Biological essence-thinking about mothering and motherhood is first of all due to the development of the life sciences in the last century. "Scientific explanations" of women's reproductive experience made, as we have seen, motherhood into women's major identity at the turn of this century. In order to challenge naturalistic descriptions of women, feminist scholars have in the last decades sought to stress that our notions about sexual differences derive from culture and not from nature or biology. The articulation of the term "gender" in the early 1980s, was of significance in this project because it enabled scholars to express the fundamentally social and cultural quality of sexual difference, without having to deal with biological determinism, implicit in terms such as "sex" and "sexual difference".[140] Thus the extensive use of gender became marked by a distinction between sex and gender, nature and culture. Moreover, this use also implies a constructive notion of gender formation, exemplified, as so many times before, by Simone de Beauvoir's "One is not born a woman; one becomes one".[141] The idea of gender as social, cultural, political, and historical constructions (constructionism) have thus become a common frame of understanding for many feminist scholars, in opposition to the biological essentialism.[142]
Linda Gordon and Ann Taylor Allen can be said to have taken up the constructive notion of gender. As we have already seen, this idea had consequences for their interpretations of maternalism. The importance of women's identity as mothers in policy making becomes, according to Gordon and Allen, a cultural product forged on the experience of the dominant social group. They mean by this that mothering and motherhood have cultural implications rather than natural or biological ones.
Theda Skocpol, Molly Ladd-Taylor, Seth Koven, and Sonya Michel, on the other hand, hold a more essential notion of gender. They all stress the existence of a female culture and a female otherness within specific organizations and movements, autonomous from the male world. However, I do not think there is any reason for describing their uses and definitions of maternalism as an example of essentialism, and thus in opposition to Gordon and Allen. The essence-talk which results of their scholarship is, from my point of view, not a conscious research strategy, but rather an unfortunate outcome, due to a simple celebration of difference. Instead of viewing the two groups of researchers in opposition to each other, as respectively constructionists and essentialists, it seems more likely that they operate on different levels (of abstractions). While Gordon and Allen strike one as theoretically updated, the other scholars have no deliberated relation to the postmodern critique of unitary notions of women and feminine gender identity.[143] The latter is especially obvious in regard to the work of Theda Skocpol, where she insists on motherhood as a universal female experience. Contrary to the historians, Skocpol has to be seen as a new-comer in the field. Even though she is a world famous social scientist, she "discovered" the importance of women and gender only a few years ago, which means that Protecting Soldiers and Mothers is her first major work marked by a gender (or women) perspective.[144]
Although some scholars, such as Skocpol, still use gender to postulate dichotomous categories in order to valorize the female part, many researchers have already opened up for the relational potential inherent in gender. Men and maleness have in this way become just as central as women and femaleness. Because the relational perspective has brought "balance" (represented by both men and women) into our analysis, we might also dare to ask more questions about the material body and its cultural implications without being afraid of returning to essentialism and biological determinism.[145] The conceptualization of maternalism can, from my point of view, be seen as an attempt to integrate bodily experiences into a social and historical frame. This might mean that the term in itself has consideration for the tension between the biologically given sex and the culturally created gender, a tension which has been consciously avoided for long. Despite the essence-talk that the use of the term might result in, I think the concept of maternalism rises some interesting questions about the political effects of how society views the relationship of male to man and female to woman. By taking bodily experiences into account, we may enlarge our knowledge and understanding of the process of policy making (and identity formation) In any case, the concept of maternalism also has other consequences than those related to the analytical vocabulary of gender. In the following I point out and discuss some central effects of the ways in which the American feminist scholars use this concept.
rethinking the political and challenging the public/private distinction
Politics has something to do with distribution of benefits and values within a social system (organizations, local communities, national societies etc.) says the Norwegian historian Leiv Mjeldheim.[146] Any action, private or public, formal or informal, taken to affect the course of this distribution, thus becomes political activity.[147]
Mjeldheim's wide definition of politics and political activity is consistent with the understanding of politics involved by the concept of maternalism because it gives room for both public and private displays of power. While historians traditionally have highlighted the public activity that takes place within organizations, unions, political parties etc., and which is directly aimed at the decision-making institutions, the users of maternalism intend to focus on the connection and the interplay between the private and public, formal and informal, arenas of political behaviour. Viewing the activities of the voluntary organizations as a part of the political system (though outside the formal political system as long as women lacked the right to vote) the disputing scholars in many ways expand our understanding of politics and of the connection between political participation and policy making.
