Role Of Women In Family Research Articles

Dependent Children, Child Custody, and the Mothers' Pensions: The Transformation of State-Family Relations in the Early 20th Century

This paper challenges the widely-held belief that government has assumed increasing authority over family life in the United States. I explore the origins and development of welfare services for dependent children from the indenture system of the colonial days to the introduction of mothers' pensions in the early 20th century. Rather than intruding more into family life, government has moved from an initial disregard of the family unit to a reinforcing of parent-child ties by supporting the custody rights of the mother. Commentators on the modern family frequently lament the progressive intrusion of government into family affairs and the resulting reduction of parental decision-making and control. A growing body of literature portrays powerless parents facing expanding government authority over the family (Donzelot, 1979; Keniston, 1978; Lasch, 1977, 1979). This paper challenges the hypothesis that government has steadily increased its prerogatives and control over children at the expense of the traditional rights of parents. To test this hypothesis, I explore the origin and evolution of government programs for dependent children in the United States from colonial times to the first decades of the 20th century. I focus on child custody, since the ability of the state to make children public wards is at the heart of competing rights between parents and the state. This paper also emphasizes: (1) class variables that organize relations between parents and the state; and (2) changes in the relative status of women which have influenced government policies. Research presented here on early government programs for dependent children suggests that, rather than progressively eroding traditional parental rights, the state has sometimes supported family unity and parental prerogatives. State intrusions into the domestic affairs of families needing income assistance have become less direct and less disruptive of parent-child relationships over time. The Mothers' Pension program, an early 20th century public assistance program, gave parents child custody rights they had earlier been denied and buttressed family relations that otherwise would have been broken. This paper is divided into three sections. The first surveys the treatment of dependent children from colonial times to the late 19th century. The second concentrates on changes in child custody laws, women's changing family roles, and the consequences of both for the care of dependent children. The third section describes the development of the Mothers' Pension program and its effects on child custody and relations between working class families and the state. I single out the Mothers' Pension program because it was an important precursor of the largest federally supported government service for families, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC).'

Reflections on Twentieth-Century American Women's History

American women's history, like other areas of American history, has tended to neglect the twentieth century in favor of its predecessor, the nineteenth. The nineteenth century emerges from historical scholarship as a dynamic period in which the process of industrialization transformed women's work and family roles. Research on nineteenth-century American women has shed light on a variety of topics previously unexplored and, more important, has led the way in defining the themes and conceptual frameworks of women's history. Scholarship on the twentieth century, on the other hand, has been scanty and has not yet identified the major trends and developments that have shaped the lives of women in contemporary society. But the body of literature on American women in the twentieth century is growing, and we need to think about the direction it is taking. One thing immediately noticeable is a lack of continuity between the two centuries as they emerge from historical writing. It is as if the First World War destroyed the old Victorian world a created a new one in which women went to work in department stores and offices, forsook their homosocial world for a heterosocial one, and turned their backs on feminism. The myth of the New Woman continues to exercise its tenacious influence on our thinking about twentieth-century women's history, and it is time that we realized what the New Woman shared with her nineteenth-century sisters. At the same time, historical scholarship has too often applied concepts shaped by nineteenth-century experiences to the twentieth without considering the differences between the two periods. We can only hope to create for the twentieth century the sort of rich materials that already exist for the nineteenth if we understand the nineteenth-century base of many of the existing concepts while using them to develop appropriate conceptual frameworks for the twentieth. This essay attempts to apply some of the approaches and concepts that have emerged in research and writing on nineteenth-century American women's history to the twentieth century. It focuses on three particular areas that have proven central to women's history: work, women's culture, and feminism. The impact of industrialization on women's lives is a central theme in

Films of Suspicion and Distrust: Undercurrents of Female Consciousness in the 1940's

