Massachusetts deserves credit for being the first state to preface
mothers’ pension legislation with a formal study of existing conditions.
The Legislature of 1912 authorized the appointment of a commission “to
investigate the question of the condition of widowed mothers within the
commonwealth having minor children dependent upon them for support,” and
to report to the succeeding Legislature “as to the advisability of
enacting legislation providing for payments by the commonwealth for the
purpose of maintaining such minor children in their homes.” The report
of the commission giving its findings and recommending legislation based
thereon has been published as is stated elsewhere in this issue,[2]
David F. Tilley, one of the members of the commission, dissenting from
the conclusions of the majority.
The success or failure of the mothers’ pension movement must depend
largely upon our ability to avoid the mistakes which have characterized
outdoor relief and other gratuitous payments to individuals from the
public treasury, and to read into the proposed remedy a new and
dignified meaning which outdoor relief has never had. It may be that
both these ends will be difficult to attain. Certainly they can only be
attained after the most careful study of the operation of outdoor
relief, both public and private, to ascertain to what extent it has
succeeded or failed and why. Such a study has long been necessary in the
interests of the poor and of efficient relief work. To be successful it
cannot be hasty, inexpensive or inexpert. Quite as important as this
study of outdoor relief will be a study of the conditions under which
children are admitted to institutions which must be undertaken with much
the same end in view.
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.”
“The resources of your commission did not permit it to secure its
information by the personal visit of an investigator, hence the
information must be less accurate than it might otherwise have been.”
“The commissioners believe that despite the limited accuracy of some
of their relief statistics further study of the relief given by
charities is not necessary.”
Moreover, regarding the information gained from the children’s agencies
as to the causes for the removal of children from their homes, it may be
doubted whether these agencies are competent witnesses. The standard of
work done by the public agencies and many of the private agencies for
the care of children in Massachusetts is unusually high. It may be
doubted, however, whether any such agency after the most careful
preliminary inquiry is fully able to determine the real economic status
of a family which is usually a matter that requires long acquaintance.
Many of these societies receiving children who have been removed from
their mothers have very little first hand information as to the reason
for it. In fact, the report itself, in discussing the information
secured through this questionnaire regarding the insurance carried by
the families, states: “The fact that the children’s agencies failed to
answer this question in so many cases was undoubtedly because they did
not possess the information.” For the same reason it is doubtful if they
were competent witnesses on many other points calling for knowledge of
what happened before the children came into their care.
The statistics secured through method 3 are condemned even more
directly. After information had been secured through the questionnaire
to public and private relief agencies regarding 1,258 families, Mr.
Tilley of the commission arranged for a special study of one hundred of
these in their own homes by trained visitors in the service of the State
Board of Charity. These studies revealed conditions completely at
variance with those stated in the returns received from the agencies
themselves. The report itself comments: “It is clear that many records
previously received from the overseers, especially, but also from
others, were glaringly incorrect.”
It is hardly possible to put confidence in conclusions based upon data
whose inaccuracy is so clear. It does not become any more possible when
the inaccuracy is frankly conceded by those who reach the conclusions.
Another method of study used by the commission—the compilation of
analogies and other non-statistical reasons for proving its case—is
rendered impotent in much the same way. In a carefully developed
argument the report draws an analogy between the proposed subsidy scheme
for widows and the industrial accident compensation plan. “The situation
of dependents of men killed by industrial accident is scarcely
distinguishable from that of these widows.... Consequently, widows
through death of husbands by disease or other non-industrial cause
should be dealt with by a similar principle.”
After developing this analogy somewhat elaborately, however, the report
says: “The commission rejects the principle of payment by way of
indemnity of loss,” apparently abandoning the workmen’s compensation
analogy just after making it serviceable.
It would not be difficult to point out other traits which are fatal to
the report as a basis for scientific action, for example, its constant
introduction of important conclusions with such expressions as “it is
obvious,” “the inference is,” “it is not unlikely,” “so far as
information was obtainable” and “important inferences are possible.”
