WELFARE

The European public welfare state began in the late nineteenth century, supplementing and sometimes supplanting private charity. Private charity, usually religious, had long dispensed alms, but increasingly public, generally secular state-welfare programs developed, especially beginning in the 1870s. Although some scholars had argued that the welfare state began in Germany during the time of Otto von Bismarck (chancellor, 1871–1890), when modern historians use the lens of gender, they understand that welfare began in many countries of western Europe at approximately the same time, but took different forms.

welfare and the "deserving poor," 1815–1870

Moral and religious convictions about poverty shaped charity and welfare policies. Religious charities believed that the poor would always form the bottom of the social and economic hierarchy, but sought to help those whom they thought deserved aid. Definitions of the "deserving poor" differed little by region or religion. They were the honest poor whose misfortunes were unpreventable, or those who could not care for themselves: abandoned or orphaned children, the insane, men and women too old or sick to work, and morally upstanding people who faced a sudden disaster. The able-bodied poor, customarily adult men, who would not work were labeled "undeserving" of poor relief.

In Britain, as well as on the Continent, poor relief was locally based. Municipalities in England, France, and the German states required recipients to have lived in the community for a number of years to become eligible. Married women belonged to the domicile of their husbands, which denied them a right to poor relief as individuals. In the 1820s settlement and domicile requirements began to break down in Europe, as people increasingly moved around to get better jobs in response to labor demand. Legal settlement in new parishes was harder to acquire, and many poor barely subsisted on the margins of their new residences.

New ideologies and conditions gave rise to the New Poor Laws of 1834 in Britain. This reform sought to restore the middle-class work ethic and moral values by tightening the criteria for aid and fostering self-support. It held poor families, specifically the men, responsible for their own survival. The New Poor Law developed prison-like work-houses as a punishment for those, especially men, who committed the "crime" of being a pauper. Indigent mothers of ex-nuptial children could also be taken into the workhouse and separated from their children as a disciplinary measure. Poor Law guardians incarcerated nonproviding fathers or indigent mothers in separate workhouse wards from each other and from their children. There was no clear separation between charity and public poor relief, with close cooperation between local Poor Law authorities and charitable organizations.

Across Europe, religious charities and secular welfare attempted to buttress the family as the bulwark of the social order. On the Continent almost every major European city enlarged the parameters of welfare to include policies for maternal assistance to prevent infant mortality. Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Hamburg, as well as most of the major cities of the Habsburg Empire, France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal inaugurated free maternity hospitals where poor pregnant women could deliver their babies in secret. These same cities and countries often established foundling homes to permit abandonment as an alternative to abortion and infanticide, and to save the honor of the woman and her family. In predominantly Catholic countries such as France, Portugal, and Spain, and in cities such as Brussels and those on the Italian peninsula, foundling hospitals became the most important form of public welfare until late in the nineteenth century.

public welfare, 1870–1914

Between 1870 and 1914 traditional local poor relief coexisted with modern centralized state intervention, as welfare greatly expanded. State bureaucracies and legislators established new criteria for welfare, pertaining more to the needs of the state and less to the older moral strictures. Many local private charities that developed earlier in the century expanded and flourished. But they diminished in importance on a national level vis-á-vis a new interest in state insurance programs and the developing rationalized welfare state. For a welfare state to develop, local politicians had to accept the notion that poor relief was less a gift from the rich and more the right of the poor, which they did by the end of the century.

Poverty became a social disease rather than a moral disorder under the powerful discourse of medical professionals, their allies in government, and the positivist philosophy of the era. Needs of state in terms of the health of the population, educational reform, industrial and military expansion, urban unrest, and agricultural development came to outweigh the religious and moral imperatives so powerful in earlier decades and affected welfare programs accordingly. Furthermore, the difficult conditions of industry and the growing militancy of male laborers led to debates about the need for the state to protect workers. As a result, after 1870 public welfare institutions increased. Welfare did not so much take over from declining charity as it added additional layers of assistance. In Germany, the country that reputedly began the national welfare state in the 1870s and developed an interventionist state in the 1890s, there was little opposition between private charity and public welfare. Rather, the two worked in tandem.

The valorization of maternity during the later nineteenth century translated into legislation, as social reformers enacted family welfare reforms centered on mothers and children. Social welfare programs designed to keep mothers and babies together started throughout Europe in the early 1870s and took similar forms in France, England, Germany, and Russia. Politicians and reformers in many western countries became increasingly willing to intervene directly in the family in order to protect children. At the same time, they glorified, dignified, and sought to protect motherhood. Public welfare authorities in England, France, and Germany perceived that underprivileged families were in a state of crisis contributing to high infant mortality, and thought the problem could be partially resolved by providing some subsidies to needy mothers who were breastfeeding their infants, establishing well-baby clinics and free milk dispensaries, teaching women how to be better mothers, and by providing school meals.