FILMS OF SUSPICION AND DISTRUST: UNDERCURRENTS OF FEMALE CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE 1940's By Andrea Walsh Andrea Walsh is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at S. U.N. Y. Binghamton, specializing in women's studies andpopular culture. This article is a sectionfrom her dissertation entitled: "The Weeds Grow Long Near The Shore: The Women's Film and Female Consciousness in the 1940's. " Suspicion and distrust toward men have long been expressed by women in twentieth century America. Across race, age, class, ethnic and sexual preference lines, we can read historical and contemporary accounts of woman-to-woman warnings and confidences that "you can't trust a man," "men are only interested in one thing," and "no man will marry a 'used woman.'" (1) These warnings were (are) often articulated by women who ran the gamut from acceptance to rejection of nurturing, subordinate and subservient female roles. This female mode of defensiveness and suspicion has often coexisted with a more dominant ideology that stressed love, support and nurturance of the 'right man.' Because of their potentially volatile effects, these mistrustful and defensive feelings have often been belittled, suppressed and denied, or confined to the little-understood female realm of gossip. And, although we can find evidence suggesting its prevalence in 20th century historical, sociological and psychoanalytical literature, this dimension of female consciousness—the 'culture of pain'—has rarely been the subject of academic study. In order to have a fuller understanding ofthe current, more explicitly feminist articulations of these long-held female sentiments, it is important to trace their historical roots. This paper is one attempt to do that, by locating and analyzing the expression of these feelings in the culture and consciousness of American women during and immediately after WWII, specifically through an analysis ofthe "films of suspicion and distrust" popular in the 1940s During World War II, American women were placed in an historically unusual situation. Over 1 1 million men were mobilized for war, and women, as a labor reserve, moved in to fill what were previously defined as "men's jobs." Many women experienced significant occupational as well as geographical mobility during the war, juggling new and untraditional work roles along with household duties. However, women's wartime double duty was never significantly alleviated; day care and community support services were, for the most part, grossly inadequate during WWII. And their inadequacy was far from accidental, prefiguring the massive layoffs of female workers that would occur in the immediate postwar period. Although wartime polls indicated that up to 75 percent of female war workers wished to retain theirjobs in peacetime, after the war ended they were forced or "cooled" out of the industrial sector of the labor market. Women were encouraged to channel their energies into the rehabilitation of the returning vet, and the reestablishment of interrupted family lives. "Go back home" became the postwar rallying cry, as some (mainly white, middle class) women actually "went home," the birth rate zoomed upward; and others (mainly working class and minority women) reentered the work force in the lower paid, dead-end clerical (read: "female") sector of an expanding monopoly capitalism. As we can see. WWII and the postwar transition period, with the particular strains it created in male/female relationships, as well as the changes it brought about in the work and family roles of women, provides an important vantage point for the study of female consciousness. How to study female consciousness, i.e., the way(s) in which women perceived their everyday lives in the 1940s, is a difficult problem. "What happened to women in WWII?" does not fully answer the question ofhow American women perceived and responded to their experience in the 1 940s. The need to study female consciousness "from the bottom up" is easy to demonstrate. How to go about it is much more complex and difficult. Few direct sources (e.g., diaries, letters) for the study of female consciousness exist, and these few are often limited by the particular class, race, ethnicity, or sexual preference of the author(s). While we could conclude that exploring popular female consciousness in the 1940s is important, but essentially impossible, we would be overlooking a...

Undergraduate Activists in the Woman's Movement and Their Public: Attitudes towards Marriage and the Family

Abstract This paper compares the attitudes towards women's home and famiy roles of two groups of undergraduate women: undergraduate activists in the Women's Liberation Movement and a random sample of non-activist undergraduates. Data from both of these groups pertaining to career aspirations, marital and fertility expectations, communal living arrangements, and possible strains between future family and work roles are examined. While the desire to combine family and career roles is typical of undergraduate women in both groups, there are important differences between activists and non-activists in their plans for integrating the two role constellations. Activist women's responses are also compared with positions on women's family roles indicated by spokeswomen of the wider radical Women's Movement, and some important differences are suggested by the data. The paper concludes by briefly exploring the implications of the findings for future social change in the family and in the society of which it is a part.

Family Roles of Women: A German Example

Family Roles of Women: A German Example