The Power of Women's Networks

Abstract

Discussions of the origins of the American welfare state invariably evoke visions of Depression era breadlines and the spirited political pragmatism of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Theda Skocpol challenges this image in her provocative study, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers. According to Skocpol, long before the New Deal, Civil War pensions for Union soldiers provided America's first large-scale nationally funded old age and disability system (p. 1). The pension program ultimately became mired in patronage politics, spurring widespread disillusionment with federal social welfare initiatives. Nevertheless, women's groups managed to engineer the passage of mothers' pension legislation in forty states between 1911 and 1920, forwarding America's first publicly funded benefits other than military pensions and poor relief (p. 10). During the same period, female reformers and volunteers created the United States Children's Bureau, the world's first national governmental bureau run by women. In 1921, the Children's Bureau and its allies successfully promoted the passage of the Sheppard-Towner Act, the country's first explicit federal social welfare legislation. During its brief existence, Sheppard-Towner distributed over $1 million in grants-in-aid to the states for the creation of clinics to deliver health care advice, compile birth statistics, and reduce infant mortality. The upshot was that women's voluntary associations, rather than male-dominated political parties laid the groundwork for the modern welfare state a full decade before the advent of the New Deal. Skocpol's analysis breaks down into discussions of the Civil War pension system, the failure of the paternalist social insurance schemes promoted by male-dominated professional groups, and women's political achievements before and after ratification of the suffrage amendment in 1920. A fourth theme, inherent in the other three, is American exceptionalism. Although largely discredited by revisionist historians during the 1960s and 1970s, the