The Duty to Provide: Fathers, Families and the Workhouse in England, 1880–1914
This chapter explores the ways that the poor laws in England were designed around the norms and ideals of the provider role in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and how in practice the result- ing structures rarely matched the more fluid realities of the lives of the poor. In the decades around 1900, Poor Law provision in England was under intense scrutiny as meanings of poverty and of welfare more generally were being challenged. Growing critiques of the excluding side-effects of the Poor Law accompanied debates about how to bring the male working class into the nation state by reconceptualizing citi- zenship around long-standing social-moral norms of obligation to pro- vide for women, children and the elderly within families. The provider role was thus highly gendered, with husbands and fathers normally required to support their dependents, but the relationship between providing and masculinity was a complex one, particularly amongst the very poorest who availed themselves of Poor Law relief. Those who failed to provide found themselves increasingly vulnerable to pauper- ism, at the same time as its stigma powerfully reinforced the ‘deviant’ position of those claiming relief. However, relationships between wel- fare institutions and families were not totally determined by the state and philanthropic agencies, but were actively used and contested at the individual level by those seeking relief and by collective working-class struggles. The voice of the very poor is notoriously difficult to access, but some fragmentary autobiographical accounts of encounters with pauperism provide opportunities to explore these dynamic relation- ships between the Poor Law and its subjects through the perceptions and reactions of the poor themselves.
The Rise of the Male Breadwinner Family: A Reappraisal
During the last two decades there has been intense debate over the causes of the domestic subordination of women within industrial-capitalist societies. A significant part of this discussion has involved attempts to understand the emergence of a form of family organisation in which the husband was expected to be the main, preferably the sole, bread-winner and his wife was to assume responsibility for running the household, preferably on a full-time basis. Established first among the middle classes, this pattern spread widely throughout the working class with increasing momentum from the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Although the outlines of this development, and the accompanying payment of a family wage to men, are now well-established, the factors responsible for its origins and expansion are still a matter of controversy. In this article I shall review some major explanations of the rise of this “male breadwinner” family and seek to identify a number of weaknesses in the debate as a whole.
The Historical Problem of the Family Wage: The Ford Motor Company and the Five Dollar Day
For feminists, the concept of the family as a social relationship presents particularly important challenges in theoretical and historical investigation. One aspect of working-class family life that has been examined by theorists and historians in the past decade may be especially useful in analyzing the processes of reproduction and gender divisions within the family: the family wage. The ideology of the male-earned family wage, many suggest, became a powerful argument for women's domestic role and position as secondary wage earner in the labor force. At first glance, the notion of the family wage seems like little more than a nasty example of patriarchy, a simplistic argument for women's subordination. Careful examination by feminist scholars has revealed it may be something more complex. The wage operates as an inferface, or mediating agent, between production and the reproduction of labor power. The family wage focuses our attention on the relationships among women, men, and children as they struggle to secure the means to survive. By analyzing the ideology of the family wage, its actual achievement by segments of the working class, and its impact on gender roles, we can begin to demystify the hidden relationships between sex, gender, and class. Domestic labor and waged labor are something more than a mystical meeting of paycheck and use values, or of women's household labor versus male waged labor. The family wage allows us a vehicle to investigate what Elizabeth Pleck called the "two worlds in one": the relationship between production and social reproduction, and the role that sex distinctions have played historically in the creation and recreation of these processes.