherhood endowment, coupled with access to birth control,
offered an answer here too: it could free women not only from unwanted, unpaid labor, but
also free women to embrace motherhood—when they wanted to.

There is strong evidence that Crystal Eastman was absolutely right: consider that American
women are currently having fewer children than they’d like, and that Canada, which offers a
more generous child allowance than the one included in Biden’s newest aid package, has a
higher proportion of women in the labor force. Neither of these Child Allowance policies
reaches the level of compensation that Crystal Eastman envisioned, a level that would make
childrearing a fully compensated vocation for any parent who wished it.

We have not yet fully realized any of the four pillars of Eastman’s equality program. More
than 100 years ago, she wrote in “Now We Can Begin” that “with a generous endowment of
motherhood provided by legislation, with all laws against voluntary motherhood and
education in its methods repealed, with the feminist ideal of education accepted in home and
school, and with all special barriers removed in every field of human activity, there is no
reason why woman should not become almost a human thing.”

https://daily.jstor.org/the-feminist-history-of-child-allowances/
___________________________________________________________________________

‘A human being, not just mum’: the women’s liberationists who

fought for the rights of mothers and children

Published: May 6, 2022

Author: Isobelle Barrett Meyering

Mother’s Day has long been exploited for commercial and political gain. This year, again, my
inbox is filled with gift ideas to “make mum smile”. With the federal election looming, we
can expect candidates to make the most of this weekend to demonstrate their pro-family
credentials.

But advertisers and politicians are not the only ones with a stake in Mother’s Day. The day’s
origins lie in feminist campaigns in the late 19th and early 20th century to promote peace and
greater recognition of women’s social and economic contribution as mothers.

For subsequent generations of feminists, it has proven to be a site of contest. This was
especially so in the 1970s, when women’s liberationists set out to challenge prevailing
expectations of female domesticity.

In their view, the dominant model of the male breadwinner and female homemaker was a
leading source of women’s oppression. Many felt Mother’s Day only reinforced the problem.

A pamphlet issued by Adelaide women’s liberationists in 1971 claimed Mother’s Day was
little more than an exercise in hypocrisy.

For one day, the pamphlet asserted, society paid lip service to women’s “martyrdom” in the
home. For the rest of the year, their domestic labour remained invisible and their “basic
needs” were left unmet – including for some independence from their children.

But it is worth noting women’s liberationists argued the “cult” of domesticity not only had
dire consequences for women, but for children too. On this Mother’s Day, it bears
remembering activists were committed to their joint liberation.

Liberation for children

This vision was put forward most explicitly in North American radical feminist Shulamith
Firestone’s bestseller, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970).

The book is now best known for its forthright critique of maternity: Firestone went so far as
to describe pregnancy as “barbaric” and advocated for artificial reproduction in its place.

But The Dialectic of Sex was also noteworthy for Firestone’s analysis of children’s status in
the nuclear family and the power parents wielded over them. Mothers played a particularly
insidious role, Firestone argued, in the psychological formation of children, determining
“what they become as adults and the sorts of relationships they are able to form”.

Read more: Shulamith Firestone: why the radical feminist who wanted to abolish pregnancy
remains relevant

Firestone’s views on the subject were far from exceptional. Indeed, the concept of children’s
liberation reverberated through a wide range of feminist texts of the period.

And as I discovered when I started looking for evidence of the concept’s impact in Australia,
it was also put into practice in diverse ways.

For feminist mothers in the 1970s, access to affordable childcare services was an especially
high priority – not only to enable their equal participation in public life, but because of its
benefits for children’s social development and connection beyond the nuclear family.

This sentiment was best captured in the slogan used at protest marches: “Free Mum, Free
Dad, Free Me, Free Child Care”.

Many feminist teachers and mothers were attracted to new approaches that emphasised
children’s autonomy and self-direction. These principles also informed broader decisions
about childrearing, such as mothers’ selections of books, toys and clothing, and their attempts
to be more open and frank when addressing their children’s questions about sexuality.

When they could not find readily available alternatives, one Melbourne group even began
producing their own resources. In 1974, they formed the Women’s Movement Children’s
Literature Cooperative. Their first book, The Witch of Grange Grove, was typical in featuring
characters who disregarded gender stereotypes and pursued their own interests.

By the mid-1970s, the issue of violence within the family home had become pressing.
Children comprised more than half of the residents at women’s refuges, such as Elsie in
Sydney. Along with physical and emotional abuse, child sexual abuse – particularly by male
relatives – was one of the issues that refuge workers, along with activists at rape crisis
services, frequently confronted.
The forgotten revolution
For many feminists of the era, women’s and children’s liberation were inseparable.

This was certainly true for the Adelaide activists protesting Mother’s Day in 1971. As their
pamphlet had it, for both their own sake and so as not to “suffocate” their children, women
must “renounce [their] martyrdom” and redefine themselves as “a human being […] not just
‘mum’”.

But this message was often lost on women’s liberation’s opponents, who were intent on
casting the movement as “anti-mother” and “anti-child” – a stereotype of this era that has
persevered.

A child in a protest holds a sign reading 'free 24 hour childcare'

While the movement was often painted as ‘anti-mothers’, women campaigned for mother’s
rights, like the right to childcare. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales and
courtesy SEARCH Foundation, CC BY-NC-SA
Internal tensions within women’s liberation have also shaped feminist and popular memory
of this period. While many involved in the movement worked hard to improve the conditions
of mothers and their children, not everyone felt these efforts went far enough.

Some women were alienated by the staunch critiques of motherhood, or felt judged by those
who did not have children. And although women’s liberation attracted participants from
diverse backgrounds, many First Nations and migrant women chose to organise in groups
outside it, in part due to a perception that their experiences of motherhood required different
political remedies.

The relationship between 1970s feminism and maternity was at times a fraught one. But we
should not forget that this ambivalence about motherhood could also be productive, creating
space for new ways of thinking not just about women, but children too.

We continue to grapple with many of the same issues, from childcare and gender
socialisation to child abuse and family violence.
In seeking lasting solutions to these problems, it is worth remembering there is a longer
history of feminist activism that might inform our contemporary approaches – not least of all
when it comes to responding to the predictable cliches that surface each year on Mother’s
Day.

https://theconversation.com/a-human-being-not-just-mum-the-womens-liberationists-who-
fought-for-the-rights-of-mothers-and-children-182057