Dreamers of a New Day (21 page)

In both countries, the meaning of state endowment was interpreted in very different ways by its supporters. One strand stressed social efficiency. Reform around reproduction was presented as being in the long-term interests of state and society. As Eleanor Rathbone put it in 1918:

After all the rearing of families is not a sort of masculine hobby, like tobacco-smoking or pigeon flying. If nations are to continue to exist they must reproduce themselves, and the cost of doing so must be paid for somehow by the nation.
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Other advocates stressed basic social needs, the possibility of economic independence, and greater honour and respect for mothers as the recipients of state endowment. In an Independent Labour Party pamphlet,
Socialists and the Family: A Plea for Family Endowment
, the 1920s birth control campaigner Dorothy Jewson insisted that ‘Of all the services claiming attention and demanding national help and protection there is none of more importance to the nation than that of bearing and rearing healthy children.’
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Another Labour Party activist, Dorothy Evans, said in 1925 that women wanted ‘some form of remuneration for mothers for the state service of rearing children’.
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British labour women tended to couch their demand for state endowment in terms of mothers’ contribution to society as a whole. However,
in 1920 the American socialist feminist Crystal Eastman also stressed women’s rights as individuals. Caring for children should be recognized as work ‘requiring a definite economic reward and not merely entitling the performer to be dependent on some man’.
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Eastman regarded motherhood endowment as giving women a choice between home and work, and argued that cash payments should be complemented by childcare and equality in employment. Linking mothering and employment, Eastman’s propositions built in the possibility of extending women’s capacity to determine how they should live.

Nonetheless, state payments troubled libertarian leftists in both countries. Ada Nield Chew argued in 1912 that the proposal would be utilized by the state to ‘command obedience’.
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In the US, Benita Locke took up the cudgels in Margaret Sanger’s anarchist journal, the
Woman Rebel
. In a 1914 article entitled ‘Mothers’ Pensions: The Latest Capitalist Plot’, Locke argued that such payments would restrict women’s options. While conceding that Mothers’ Pensions advocates were well-intentioned, she warned that the ‘effect of social reforms . . . is often the reverse of that intended by their sponsors’.
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Stella Browne, who supported family allowances, opposed Eleanor Rathbone’s emphasis on marriage or the morality of the mother as conditions for receiving the allowance. She saw such stipulations as an inadmissible extension of the state’s control over personal behaviour: ‘Why should the child or children be made to suffer if its two progenitors refuse to turn a brief – though possibly worthwhile – illusion into a permanent incompatibility?’
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The push towards seeing motherhood as a social activity in which intervention was possible contributed to a growing self-consciousness about how to mother. Carrica Le Favre’s
Mother’s Help and Child’s Friend
(1890) combined advice about bathing babies and letting fresh air into rooms, with exhortations about the importance of ‘moral sunshine’ in making for ‘domestic happiness’. She stressed that women’s rights involved responsibilities, and aimed to reconcile women to motherhood by raising the ‘esteem’ in which it was held.
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The message of such mothering manuals, anxiously perused by the enlightened, was that motherhood was a skilled activity which had to be learned.

Calls on women to seek alternative ways of mothering proved particularly popular in the United States, where self-help health movements proliferated and ‘mind-cure’ flourished. Alice B. Stockham, a feminist interested in spirituality and free love, followed up her 1896 alternative sex manual
Karezza
with her 1911
Tokology
, covering
pregnancy, childbirth and infant care. Stockham mixed common sense with mind control. Pregnant women were advised to avoid ‘tight lacing’, to take thermal baths, to adopt ‘fruit diets’ and deep breathing, to have massages, walk upstairs, stride up hills, do gymnastics and, when the baby was born, to breastfeed.
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Stockham exhorted them to live active, socially useful lives, and in the event of ailments or pain, to abstract their thoughts. She concluded
Tokology
with the assertion that the ‘
mind, the real self
’ determined life. Hence Stockham’s advice to would-be mothers was: ‘Learn to subordinate the body.’ Both parents, in her opinion, needed to ‘lose sight of selfish interest, and strive to the utmost for all conditions that shall favour the highest good of offspring, “for to be well born is the right of every child”.’
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Moses Harman’s phrase was thus to enter that modern and popular genre – the childbirth advice manual.

The utopian promise of the ideal offspring lurked behind all these proposals for better mothering. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ideal future, the children are all mysteriously ‘eager, happy, courteous’.
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This faith in harmony extended even to infants; an optimistic Rosa Graul promised that anarchist co-operatives would foster exemplary babies. Precociously aware of how much they all were wanted, ‘they were wonderfully good babies.’
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In the early twentieth century, the Swedish feminist Ellen Key’s exaltation of the fulfilling aspects of motherhood exerted an international influence. Key’s conception of expressive mothering combined social demands for childcare provision and state payments for mothers, with the individualistic assertion of a woman’s right to fulfil her potential as a person. Key argued that women’s difference from men should be the basis for the reform of motherhood, and that women’s subordination was founded on their economic dependence on individual men. Her mystical celebration of mothers, elaborated in
The Century of the Child
(1900) and
Love and Marriage
(1904), redefined how to mother, and delineated how mothering could be endowed with new values.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman adopted a contrasting perspective, though she too wanted to change how mothering was seen and what it entailed. Gilman believed that the individual home confined women, and that they could make much better use of their mothering skills by moving outwards into society. In
Moving the Mountain
(1911), Gilman outlined the conditions necessary for her new motherhood.

