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Social Policy in the 19th and 20th Century
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Rt Hon Baroness Patricia Hollis of Heigham, Parliamentary Permanent Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions
I. The Early 19th Century
All social panics about lone mothers have been proxy concerns about feral fathers.
Maleness in the early 19th century rested in animalistic brutality. Suffrage established itself first in less developed societies where women were present to domesticate. Suffrage was a tool for controlling male society and had little to do with realising women's rights.
Single women and lone mothers were perceived as a threat to male health, both physical - through STDs - and moral.
Policymakers did not want men domesticated as they needed to harness their brutality for use in warfare.
II. Victorian Attitudes
- The Moral Threat of Lone Mothers
Victorians dealt with women according to the dichotomy of Madonnas and Magdalenes.
Female sexuality threatened male self-constraint, undermined family values and was considered a danger to society. Hence, women were desexualised.
The Financial Threat of Lone Mothers
Lone mothers were a perceived financial threat as, unlike professional prostitutes, they did not control their fertility and the state assumed the role of father and husband.
The Poor Laws focused on individual character and morality as causes of financial degradation, and ignored the social structures that created poverty. The workhouse, designed to punish able-bodied men who refused to work, ended as a punitive system for lone mothers. Redemption was through work; lone mothers were forced into arduous and poorly paid labour.
III. 20th Century Reform
Defining lone mothers as 'moral imbeciles' continued into the 20th century. So did the policy of separating them from their children. Lone parents were thought to lower the quality of the human race, and sterilisation programmes were debated.
David Lloyd George established National Insurance to alleviate state support from the marginalising stigma of the workhouse. Family Allowance deposed male supremacy over the family.
In the 1950s social emphasis was on the rebuilding of post-war Britain.
The second women's movement of the 1960s reconfigured attitudes to lone mothers, opening up employment opportunities.
IV. Rights for Women and Children
The Victorian conception of the family unit as a sovereign commonwealth with the male as its head denied universal suffrage. The late 19th century saw the dis-aggregation of women's rights from men's; the 1960s saw a similar dis-aggregation for the rights of children.
Government institutions privileged lone mothers during the 1960s and 1970s, as poverty became a larger social issue than the collapse of the family unit.
The question of lone mothers has always been bound to the question of what happens to men when they are unregulated by family responsibilities and excluded from the labour market.
Response
Beatrix Campbell, Social Historian (Chair)
The story of the lone mother is the story of masculinity, how we define it and what we demand of it. The single mother has always been at the centre of the women's movement. The Labour Movement, centred on the iconic figure of the male breadwinner, did not work successfully for the lone mother.
A feminist economic theory - using the part-time employed, single parent as the ideal model individual - posited a liberation from patriarchy. This idea, like many others, was decimated by Thatcherism.
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