THE MASSACHUSETTS REPORT ON THE RELIEF OF WIDOWS
PORTER R. LEE
Massachusetts deserves credit for being the first state to preface mothers’ pension legislation with a formal study of existing conditions. The Legislature of 1912 authorized the appointment of a commission “to investigate the question of the condition of widowed mothers within the commonwealth having minor children dependent upon them for support,” and to report to the succeeding Legislature “as to the advisability of enacting legislation providing for payments by the commonwealth for the purpose of maintaining such minor children in their homes.” The report of the commission giving its findings and recommending legislation based thereon has been published as is stated elsewhere in this issue,[[2]] David F. Tilley, one of the members of the commission, dissenting from the conclusions of the majority.
The success or failure of the mothers’ pension movement must depend largely upon our ability to avoid the mistakes which have characterized outdoor relief and other gratuitous payments to individuals from the public treasury, and to read into the proposed remedy a new and dignified meaning which outdoor relief has never had. It may be that both these ends will be difficult to attain. Certainly they can only be attained after the most careful study of the operation of outdoor relief, both public and private, to ascertain to what extent it has succeeded or failed and why. Such a study has long been necessary in the interests of the poor and of efficient relief work. To be successful it cannot be hasty, inexpensive or inexpert. Quite as important as this study of outdoor relief will be a study of the conditions under which children are admitted to institutions which must be undertaken with much the same end in view.
Those who have felt the need of more facts before enacting mothers’ pension legislation have been much interested in the study which Massachusetts has been making. If all the possibilities of such a study were realized in this report, a good many of our stumbling blocks would be removed. The existing outdoor relief machinery, public and private, an analysis of its success or failure and a standard for future procedure would all have been revealed.
The report of the Massachusetts commission, however, gives us very little help. It is marked by evident earnestness of purpose; but its conclusions are of little value because they represent in almost every case inferences from inadequate data. To a large extent this is to be charged to the commission’s inadequate resources; but whatever the reason the report as it stands does not give us a model for other states. It does not give us even a clear relation between the commission’s own findings and their recommendations. Because the right kind of an outdoor relief study is necessary and because the example of Massachusetts is likely to be followed by other states, it is important to subject this report to somewhat critical examination.
The commission’s method of study was five-fold:
1. A questionnaire to fifty-seven child helping societies and several public departments caring for dependent children as to the circumstances under which the children in their care were committed.
2. A questionnaire to various children’s agencies asking why children are separated from their mothers in poverty.
3. A questionnaire to public and private relief agencies asking for “the total income and the sources thereof, together with certain other facts in each widow’s family receiving through it (the agency) regular relief” for a definite period.
4. Special study of the Juvenile Court records of Boston and of the results of a day nursery investigation.
5. A use of analogies, observations and “reasons of a non-statistical kind” which suggest the desirability of legislation granting pensions to mothers.
Methods 1 and 3 brought the statistics upon which the chief conclusions of the report are based. But the commission itself by a series of statements regarding their accuracy robs one of any confidence in the results obtained. For example, these statements appear in the discussion of the statistics received from relief agencies:
“Because of its small appropriation it [the commission] was enabled to make a much less detailed and exact statistical study of the position of these widows than would have been desirable.”
“The resources of your commission did not permit it to secure its information by the personal visit of an investigator, hence the information must be less accurate than it might otherwise have been.”
“The commissioners believe that despite the limited accuracy of some of their relief statistics further study of the relief given by charities is not necessary.”
Moreover, regarding the information gained from the children’s agencies as to the causes for the removal of children from their homes, it may be doubted whether these agencies are competent witnesses. The standard of work done by the public agencies and many of the private agencies for the care of children in Massachusetts is unusually high. It may be doubted, however, whether any such agency after the most careful preliminary inquiry is fully able to determine the real economic status of a family which is usually a matter that requires long acquaintance. Many of these societies receiving children who have been removed from their mothers have very little first hand information as to the reason for it. In fact, the report itself, in discussing the information secured through this questionnaire regarding the insurance carried by the families, states: “The fact that the children’s agencies failed to answer this question in so many cases was undoubtedly because they did not possess the information.” For the same reason it is doubtful if they were competent witnesses on many other points calling for knowledge of what happened before the children came into their care.
The statistics secured through method 3 are condemned even more directly. After information had been secured through the questionnaire to public and private relief agencies regarding 1,258 families, Mr. Tilley of the commission arranged for a special study of one hundred of these in their own homes by trained visitors in the service of the State Board of Charity. These studies revealed conditions completely at variance with those stated in the returns received from the agencies themselves. The report itself comments: “It is clear that many records previously received from the overseers, especially, but also from others, were glaringly incorrect.”
