The family and its members

by Anna Garlin Spencer

The passage of the so-called Sheppard-Towner Bill is one answer in the United States to the right of the child and its mother to life and health. There are those who deplore the tendency to seek for such aid to individuals through the Federal Government. The Governor of New York State, for example, although a man of progressive ideas and liberal point of view, opposed "starting aid to mothers and babies from the Washington end," declaring that work for the "welfare of citizens of any class should start at the locality to be benefited." He would not have the people educated to depend upon the Federal Government for benefits. He feared that the Sheppard-Towner Bill would tend to "make the public expect to be nursed from the cradle to the grave" and be a detriment to the public life rather than a benefit. New York State made a good appropriation for its own aid to mothers and babies, but did not apply for the Federal aid in addition. By the middle of the second month of 1922, however, nearly thirty states had accepted the Act as a welcome help in their welfare work, and few will be left outside of its provisions by the end of the year. The fear that such an Act would make the general government the active controller and director of the lives of parents and their children in most intimate ways seems not justified by the facts. The Bill, when passed, simply provided money to be given to the states on the fifty-fifty basis "for the purpose of coöperating with them in promoting the welfare and hygiene of maternity and infancy." The specific plans for each state are to be made by the state agency in charge of the work and the only Federal supervision is that of standardization, by which the Chief of the Children's Bureau, the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service, and the Commissioner of Education must approve those plans as "reasonably appropriate and adequate to carry out the purposes of the Act" before the money of the Federal Government is passed over to any state.

It is rather as a help to states desiring aid in this particular than as a compulsory requirement that the Act is intended to operate. There are those, however, who fear any extension of power of the National Government even through influence acquired by subsidies for necessary aids to the common life. It is a matter for thought and unprejudiced study what form of public aid is, on the whole, the best for our country. It cannot be denied, however, that different states have differing burdens to carry for the immigrant, the ignorant, the destitute, and the defective. It is at least desirable to press the point that no state lives to itself and no one dies to itself. Disease knows no boundary lines of political government and the death-toll of mothers and babies does not halt at geographical limitations. We are all one country insofar as bad social conditions are concerned. We are all helped when any smallest country town most remote from the centres of population is raised in its social standards and conditions. Hence, perhaps, we may not fear national aid to each locality in need or feel concerned as to what agency accomplishes a required social advance.

Ellen Key declared that every mother should be maintained by the state during the first year of every child's life and that afterward each child should have one-half its support from the state and one-half from the father. That may not be the ideal. We may believe that to thus reduce the father's responsibility would mean a dangerous lessening of his energy and devotion to the family well-being. It is true, however, that while there are so many in every community without essentials for care in childbirth or for the early nurture of infants, we must find some way of providing these essentials, or the state is endangered at its vital centre.

Every Child Should Have a Competent Father.—The third demand of childhood is for a competent father. That takes us at once into the area of wages and economic conditions. When the Children's Bureau, itself a testimony to the awakened social conscience in respect to childhood, shows from careful investigation that in families where the father earns only ten dollars or less a week more than twice as many babies die before the age of two years than in families where the fathers earn twenty-five dollars a week or more, we can see with clearer vision than ever before that to give babies a fair chance in life the father must be fairly paid for his work.

The following table shows this fact in graphic form:

Economic Aspects of the Father's Competency.—The death-rate of babies in families in which the mother has to earn outside the home under factory conditions of labor in order to secure absolute necessities is so high that it is seen to be not socially thrifty to thus place a double burden upon mothers. The death-rate and sickness-rate of families in which the children do not have sufficient nourishing food, in which the mother is half starved and wholly deprived of rest and pleasure, and the father is under terror night and day lest the rent money will not be ready when the landlord's agent comes, cannot give us ease of mind. The families in which unemployment is frequent or overwork keeps the father as well as the mother under the pressure of nervous exhaustion, are the families in which the right of the child to two competent parents is grossly denied. The aid given the mother, by even the best of "Maternity Bills," insofar as it transcends the wider dissemination of knowledge and gives actual financial aid in economic distress, seems only a makeshift. The sick have a social claim for social care and the ignorant of all ages have a special claim upon the community for instruction, whether from separate Commonwealth or from the Federal Government, it matters little. The financial aid given, however, the "material relief" that must be rendered in family emergencies, should not be needed by the healthy, law-abiding, thrifty, honest, skilled, or even half-skilled workman. He should be able to earn a necessary minimum for himself and for his family by his own labors. We cannot here enter into the economic problems involved, but must register a conviction that real social progress must include not only a competent father for every child but also a fairer chance for every man to become that competent father through fairer sharing in the profits of industry. Widespread and careful inquiry as to reasons for dropping below the self-supporting line list as one cause of "necessity for material relief, having in the family more than three children under the age of fourteen." This fact must give us thought. At fourteen in many states the child may begin to earn something toward his own support. The question may well be debated whether or not an average man in ordinary economic general conditions should be unable to care for more than three children below the earning period if his wife is a competent housemother and thus earns her part. If such a condition of restriction upon family increase is accepted as inevitable and permanent in our industrial order, then surely the cost of rearing children must be far more widely distributed. In such a condition there would be needed social help for fathers and mothers far more definite and inclusive than merely the aid to expectant mothers. If it is true that it takes from three and one-half to four children from each married pair to keep up the population considered necessary for national well-being, and if there is an increasing number of men and women deterred from furnishing even two of that quota by the expense involved, then it is high time that we consider at least how the family burden may be more equally distributed.

The French Plan of Family Extra-wage.—One plan of meeting this unequal social burden of parenthood and the social danger involved in too few children born, France has devised by the family extra-wage.[8] This is simply a provision by which married workers with children are preferred before married workers without children, and much preferred before bachelors, in the matter of wages. French work-people with families, irrespective of their station, rate of pay, premium or bonus, receive:

1. An indemnity of 200 francs at the birth of a child.

2. A suckling indemnity, which is given to the wife, of 100 francs a month during the first year.