Child protection was inseparable from the protection of motherhood, and it included legislation regulating children's and women's labor in Britain, Germany, and France. Authorities in western Europe regarded women as mothers, and motherhood became a social function. Politicians consequently enacted aid programs to support maternity. In Germany, this led to the protection of working mothers through maternity insurance and pregnancy leave. Generally, German infant welfare organizations fell under private auspices, such as the League for Protection of Mothers. In Russia, day nurseries and boarding institutions for infants of widowed, deserted, or working mothers developed as part of an effort to reduce infant mortality. Russian efforts were in keeping with their philosophy that the state could raise children better than poor, uneducated, working mothers. The major difference between child protection reforms in Russia and in countries of western Europe revolved around concepts of women's roles as workers. Western European authorities viewed women primarily as mothers; Russians viewed women primarily as workers.

To defend children from abusive parents, the French, British, and German governments enacted almost identical legislation enabling state welfare authorities to decide which parents were placing their children in moral danger and then deprive those parents of authority over their children. Police and welfare agents would subsequently remove the children from their parental homes and place the children with relatives, in foster care, or in institutions. In these instances, as in many other aspects of welfare, public authorities entered the private spaces of the underprivileged. The French Parliament enacted a law protecting these "morally abandoned" children in 1889, the same year that the British Parliament enacted the law for the Prevention of Cruelty and Protection of Children that allowed state authorities to remove children from their families when circumstances warranted it. Scottish Poor Law authorities, who had been separating children from abusive or dangerous family situations for decades and boarding them out, continued this process in the interest of protecting the children and imbuing them with sober work habits. Comparable German legislation came about a decade later.

The significance of motherhood is evident in legislation in Britain, Germany, and France that treated childbirth as an illness entitled to medical assistance. The French law of 1893 on free medical assistance assimilated childbirth with other illnesses and allowed women in labor free admission to the public hospitals. Britain's National Health Insurance Act of 1911 allotted a pittance to women who had enrolled in the insurance program, either on their own or through their husbands. The 1883 German law on health insurance entitled insured women factory workers to minimal benefits for three weeks of maternity leave after childbirth, but coverage was optional and rarely paid. Even Russia had a workers' insurance law in 1912 that provided for maternity benefits.

In France, the creation of mothers' pensions, or aid to mothers (including the unwed) to encourage breast-feeding and prevent child abandonment provided another building block to the welfare state. Despite the opposition of church authorities who regarded payments to unwed mothers as a "subsidy to debauchery," mothers' pensions began in France in the 1870s and 1880s with programs of aid to single and married mothers. Portugal developed an equivalent system called a "subsidy of lactation" to aid indigent parents and widows or widowers, as well as unwed mothers. Despite opposition from church authorities, regions of Italy almost immediately followed France with similar programs of subsidies to single mothers who nursed their babies. In Italy, however, the motive was not a perceived depopulation but rather the desire to moralize poor, unwed mothers. Although much of the British, German, and Russian legislation for the protection of children and mothers resembled French programs, the differences between France and the other countries are twofold. One is a question of timing. France's various programs for the protection of motherhood began in Paris and other cities in the 1870s, developed through the 1880s, and became nationally legislated in 1893, 1904, and 1913. Second, France was among the first to offer programs of aid to non-married mothers to prevent infant mortality on a national scale in 1904. Except for Russia, Italy, and Portugal, other nations' laws restricted mothers' pensions to widows or married mothers.

Welfare in the form of maternity leaves varied in their comprehensiveness and remuneration. The Swiss were pioneers in this area; their 1877 law provided for eight weeks of leave, before and after delivery, and prohibited women from returning to factory work until six weeks after childbirth. One year later, in 1878, Germany enacted a three-week leave after childbirth, but neither the Swiss nor the German leaves included benefits or pay. By 1883 both Germany and Austria-Hungary had paid maternity leaves of three weeks after delivery for insured women, but the amount varied with each insurance program. Sweden put family policies into law in 1900 when it gave mothers a four-week maternity leave after the birth of a child. Mothers received no money, just time off from work to breast-feed. By 1900, Great Britain, Portugal, Norway, Sweden, Holland, and Belgium provided unpaid maternity leaves after delivery. France, along with Spain, Italy, Denmark, and Russia, lagged behind these other countries in instituting any kind of maternity leave, even without pay. In 1911 Sweden instituted a program to protect and care for women and their babies through maternity and convalescent homes as well as by giving women a subsidy to breastfeed their babies. In 1913 when France legislated paid maternity leaves before and after childbirth, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, and Austria-Hungary had paid leaves, and only Switzerland had a maternity leave before delivery. Maternity leaves and child welfare were just some examples of welfare at the turn of the century designed to keep families together.