The voluntary organizations stressed by the different scholars were all political in the meaning that they sought to influence the distribution of values and benefits (welfare) in society.[148] However, their political activism can be said to be double-edged in the meaning that they exerted their political activity in two different ways. Whereas some organizations aimed their activity directly at needed groups in society, by establishing health clinics and soup kitchen, others were more concerned about lobbying on state or federal level for maternal and child welfare reforms. Tone Margrethe Birkenes has described these two forms of activity as respectively horizontal and vertical political activity.[149] Even though the users of maternalism do not employ the terms "vertical" and "horizontal", they call attention to the same distinctions or features as Birkenes. Especially Sonya Michel addresses the relationship between indirect and direct, or horizontal and vertical political activity. Separating between what she calls radical and conservative maternalists, Michel explicitly stresses the fact that women used different political paths in order to improve the welfare of poor women and children; one that led to or through government and another that went directly at needy groups in society.[150] The National Consumers' League, the Children's Bureau and the settlement movement were, according to Michel, directing their activities towards the political public. The General Federation of Women's Clubs and the National Congress of Mothers, on the other hand, were more engaged in practical charity-work than pressing for social reforms. Molly Ladd-Taylor also calls attention to the existence of different political strategies when she talks about the differences between the club women and the government women.[151] Albeit the remaining scholars are less specific than Michel and Ladd-Taylor, they include the activities conducted at domestic concerns in the frame of politics. Theda Skocpol for example wants to put voluntary activism and institutional political activity on an equal footing by using what she calls a polity-centered approach.[152]
By demonstrating that private and public activities are interrelated, the disputing scholars challenge the private/public distinction underlying much scholarly work on the welfare state.[153] Their focus on the horizontal line of activity expands particularly our ideas about political spaces. Although mainstream scholars, such as Mjeldheim, operate with wide definitions of politics, they still tend to leave out the private displays of power, which means that the horizontal line of activity most often "fell out". Despite the fact that women's practical charity-work did not result in specific social reforms or welfare laws, it did affect the behaviour of others because it often resulted in more permanent public welfare arrangements such as health clinics, food-stations, day-care centres, etc. When Theda Skocpol and others treat the private welfare contributors as a part of the welfare state, the study of welfare states no longer becomes tied merely to the state or the governmental institutions. Welfare-state research becomes, in other words, a study of relations between both private and public welfare contributors, where the state not necessarily plays the major role.[154] This indicates, moreover, that the term "welfare state" got a very inclusive meaning, a meaning in which the link between welfare and state is weakened.
As mentioned in the introduction, the Norwegian historian Anne-Lise Seip has explicitly emphasized such a relational approach on welfare-state research, through the "welfare-triangle". Concerning the American debate and the American welfare-state structure, it is perhaps more correct to talk about a study of interaction in a rectangle between private organizations, local authorities, state legislatures, and federal government. The contributions of the disputing scholars in the maternalist debate lies, however, in the intersection between state and voluntary organizations, which in a Norwegian context can be compared with the level of municipalities.
The concept of maternalism involves, as far as I can see, a rethinking of a different kind of politics, one for which the public/private distinction will not necessarily make sense. This rethinking is, from my point of view, a positive consequence of maternalism because it contributes to a better understanding of the ways the welfare state took its form. Furthermore, the approach that these scholars initiate, gives more room for different welfare state experiences, seeing a high degree of state intervention as only one possibility among many.
Despite the positive potential inherent in many of the discussed contributions, the use of the concept of maternalism leads in some cases to simplifications of national differences. With regard to Theda Skocpol this simplification appears through her sharp distinction between paternalism and maternalism. By celebrating differences between the European and the American welfare states, Skocpol ends up presenting the two systems as mutually exclusive. Seth Koven and Sonya Michel besides operate with a distinction between countries based upon the strength of the state. Since the strength of the central state is identified through the contrast strong/weak, Koven and Michel have constructed a dichotomy between strong states and weak states.
creating new binary oppositions: maternalism/paternalism & strong states/
weak states
As already mentioned, the United States and major European nations came to organize their early welfare systems in different ways (see Table 1-3, page 29-32).[155] During the time when many European countries arranged their social schemes around the wage worker, the US formed a social security system aimed at women and children in particular. Because less women than men were engaged in wage-work in the early 1900s, the early European welfare state tied few women directly to the insurance schemes. Many women nevertheless obtained social benefits through their insured husbands.
According to Theda Skocpol, the European welfare states have to be seen as paternalist welfare states because most women in Europe received social benefits on the basis of their ties to wage-earning males. The American system, on the other hand, is characterized by Skocpol as a maternalist system because women by virtue of their status as single mothers, widows, and workers, were objects for social provisions. Furthermore, the American welfare state was also maternalist in the sense that it was formed to a large extent by women themselves (as professionals and politicians). The paternalist European systems were forged by male politicians, bureaucrats and union leaders.