a. Free, healthy, independent, intelligent mothers.

b. Enough to live on – right conditions for child-raising.

c. Specialized care.

d. The new social consciousness, with its religion, its art, its science, its civics, its brilliant efficiency.
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Gilman was searching for opposing social values to a competitive, male-dominated capitalism. She located these not in an ideal of existing mothering, but in the potential it contained. In her ironic utopian work
Herland
(1915), Gilman depicted an all-female community which had established a maternalist co-operative haven based on nurture. Three male visitors, accustomed to the struggle for existence and the confinement of mothering within the domestic sphere, were deeply puzzled:

We are used to seeing what we call ‘a mother’ completely wrapped up in her own pink bundle of fascinating babyhood, and taking but the faintest theoretic interest in anybody else’s bundle, to say nothing of the common needs of
all
the bundles. But these women were working all together at the grandest of tasks – they were Making People – and they made them well.
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Gilman argued for new conditions for mothers, while suggesting that mothering carried values which were relevant to men as well as women, and could be translated into a universal social alternative. Like Key, Gilman combined individual fulfilment with social reorganization and a vision of community. Her ideas were influential in Britain as well as in America. In the
Daily Herald
in 1912, Mabel Harding dismissed ‘early Victorian platitudes about a woman’s place being the home, and her only true vocation that of wife, mother and housekeeper’. She asserted, like Gilman, that the home was not ‘encompassed by four walls, no longer is a woman confined to her own narrow circle’. Instead a woman now had duties to the ‘bigger family of the city and the state’.
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Motherhood, for and against, aroused strong passions. While some radical women believed that changing motherhood was a crucial element in improving women’s lives and position in society, others were wary of highlighting biological or cultural difference; they considered that concepts of a gendered citizenship for mothers undermined a universal right based on a common humanity. Moreover, amidst all the talk about socialization, it was unclear whether the aim was to enhance or minimize
mothering as an aspect of women’s lives. For some women adventurers, it was simply a trap. In 1892, Lizzie Holmes’s sister, the American Populist and Secretary of the Kansas Freethinkers’ Association, Lillie D. White, advised women to ignore ‘wifely and maternal ties and burdens’ and to ‘unlearn . . . any duties of any kind to gods, men or communities’.
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Writing in the
International Socialist Review
in 1911, Georgia Kotsch, from the radical West Coast wing of the Socialist Party, considered that ‘the mother function’ and the ‘mother instinct’ were the ‘last citadel’ of masculine psychology’s way of managing women.
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The anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre similarly repudiated the mother instinct and defended the childless.
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A 1912 contributor to the
Freewoman
deplored the way women tended to go to pieces intellectually when they became mothers.
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‘Beatrice Hastings’ (Emily Alice Haigh), who wrote in the avant-garde
New Age
, also held motherly nurture in contempt. Ticked off by a proponent of breastfeeding, she exploded, ‘I don’t care a tacking-thread whether women feed their children or not’.
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She wanted a bohemian, independent identity and sexual freedom.

The American socialist feminist Harriot Stanton Blatch tried to cut through the polarities and the passion by arguing that the key question was how to balance work and mothering.
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Similarly Ada Nield Chew carefully distinguished between domesticity and mothering in the
Freewoman
in 1912: ‘The confusion arises from the fact that the maternal part is mixed up in some minds inextricably with what are regarded as equally sacred duties – duties to houses and clothes, to pots and pans and to food. We can never think clearly about this matter till we accustom our minds to regard women as individual human beings.’
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In 1915 the Greenwich Village bohemian socialist and feminist, Henrietta Rodman, stressed the creative benefits of mothering: ‘The baby is the great problem of the woman who attempts to carry the responsibilities of wage-earning and citizenship. We must have babies for our own happiness, and we must give them the best of ourselves – not only for their own good, not only for the welfare of society, but for our own self-expression.’
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Yet this enthusiasm for expressive motherhood did not imply constant contact: ‘The mother of the past has been so busy with her children that she hasn’t had time to enjoy them . . . The point is not how long but how intensely a mother does it.’
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The problem was how to achieve the desired equilibrium. In practice, women’s personal solutions ranged from leaving children with relatives or servants to living communally and sharing childcare. But by World
War One a few middle-class American feminists and reformers were raising the sexual division of labour, both in their own personal domestic arrangements, and as a social issue with policy implications. The consciously modern Crystal Eastman wanted fathers to be involved with looking after the children, though her proposition of ‘marriage under two roofs’, whereby the man and woman lived in separate places when children arrived, suggests that sharing childcare would have presented difficulties for the unconventional semi-detached couples.
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The connection between changing childcare and changing both men and women’s work was acknowledged in 1918 by 300 delegates from social reform organizations at the Women’s Legislative Congress in Chicago, who argued for a shorter working week ‘so the father can give personal care to the child’.
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By the 1920s, progressive child-rearing theories in Britain were also beginning to count fathers in. However, when it came to the crunch, old habits died hard. Leonora Eyles described this graphically in the mid-1920s. When baby wakes and cries:

‘Feed him,’ says father, and turns over dragging most of the clothes with him. Mother, afraid of a row, and distressed at spoiling the breadwinner’s night, feeds him. And in an hour’s time he wakes again, and is sick. Usually by this time both mother and father are wet and uncomfortable. Mother sleeps with one eye open, so that father shan’t be disturbed. And next day she gets up at the call of the alarm clock, red-eyed, fuzzy-headed, nervy, tired to death to begin the new day.
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