Protecting family and race: the progressive case for regulating women's work

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, July, 2005 by Thomas C. Leonard

I

Introduction

AMERICAN ECONOMICS BECAME a professional, expert policy discipline during the Progressive Era (roughly 1890-1920), a period that marked, not coincidentally, the beginning of a vastly more expansive state relationship to the economy. By World War I, the U.S. government created the Federal Reserve, amended the Constitution to institute a personal income tax, established the Federal Trade Commission, applied antitrust laws to industrial combinations and to labor unions, and restricted immigration, while state governments regulated working conditions, banned child labor, instituted "mothers' pensions," capped working hours, and set minimum wages. (1) Professional economists, especially the progressives among them, played a leading role in the Progressive Era transformation of the state's relationship to the American economy.

What is less well known is that eugenic thought deeply influenced the Progressive Era transformation of the state's relationship to the American economy. Progressive Era economics, like the regulatory state it helped found, came of age at a time when biological approaches to social and economic reform were at their high-water mark. Reform-minded economists (and other social scientists) argued that the labor force should be rid of unfit workers--whom they labeled "unemployables," "parasites," and the "industrial residuum"--so as to uplift superior, deserving workers. Immigrants, blacks, and those deemed defective in character or intellect were regarded by leading labor legislation activists less as victims of industrial capitalism than as threats to the health and well-being of deserving workers and of society more generally. Mostly neglected by historians of American economics, these invidious distinctions crucially informed the labor and immigration reform that is the hallmark of the Progressive Era (Leonard 2003a). (2)

This crude, eugenically informed sorting of workers into deserving and undeserving classes was applied to women as well. Many reformers classified women among the "unemployable." In the United States, where nearly all Progressive Era labor legislation applied to women exclusively, laws regulating women's work were promoted for the benefits thought to obtain when women were removed from paid employment. Leading progressives, among them women at the forefront of labor reform, advocated excluding women from the labor force on the grounds that (1) work outside the home threatened women's health and morals; (2) working women usurped jobs that rightly belonged to male heads of household entitled to a "family wage"; and (3) women in the labor force improperly abandoned their eugenic duties as "mothers of the race." (3)

The progressive justifications for women's labor legislation were diverse. Paternalists invoked women's health; moralists invoked women's virtue; "family wagers" sought to protect fathers from the economic competition of women; "maternalists" promoted the virtues of motherhood; and eugenicists advocated for the eugenic health of the race. (4) But all of these different justifications for women's labor laws shared two common characteristics: all were founded upon invidious distinctions between the sexes, and all argued that society is better off when women are excluded from work for wages.

II

The Influence of Eugenic Thought

BIOLOGY INFORMED PROGRESSIVE ERA social science enough that one cannot fully understand the economic ideas that underwrote labor and immigration reform without also understanding the biological thought that influenced them. The relationship between American economic reform and the biology of human inheritance remains relatively unexplored because, new scholarship notwithstanding, the influence of eugenics is poorly understood. Eugenics is still widely regarded as an aberrant, pseudoscientific, laissez-faire doctrine, a 20th-century version of Gilded Age social Darwinism that was wholly abandoned after the eugenic atrocities of German National Socialism. In short, eugenics is seen to represent everything that Progressive Era reformers opposed.

But the progressives were not that progressive and eugenics was, in actual fact, the broadest of churches. Eugenics was mainstream; it was pervasive to the point of faddishness; it was supported by leading figures in the emerging science of genetics; (5) it appealed to an extraordinary range of political ideologies, not least to the progressives; it was, as state control of human breeding, a program that no advocate of laissez-faire could consistently endorse; (6) it opposed natural selection (Leonard 2004); and it also survived the Nazis. (7)

Historians of eugenics, traditionally focused upon movements in the United States, the United Kingdom, and in Germany, have more recently shown that eugenic thought was commonplace elsewhere, influencing intellectuals, scientists, and public figures in virtually all non-Catholic Western countries, and in many others besides. There are scholarly treatments of the eugenics movements in Canada, France, Japan, Russia, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Romania, China, Latin America, and elsewhere. (8) By 1933, American demographer and eugenicist Paul Popenoe could boast that eugenic sterilization laws obtained in jurisdictions comprising 150 million people (Kevles 1995: 115). (9)