Skocpol's distinction between the "maternalist" United States and the "paternalist" Europe has as a purpose to demonstrate that the United States did develop social welfare programs before the New Deal. In other words, the United States was not a welfare state "latecomer" compared to Europe. Skocpol wants besides to show that the American welfare state was a better welfare state than the European because it placed women and children at the centre. This results in a hierarchical relationship between the American and the European experience, placing the American welfare state, by its virtue as woman-friendly, above the European.
The opposition between indirect and direct channelling of welfare benefits, between paternalism and maternalism, helps Skocpol to neglect the fact that many European nations did form maternal social policies at the turn of the century, policies which gave social benefits both directly and indirectly to women.
The British insurance Act of 1911 included cash maternity benefits for insured women and the wives of insured men, and the Maternity and Child Welfare Act of 1918 encouraged the further development of local maternity clinics and services. In Norway the Sickness Act of 1909 introduced cash maternity benefits for insured women as well as for wives of insured men, and the Child Welfare Act of 1915 granted small maternity allowances, paid out of taxes, to poor single mothers. [156]
Examples like these show that Skocpol's sharp contrast between maternalism and paternalism represents a strong simplification (see Table 1-3. page 29-32). Even though European countries and the United States arranged their social systems in different ways, both systems were based on the ideal of separate spheres. Most social policies were aimed at women both in Europe and the US in this period, were designed explicitly to benefit them in their capacities as wives and mothers and not as independent workers. The British historian Jane Lewis says that healthier motherhood, which was the purpose of maternal policies, "was meant to strengthen the family, not threaten it by giving economic assistance to mothers and undermining the responsibility of fatherhood".[157]
Skocpol exaggerates, from my point of view, the importance of direct versus indirect distribution of welfare. Instead of celebrating differences in the way Skocpol does, it seems more fruitful to give attention to similarities and the fact that the notion of motherhood as a public virtue played an important role in the promotion of maternal policies in Europe as well as in the US. Furthermore, it seems important to notice that demographic and nationalistic justifications also were behind maternal policies. Pat Thane, also a British historian, sees the growing interest in maternal and child welfare at the turn of the century in connection with declining birth-rate and the high rates of infant mortality throughout Europe. She says:
Nor, anywhere in Europe, can growth of infant and maternal welfare in particular but also social, especially health, policies more generally be dissociated from the sense of demographic crisis which hung over most of the Continent from 1880's to World War Two. [158]
Jane Lewis supports this line of reasoning, saying that the interest in child and maternal welfare began with the recognition that infant mortality was a problem of national importance.[159] Mothering and motherhood became the centre of state activity primarily in order to save infant lives. Because maternal and child welfare was treated as a political issue of national importance, Lewis does not approach the issue of maternal policies as something specifically female, in the way Theda Skocpol does. Nevertheless this does not preclude Lewis from noticing that men and women sometimes had different reasons for promoting maternal and child welfare. But contrary to Skocpol, this notice does not result in an opposition between the interest of men and the interest of women, between paternalism and maternalism, respectively.
Everyone who uses the term "maternalism" places an emphasis on women's ability to influence the creation of welfare policies. Seth Koven and Sonya Michel argue, as we have seen, that women were more influential in countries marked by a "weak" state structure. By distinguishing between strong and weak states, Michel and Koven tend to measure women's welfare activism against the character of the central state.[160] The American state and the British state, to some extent, are characerized as "weak" because both states lacked a strong central bureaucracy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A decentralized state structure encouraged, according to Koven and Michel, political activism outside the institutional borders. On the contrary, "strong states", defined as those with well-developed central bureaucracy and long traditions of government intervention, allowed women less space in which to develop social policies. Thus the "strong states", such as France and Germany, were marked by a low degree of voluntary engagement compared to the USA and Britain.
Pat Thane has criticized categories of "strong states" and "weak states" saying that any simple dichotomy which defines states as "strong" or "weak" in such terms as the size of a central bureaucracy is unhelpful in the British case".[161] Even though the British state was less bureaucratized than the states on the Continent, it was by no means limited or weak, says Thane.
