"Progressive" Marriage and Motherhood 10.24.23

• HIS 379 The Family in America
• Year 4

"Progressive" Marriage and Motherhood

The History of Family in America (HIST 379)
Dr. Caitlin Wiesner
Main Hall Room 213
October 24, 2023 (Week 7)

Legislating Miscegenation

1883: Pace v. Alabama argues that harsher punishment for interracial fornication (as opposed to extramarital sex between members of the same race) violated the Equal Protections Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

    Alabama Supreme Court rules against the plaintiffs, claiming that because both offending partners received the same punishment, there was no discrimination

Between 1871 and 1928, Southern Senators tried (and failed) three times to revise the U.S. Constitution with an amendment outlawing interracial marriage across the nation.

By 1924, bans on interracial marriage were still in force in 38 states.

Rhinelander v. Rhinelander (1924)

Progressive Women Reformers

Civic Housekeeping:

Based on their "natural" moral superiority, mothers should "clean up" the dirty, corrupt world of politics and business as an extension of their "traditional" domestic duties in the home

Maternalists:

The belief that motherhood is woman’s most sacred occupation, so state resources should be deployed to allow mothers without wage-earning husbands to stay out of the exploitative labor market and raise her own children 

(i.e. mother's pensions, or "welfare"). 

Discuss: "Jane Addams on Idle Daughters and Working Mothers" (1911)

• How does Addams describe the relationships between the husband & wife and parent & child in the immigrant families served by Hull House?
  
• Does she see these relationships as helpful or harmful adaptations of the “American family”?
  

Discuss: Margaret Sanger, "Contraception for All" (1931)

• According to Sanger, why is birth control so essential for women?
• How did Sanger’s ideas about birth control respond to prevailing ideas about family and motherhood in the United States?

“Society is divided into three groups.  Those intelligent and wealthy members of the upper classes who have obtained knowledge of Birth Control and exercise it in regulating the size of their families.  They have already benefited by this knowledge, and are today considered the most respectable and moral members of the community. They have only children when they desire, and all society points to them as types that should perpetuate their kind.The second group is equally intelligent and responsible.  They desire to control the size of their families, but are unable to obtain knowledge or to put such available knowledge into practice.The third are those irresponsible and reckless ones having little regard for the consequence of their acts, or whose religious scruples prevent their exercising control over their numbers.  Many of this group are diseased, feeble-minded, and are of the pauper element dependent entirely upon the normal and fit members of society for their support...

...There is no doubt in the minds of all thinking people that the procreation of this group should be stopped....We do not believe that filling the earth with misery, poverty and disease is moral.  And it is our desire and intention to carry on our crusade until the perpetuation of such conditions has ceased. We desire to stop at its source the disease, poverty and feeble-mindedness and insanity which exist today, for these lower the standards of civilization and make for race deterioration.”

- Margaret Sanger, "The Morality of Birth Control" (November 18, 1921)

1907: Indiana Sterilization Law allows the state to forcibly sterilize "confirmed criminals, idiots, rapists and imbeciles

Until ruled unconstitutional by the Indiana State Supreme Court in 1921, 2,500 people in Indiana were forcibly sterilized.

1914: Harry Laughlin of the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring, NY drafted a Model Eugenical Sterilization Law for the “socially inadequate…maintained wholly or in part by public expense," the "feebleminded, insane, criminalistic, epileptic, inebriate, diseased, blind, deaf; deformed, and dependent, ” and "ne’er-do-wells, tramps, the homeless, and paupers”

1924: Virginia passed a law based on this model, 8,300 Virginians eventually sterilized

1935: over 25,000 people in state custody had been involuntarily sterilized across the nation.

A fact is an objective and incontrovertible piece of information.
Evidence is the application of one or more facts to support an argument.
An argument is a subjective claim made to expand an area of knowledge.

We will begin discussion of readings each class with an FAQ (Fact, Argument, Question) Exercise. All students will free write the following:

     A fact that stood out to you in the reading (please include page number)
    An explanation of how that fact works as evidence for the historian’s argument
    A question that the reading raised for you

A fact is an objective and incontrovertible piece of information.
Evidence is the application of one or more facts to support an argument.
An argument is a subjective claim made to expand an area of knowledge.

FAQ (Fact, Argument, Question) Exercise

All students will free write the following:

1.  A fact that stood out to you in the reading (please include page number)
2. An explanation of how that fact works as evidence for the historian’s argument
3. A question that the reading raised for you

Discussion: Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (2015)

1) What role does nostalgia play in the history of family in America?

2) According to Coontz, what do Americans actually mean when they refer to the "traditional" family? Why is the "traditional" family a touchstone for cultural and political debate?

3) What forces created the "traditional" family of 1950s America? What did the image of the "traditional" family of the 1950s conceal?