Politicians in all countries sought to use welfare to form a moral citizenry and create a stable working class. The German town of Elberfeld provides one example of how cities used poor relief to further their agenda of social discipline of the poor through inspections. The central goal of the Elberfeld system was to find work for the poor with a fixed domicile. Many German cities followed the Elberfeld model, but increased industrialization and migration after German unification made the Elberfeld system unworkable; reformers replaced it with a new, centralized, national system. The Bismarckian social insurance provisions of the 1880s and family welfare schemes of the 1890s aimed to integrate the working class into established society. To win support from male workers, in the 1880s the German government provided a welfare plan that included health insurance and old-age pensions for many of them.

The impetus for welfare reforms at the end of the century may have come as a result of the general depression and fears of mass unemployment that struck most of Europe from the mid-1880s to mid-1890s. During these years the poor became more visible, and thus more of a perceived threat to an orderly society. The rise of industrial capitalism transformed poverty from a social into a political problem, as welfare state capitalism developed in response to crises in classical capitalism. Politicians redefined poverty to justify the state's intervention in support of the patriarchal ideal and the raisond'état. Specifically, the decline in agriculture and the migration of young to the cities in the late 1880s added to a large pool of urban labor (with many unemployed) and an elderly population remaining in the rural areas.

Public welfare began to try to address some of the problems of workers and the elderly, beginning with national insurance programs for sickness, disability, and old age. In Germany, social reformers eventually recognized that deserving workers had a right to experience old age without financial hardships, and that it would be unjust to let them live out their lives under conditions worse than while they were still working. When old age came to be recognized as a separate stage of life in the late nineteenth century, old-age pensions became a subject of legislation. In England and France the debate continued over the divisions in how much families bore responsibility for the elderly and how much that responsibility devolved on welfare institutions. At the end of the century, public assistance made pensions available to proportionally fewer of the aged than it had before 1870, and the amount was reduced. In the absence of sufficient welfare, elder care devolved on families.

State welfare was insufficient to deal with the problems of poverty and unemployment. In many countries, charitable organizations and mutual aid societies existed alongside public poor relief. Stable breadwinner working men in almost all countries established voluntary mutual aid societies designed to protect their members, and women formed cooperative guilds for self-help. Private charities remained important everywhere, although many became more secular.

By the end of the nineteenth century neither charities nor welfare had enough money or facilities to meet the demand. Layers of institutions and of jurisdictions—municipal, local, regional, and national—provided private charity and public welfare. They combined their recognition of economic need, however, with a moral commitment to promote and reward working-class women's domesticity and men's steady work habits. Welfare measures in the last decades of the century involved a change in cultural concepts. Reformers recast the relationship between the sexual and social order, between the family and the state, and between what they thought of as the public and private spheres. The family remained the linchpin of the social order, but public welfare permitted a greater variety in acceptable family structures. With the change in attitudes came increased programs to provide medical, old-age, and accident insurance to workers.

using welfare, 1815–1914

The poor became knowledgeable consumers in the welfare market as they negotiated their way within the available programs. Unlike the middle classes who blamed the poor for their own plight, the poor themselves blamed the wider world over which they had no control. Therefore they regarded poor relief as a "right" during a crisis: an unexpected death (especially of the male breadwinner), illness or accident to the male breadwinner, childbirth, old age, unemployment, or having many young children at home. By the end of the century, some reformers also asserted that welfare was a right.

Welfare allowed men and women a form of "disciplinary individualism" in which a person voluntarily conformed to requirements and tried to use the laws and institutions to their own ends. They used institutions as a safety net. In England, Ireland, Belgium, and Holland families used the workhouses as institutions of last resort. Entering one meant loss of respectability, and the elderly felt this sense of shame quite keenly. Others, perhaps those less needy, decided not to request poor relief to avoid the disgrace of pauperism. Outdoor relief (assistance in the poor's own homes and outside of institutions) was preferable to the detested workhouses, although it was an income subsidy insufficient to provide food, fuel, and shelter for its recipients. In England, between 60 and 80 percent of the recipients of poor relief, both in the work-house and outdoors, were adult women and children, equally divided. More than half of the women were single parents. Changes in the British Poor Laws (1834 and 1871) making outdoor relief more restrictive led to adaptive family strategies. If neighbors and relatives possibly could feed another mouth, they stood ready to help by taking in young children so the child might avoid the parish work-houses.