It is hardly possible to put confidence in conclusions based upon data whose inaccuracy is so clear. It does not become any more possible when the inaccuracy is frankly conceded by those who reach the conclusions.
Another method of study used by the commission—the compilation of analogies and other non-statistical reasons for proving its case—is rendered impotent in much the same way. In a carefully developed argument the report draws an analogy between the proposed subsidy scheme for widows and the industrial accident compensation plan. “The situation of dependents of men killed by industrial accident is scarcely distinguishable from that of these widows.... Consequently, widows through death of husbands by disease or other non-industrial cause should be dealt with by a similar principle.”
After developing this analogy somewhat elaborately, however, the report says: “The commission rejects the principle of payment by way of indemnity of loss,” apparently abandoning the workmen’s compensation analogy just after making it serviceable.
It would not be difficult to point out other traits which are fatal to the report as a basis for scientific action, for example, its constant introduction of important conclusions with such expressions as “it is obvious,” “the inference is,” “it is not unlikely,” “so far as information was obtainable” and “important inferences are possible.” Moreover, when conclusions are based upon statistics compiled from different sources by different persons with different standards and possibly different interpretations of the questions asked, a report giving these statistics and the conclusions reached should give also a copy of the schedule used in gathering them. The report does not include the commission’s schedule.
With the purpose of the commission to point the way to the adequate assistance of widows most of us like Mr. Tilley, who submits a minority report, are in complete accord. During recent years our enlarging conceptions of social treatment have condemned utterly much of our supposedly efficient work in family and individual reconstruction. There is a widespread conviction of sin in this matter and an earnest searching for the remedy. The mothers’ pension movement is no doubt a result of this; but the conviction of sin and the earnest search are true of many to whom mothers’ pensions seem a remedy of doubtful immediate value.
If we have failed in our relief work, the children of the widow are not the only ones who have suffered. Upon the children of disabled fathers, of incompetent and neglectful parents, of all those tragic families who fall outside the commission’s category of “worthy,” our sins are visited still more heavily. The commission was charged only with the duty of studying the condition of widows; but it seems to have taken some note of families of other types. We read: “Consistently, widows through death of husbands by disease or other industrial cause ... deserve an utterly different kind of treatment from that accorded to the lazy and shiftless, the victims of drink, gambling or other dissipation or persons in transitory or emergency destitution. The commission does not believe that the same persons who administer the general poor law should alone determine the aid for worthy widows. Administration of such aid is sufficiently complicated, difficult and frequent to deserve separate care.” It might be noted incidentally that the cause of a husband’s death is not always a satisfactory test of a wife’s moral habits, and that “widows through death of husbands by disease, etc.” are not infrequently of the unsatisfactory type described by the commission. But a still more important comment is the following from Mr. Pear of Boston:
“It is well understood by social workers that those whom your correspondent terms the incompetent, and willingly leaves to the care of overseers of the poor are really in need of the most skillful ministration. They too have children. To assume that they may well be left to officials considered incapable of caring for respectable widows is evidence of a complacency which social workers cannot share.”
The report of the commission gives us much that suggests the fact of our failure to provide adequately or helpfully for the families of widows, a fact of which we had already become conscious. What we need, however, is not so much evidence of the fact of failure as a clear understanding of why we have failed. Why have public outdoor relief and private charity conceived in as deep an interest in the destitute widow as any mother’s subsidy program, failed to satisfy either the widow or the charitable or society at large?
The failure has rarely been due to lack of aggregate resources. Nobody familiar with the enormous totals spent for relief, public and private, could doubt that. It must lie somewhere in the quality of the service which brings relief with it. To determine just where it does lie calls for a study requiring money, time and the sure touch of somebody who knows what to look for. The mothers’ pension schemes which the various states have worked out give us very little that is new or of higher promise in the service that goes with relief. The subsidy plan that follows the study of the Massachusetts commission is no exception.
Few institutions have been subject to more criticism than public outdoor relief. No institution has been under fire so long with so little real effort to find out what makes it criticizable. It may well be that public assistance in some form is indispensable in this country and will be made to yield the results we seek. If so, its administration must be revolutionized. Giving existing outdoor relief officials new duties and responsibility to a new authority for part of their work, which is an important part of the proposal resulting from the Massachusetts report, will not revolutionize it. Nor will the giving of new names to old practices not otherwise shorn of the defects which popularize the new name do so. Again and again we have started with a clear call to do justice to the widow. Every time we try to translate our zeal into legislation we come square up against our outdoor relief machinery. Some one of these United States has a golden opportunity to make a study which will point the way to justice not only for the widow and her children but for every other person, old or young, who through our stupidity or his own fault, or both, finds himself forced to seek assistance. But the Massachusetts report does not point the way.
