MOTHERHOOD AND PENSIONS
To the Editor:
After all, the discussion of State Funds to Mothers has not left us breathless. Even after the clear statements of two opposing social points of view in The Survey of March 1, and the summing up by Dr. Devine it seems to me that there still remains another point of view—that of the mother.
Speeches in a Mother’s Congress do not always give the right idea of the mother’s point of view. One must make allowance for fervour. A speaker of charm and imagination will be quoted, but the great body of mothers are as calm and collected in thinking on this subject as on any other domestic problem which comes to them for solution. For there is no doubt that the women, and above all, the mothers, will have something to do and say about the solution of this problem.
I belong to the class of mothers who would not usually speak in public except for an accident. The accident was that I discovered a woman trying to do the impossible and found that society seemed organized to ignore her. She was not very good, but she was not bad. No one tried to help her to be better. They said they had been observing her, and that they were not satisfied. She was a widow of thirty-five with eight children under the working age. The conditions under which that woman was struggling were absolutely impossible and I broke the boycott. Since then I have been interested in mothers with minor dependent children.
It seems to me that taking away the children from a mother, is like taking away her life, for the connection is so close and subtle. Many a mother would prefer a quick and sudden death to that slow and living one. It is like giving capital punishment for a trivial offense. Sometimes the offense is unintentional. It may be poverty.
There is a certain temporary relief gained, when children have been entirely dependent on the mother, and she has had no bread to give them. At first, when the relieving officer takes the children and she knows that at night they will be snug and warm and in the morning dressed and fed, there is a great wave of thankfulness and relief. But soon the mother asks herself, “why could not I have warmed and fed and dressed them, since I could have done it for less?” Even the simplest mothers have heard the whisper now. In their desperate loneliness they are gathering, by tens and by thousands, to ask for the custody of their own children.
This social revolution may be like the French revolution, but it is surely not like the burning of witches, unless the witches are the ones that stand by the cradles of neglected childhood.
How carefully Miss Richmond, appealing to our judgment and sound sense, figures out the seemingly fabulous sums that might have been saved to fight tuberculosis and feeble-mindedness, from the sums wasted in soldiers pensions. But why, I ask, is the whole country spell-bound, helpless and hopeless at the prospect of the mounting pension ladder? If we admit that the granting of pensions to disabled soldiers was right, why attack the principle instead of the abuse of the practise? Surely that could be helped. If a thing can be proven to be wrong and illogical by mathematics, as Miss Richmond has proved it to be, then it can be solved by mathematics. There is a leak somewhere.
In the same way, if there are more children with their mothers, after a certain law has been passed, and at the same time more in the institutions, it shows, surely, that the attention of the community has been called to a lot of children unknown before or that someone has blundered in counting them. A new law does not produce a spontaneous crop of children, under the Juvenile Court limit. Where were those children? These are the things that a mother naturally asks. They say that the soldiers are dying out. But unless the risks and dangers and lack of independence of the life deter women in the future, there will always be mothers.
But will there always be poor mothers? Have we not begun a war on poverty?
Why is not the prevention and cure of poverty as wide and noble a field as the cure of tuberculosis? Are we not studying to eliminate it in the same way by destroying its breeding places, by rescuing the child, by no longer considering poverty as “the curse of God?” Poverty and tuberculosis and other dark shapes go hand in hand. Why is not the prevention of needless poverty also a constructive health measure?
And why, if we are to be so very careful and scientific about it, is the question of non-support always confused with that of the death of the wage-earner? The man cannot take his responsibilities with him into the next life, whatever we say, and the poor cannot carry adequate insurance till we copy England or Germany.
Let us have “more individualized, more skillful, more thorough treatment of the widely diversified causes of dependence” by all means. But let us not forget that the fact of bearing and rearing a child in itself creates a certain, if variable, state of dependence for a woman. No amount of learned reasoning can change the fundamental fact that while the child is coming into the world and is young the mother must forfeit a certain amount of her independence to care for the child. What I do not have patience with is the preaching of that good old-fashioned dogma “the mother’s best place is in the home.” Nothing can be more valuable to the state than the mother’s contribution, but the home has no safeguards other than those which the man, with his willing or unwilling hands can give her.
It is the preachers and the social workers, I have thought to myself many times who have waked our sleeping “social conscience.” It may be a good genie that is waked but it wants something to do, and will not be put off with promises.
Clara Cahill Park.
[Secretary of the Commission to Study the Question of Support of Dependent Minor Children of Widowed Mothers.]
Wollaston, Mass.