Moreover, when conclusions are based upon statistics compiled from
different sources by different persons with different standards and
possibly different interpretations of the questions asked, a report
giving these statistics and the conclusions reached should give also a
copy of the schedule used in gathering them. The report does not include
the commission’s schedule.
With the purpose of the commission to point the way to the adequate
assistance of widows most of us like Mr. Tilley, who submits a minority
report, are in complete accord. During recent years our enlarging
conceptions of social treatment have condemned utterly much of our
supposedly efficient work in family and individual reconstruction. There
is a widespread conviction of sin in this matter and an earnest
searching for the remedy. The mothers’ pension movement is no doubt a
result of this; but the conviction of sin and the earnest search are
true of many to whom mothers’ pensions seem a remedy of doubtful
immediate value.
If we have failed in our relief work, the children of the widow are not
the only ones who have suffered. Upon the children of disabled fathers,
of incompetent and neglectful parents, of all those tragic families who
fall outside the commission’s category of “worthy,” our sins are visited
still more heavily. The commission was charged only with the duty of
studying the condition of widows; but it seems to have taken some note
of families of other types. We read: “Consistently, widows through death
of husbands by disease or other industrial cause ... deserve an utterly
different kind of treatment from that accorded to the lazy and
shiftless, the victims of drink, gambling or other dissipation or
persons in transitory or emergency destitution. The commission does not
believe that the same persons who administer the general poor law should
alone determine the aid for worthy widows. Administration of such aid is
sufficiently complicated, difficult and frequent to deserve separate
care.” It might be noted incidentally that the cause of a husband’s
death is not always a satisfactory test of a wife’s moral habits, and
that “widows through death of husbands by disease, etc.” are not
infrequently of the unsatisfactory type described by the commission. But
a still more important comment is the following from Mr. Pear of Boston:
“It is well understood by social workers that those whom your
correspondent terms the incompetent, and willingly leaves to the care of
overseers of the poor are really in need of the most skillful
ministration. They too have children. To assume that they may well be
left to officials considered incapable of caring for respectable widows
is evidence of a complacency which social workers cannot share.”
The report of the commission gives us much that suggests the fact of our
failure to provide adequately or helpfully for the families of widows, a
fact of which we had already become conscious. What we need, however, is
not so much evidence of the fact of failure as a clear understanding of
why we have failed. Why have public outdoor relief and private charity
conceived in as deep an interest in the destitute widow as any mother’s
subsidy program, failed to satisfy either the widow or the charitable or
society at large?
The failure has rarely been due to lack of aggregate resources. Nobody
familiar with the enormous totals spent for relief, public and private,
could doubt that. It must lie somewhere in the quality of the service
which brings relief with it. To determine just where it does lie calls
for a study requiring money, time and the sure touch of somebody who
knows what to look for. The mothers’ pension schemes which the various
states have worked out give us very little that is new or of higher
promise in the service that goes with relief. The subsidy plan that
follows the study of the Massachusetts commission is no exception.
Few institutions have been subject to more criticism than public outdoor
relief. No institution has been under fire so long with so little real
effort to find out what makes it criticizable. It may well be that
public assistance in some form is indispensable in this country and will
be made to yield the results we seek. If so, its administration must be
revolutionized. Giving existing outdoor relief officials new duties and
responsibility to a new authority for part of their work, which is an
important part of the proposal resulting from the Massachusetts report,
will not revolutionize it. Nor will the giving of new names to old
practices not otherwise shorn of the defects which popularize the new
name do so. Again and again we have started with a clear call to do
justice to the widow. Every time we try to translate our zeal into
legislation we come square up against our outdoor relief machinery. Some
one of these United States has a golden opportunity to make a study
which will point the way to justice not only for the widow and her
children but for every other person, old or young, who through our
stupidity or his own fault, or both, finds himself forced to seek
assistance. But the Massachusetts report does not point the way.
[Illustration: CALL TO MASS MEETING IN ARABIC]