Black and White Visions of Welfare: Women's Welfare Activism, 1890-1945

Abstract

One of the pleasures of historical scholarship is that it may lead into unexpected paths, and what begins as a frustration-say, from an apparent shortage of sources-may end as a new opening. This essay began as an attempt to examine gender differences in visions of public welfare among reformers. Having compiled material about women welfare activists who were mainly white, I found I could not distinguish the influence of gender from that of race in their perspectives. (Indeed, to many white historians, the racial characteristics of the white people we studied were invisible until we began to learn from minority historians to ask the right questions.) So I set up a comparison between black and white women welfare activists, with results that were illuminating about both groups. Three major areas of difference between black and white women's ideas emerged: first, about the nature of entitlement, between a black orientation toward universal programs, and a white orientation toward supervised, means-tested ones; second, in attitude toward mothers' employment; third, in strategies for protecting women from sexual exploitation. In what follows I want both to show how those differences were manifest and to suggest their roots in historical experience.' Several historians have recently studied black women's civic contributions, but black women's reform campaigns have not usually been seen as part of welfare history. How many discussions of settlement houses include Victoria Earle Matthews's White Rose Mission of New York City, or Margaret Murray Washington's Elizabeth Russell Settlement at Tuskegee, Alabama, orJanie Porter Barrett's Locust Street Social Settlement in Hampton, Virginia, or Lugenia Burns Hope's Neighborhood