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.”