The state system which was constructed in the mid-nineteenth century on the foundation of older institutions and principles was "minimal" in the sense of possessing a small central bureaucracy, and in consciously limiting the areas of activity of central government. But this state was in no useful sense "weak" because those areas were carefully selected as keys to effective central control and the central state operated in a clearly theorized relationship with the broader spheres of activity of local government and voluntary institutions.[162]
In order to evaluate women's welfare activism, we have to look at the context in which they were acting, says Thane. A strong voluntary sector, organized by women, was by no means a sign of a weak central state, in the way Koven and Michel argue. "The important role of voluntarism in nineteenth-century Britain was not the fortuitous corollary of the limited state but integral to the conceptualization of the state by its leaders".[163] Thane continues:
Hence to understand the capacities of the British state for socio-economic intervention at any time before World War Two, it is not enough to examine only the institutions and personnel of the central state. It is essential to understand its close and shifting relationship with local government and with the voluntary and private sectors.[164]
Although Thane criticizes Koven and Michel for the use of the "weak state/strong state" dichotomy, they seem to agree about women's ability to influence the shaping of maternal and child welfare policies in Britain. This common assumption about British women stands in contrast to Skocpol's simple distinction between a "maternalist" American and a "paternalist" British welfare system.
The construction of the dichotomy strong states/weak states has, like the paternalism/maternalism formulation of Skocpol, the purpose of accentuating the United States as better and more woman-friendly than Europe.[165] This need to emphasize the American "greatness" can at first sight look rather "childish". However, I think the answer to this need lies elsewhere. In order to understand why Skocpol, Koven and Michel tend to present the US as better than Europe, we have to look at the political context in which these scholars operate. Whereas most western-European countries have welfare systems with many universal benefits, the United State never came to develop a social security system for all Americans. [166] To claim the existence of an American welfare state better than the European, has, as far as I can see, thus highly political underpinnings. I think Theda Skocpol, Seth Koven, and Sonya Michel want to establish a welfare tradition in which they can base their present day demands for a universal health system, free from stigmatizing means-tested welfare programs. Put differently, their intentions are not to say that the American welfare system actually is better, but to stress the fact that USA has a welfare state tradition on which to build future welfare policies.[167]
American scholars' focus on welfare policies is to some extent due to the current debate on the role of the federal government in ensuring health care in the US. Despite the fact that national social policy for long has been a topic on the American political agenda, the debate took a new turn in the beginning of the 1990s, when the Democratic party began to address the topic: universal health insurance. During the campaign for presidency in 1992, the Democratic candidate Bill Clinton picked up on this theme, a theme on which Clinton continued to work after he assumed office in January 1993. Already in the fall of 1993, he unveiled a comprehensive health care reform (Health Security Plan), hoping to "end welfare as we know it". Many scholars openly supported Clinton's health plan. Theda Skocpol and Linda Gordon are among these that directly, through their scholarship, have commented on and advocated the social political line of the president.
In addition to the constructed oppositions between paternalism and maternalism, between strong states and weak state, some of the disputing scholars reinforce other dualistic distinctions that for long have characterized feminist positions and political strategies. Molly Ladd-Taylor revives for example the (never-ending) debate around the conceptual couple "equality and difference", when she opposes feminism and maternalism.
reinforcing dualistic distinctions: feminism/maternalism
& equality/difference
According to Molly Ladd-Taylor, maternalism has to be seen as a female ideology separate from feminism.[168] Feminists stressed individual rights in social, political, and economical matters, whereas maternalists emphasized to a larger extent the complementary role of women. Using the language of gender sameness and gender difference, respectively, feminists and maternalists have promoted very different ideas about women's role in society, argues Ladd-Taylor.
Ladd-Taylor's definition of maternalism is based on a mutually exclusive character of the relation between arguments of gender sameness and gender difference. In feminist thought polarization between a difference and similarity perspective has contributed to a contrastive notion of equality and difference, where feminists more often are defined as agents of equal rights arguments.[169] Ladd-Taylor, however, makes her two-category model, which is an abstraction, concrete by placing the two mutually exclusive ideological orientations (feminism and maternalism) within specific oragnizations and movements.[170] This placement strengthens the notions of equality and difference as interdependent, as well as it precludes Ladd-Taylor from noticing that the membership (and even the leadership) of both kinds of groups extensively overlapped in the early twentieth century United States.[171]
As we have seen, Ann Taylor Allen challenges the dichotomous distinction between equality and difference.[172] Claiming that women activist in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not find equality and difference mutually exclusive, Allen sees no reason for separating feminism and maternalism. Actually, she defines maternalism as a paradigm for feminist action and ideology, and thus breaks the dichotomous notion of equality and difference, reinforced by Ladd-Taylor. Linda Gordon also talks about maternalism as a variant of feminism by using the term "maternalist feminist".[173] In order to include the maternalist arguments within the frame of feminism, Gordon claims the necessity to expand our ideas of feminism. Gordon means by this that maternalism does not fit within the equal-rights model being used to index feminism.
The disagreement between scholars such as Ladd-Taylor, Allen, and Gordon mirrors in many ways the current debate about "equality-versus-difference" within feminist theory circles on both sides of the Atlantic.[174] In fact, it is quite misleading to talk about it as one debate. The discussion around the conceptual couple equality/difference has literally turned out to be a complex dispute which has brought about many different positions and perspectives. With regard to the users of maternalism, it is possible to identify two of these modes: 1) Ladd-Taylor seems to belong to those who insist on the mutually exclusive character of the relation between "equality" and "difference", and thus also on the necessity of an either/or choice. The effect of this stand is the idea that arguments for equality of civil rights and political rights cannot be made without denying difference.
2) Allen and Gordon, on the other hand, do not see "equality" and "difference" as interdependent. By identifying the way that types of equality and difference are interwoven in particular historical contexts, they question in many ways the dichotomous stance between the two. In this perspective, claims for equal rights does not indicate a rejection of differences.[175] Thus Allen and Gordon can, in contrast to Ladd-Taylor, be seen as promoters of as-well-as solutions.
The position taken up by Allen and Gordon is, as far as I can see, inspired by Joan Scott and her theorizing around the dichotomy equality/difference. Despite the fact that this dichotomy has served to characterize feminist politics and strategies, Scott points out that; when equality and difference are paired dichotomously, they structure an impossible choice. "If one opts for equality, one is forced to accept the notion of difference as antithetical to it. If one opts for difference, one admits that equality is unattainable".[176] Instead of choosing one side, Scott wants to question the dichotomy itself, because both focusing on and ignoring difference risk creating it. Hence to avoid this problem -the dilemma of difference- Scott argues the need to establish a new way of thinking on difference which rejects the idea that equality-versus-difference constitutes an opposition. Instead of remaining within terms of existing political discourses, we need to subject those terms to critical examination. Scott concludes from this that the only alternative is to,
refuse to oppose equality to difference and insist continually on difference -difference as the condition of individual and collective identities, difference as the constant challenge of the fixing of those identities, history as the repeated illustration of the play of difference, difference as the very meaning of equality itself. [177]
An insistence on difference in the way Scott argues, undercuts, from my point of view, the tendency to absolutism and essentialist categories (women=mother).[178] Such an approach will, on the other hand, not deny the existence of gender difference, but it suggests that its meanings are always relative to particular constructions in specified contexts. This brings us back to the constructive notion of gender, shared by Linda Gordon and Ann Taylor Allen, and the fact that "throughout its history, women's liberation has been seen sometimes as the right to be equal, sometimes as the right to be different".[179]
The application of "maternalism" as a historical concept in the studies of welfare states has both positive and negative implications. Concerning an analysis of the early welfare state, maternalism can be said to be a gainful concept because it gives expression to the interaction that took place between private and public welfare contributors in the earliest phase of the welfare state. Through integrating voluntary and private welfare activity in the study of social policy, the debating authors manage to shed light on the private-public mix that marked the first welfare policies in many Western countries. Because the welfare state as a state form and an institution is a result of political activities (and styles) on different levels of society, we should strive for an approach which enables us to see individual welfare activism in relation to the welfare state as a whole. The concept of "maternalism" fulfils in many respects this demand since the modes of politics which are not dependent on action through political institutions are viewed as central and important as formal political activity in welfare-state formation. Since the activism of private organizations is placed on equal footing with the action of political parties, trade unions, and official bureaucrats, maternalism endues researchers to notice and integrate the contributions of those who did not have formal political rights. The introduction of maternalism is thus an interesting attempt to challenge both the state-centrism and the limited definition of "politics" that for long has dominated welfare-state research.
By integrating welfare policies concerning women and children into the studies of the welfare state, these scholars have, moreover, enriched the study-field of welfare-state researchers in general. An inclusive conceptualization of the term "welfare state", is furthermore of importance in order to include other welfare-state experiences than those of Northern- and Western Europe.
However, some researchers such as Theda Skocpol, Seth Koven, and Sonya Michel make use of this potential to establish oppositions between countries on mistaken foundations. Rather than opening for a comprehensive understanding of the development of welfare states, these scholars seem in fact to limit their own approach by creating false dichotomies. The reviving of the "equality versus difference" debate made by Molly Ladd-Taylor is, from my point of view, another problematic outcome of the use of maternalism. By reinforcing binary oppositions, Ladd-Taylor creates, along with Skocpol, Koven, and Michel, mutually exclusive approaches to questions of welfare state and gender.