In France, Italy, and Russia, in acts of desperation, women abandoned hundreds of thousands of children at institutions each year. At the height

of child abandonment around midcentury, approximately twenty-six thousand children per year were abandoned in Moscow and St. Petersburg. In Paris during the peak decade of the 1830s, around five thousand per year were abandoned, and more than forty-four thousand abandoned children under twelve were alive in all of France in a given year of that decade. Spain and Portugal saw fifteen thousand per year abandoned; a fifth of all babies were abandoned in Warsaw; half of all babies in Vienna and two-fifths in Prague; a third of all babies in Milan and Florence.

Mothers, especially the unwed, may have been driven to abandon their babies because of their impoverishment and their working conditions that precluded work and care for their infant. The higher rates of illegitimacy and rural-to-urban migration also contributed to a greater proportion of abandoned ex-nuptial children. The baby's gender did not matter to single mothers, but married women abandoned more girls than boys. Welfare policies also affected mothers' decisions to abandon. When government policy permitted, families used institutions to their own advantage, allowing the state to raise the children until they could reclaim them. When public authorities imposed restrictions on child abandonment, the desperate continued to abandon their babies. However, other welfare resources for mothers, such as aid for maternal breast-feeding or day-care centers, often accompanied restrictions on infant abandonment, especially in France. Few questioned the entitlement of children to food and sustenance through welfare when their mothers could not provide. Dealing with the elderly was a different matter.

Family support of the elderly was critical. Widowhood amplified problems of economic insecurity and possible destitution for women more than men. The aged in Britain relied on complex systems of support from their own wages and pensions, and from their children and Poor Law relief. At the turn of the twentieth century, the establishment of widows' pensions in England enabled fortunatemen and women to benefit from that insurance, and in 1908 all deserving poor were eligible for old-age pensions. The Dutch government established regulated and regimented old-folks' homes for widows and unmarried elderly women. In Paris, poor widows were approximately half of those on the welfare roles of public assistance. In Germany old age was not used as a category to determine the distribution of poor relief, which was geared for the sick and disabled.

Until after World War I, state insurance schemes were geared to help the individual, including the aged, whereas poor relief was understood as a subsidiary measure that kicked in when all family support had failed. Europe was not a monolithic entity and a multiplicity of regional and national patterns prevailed. In England, a strong desire to imbue the poor with the donors' concepts of morality and respectability influenced welfare and poor relief. Authorities in England and Germany channeled welfare through the male breadwinner. France, however, tried to reconcile women's productive and reproductive roles, and welfare went directly to the mothers, with guidelines and supervision from the state. In Russia, quite unlike Great Britain, poverty was not considered a sin, and authorities did not noticeably distinguish between the deserving and undeserving poor. Russia also did not develop a national welfare system. By 1914, British paupers had a right to public assistance in the parish of their birth or settlement. In Germany, national insurance plans developed for workers, all towns provided some poor relief, and rural areas were required to establish relief commissions for the poor. The French enacted comparable legislation, and approximately three-fourths of French men and woman had access to assistance for hospital care or other forms of temporary relief on the eve of World War I. A welfare system is a product of an urban society. It developed more completely during the nineteenth century in more urban countries with an ideology that understood that a welfare system benefited the entire nation.

See alsoBismarck, Otto von; Class and Social Relations; Poor Law; Poverty; Trade and Economic Growth; Working Class.

bibliography

Accampo, Elinor, Rachel G. Fuchs, and Mary Lynn Stewart. Gender and the Politics of Social Reform in France, 1870–1914. Baltimore, Md., 1995.

Baldwin, Peter. The Politics of Social Solidarity: Class Bases of the European Welfare State, 1875–1975. New York, 1990.

Barry, Jonathan, and Colin Jones, eds. Medicine and Charity before the Welfare State. London and New York, 1991.

Behlmer, George K. Friends of the Family: The English Home and Its Guardians, 1850–1940. Stanford, Calif., 1998.

Bock, Gisela, and Pat Thane, eds. Maternity and Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of the European Welfare States, 1880s–1950s. London and New York, 1991.

Boyer, George R. An Economic History of the English Poor Law, 1750–1850. Cambridge, U.K., 1990.

Cunningham, Hugh, and Joanna Innes, eds. Charity, Philanthropy, and Reform from the 1690s to 1850. New York, 1998.

Daunton, Martin, ed. Charity, Self-Interest, and Welfare in the English Past. London, 1996.

Dickinson, Edward Ross. The Politics of German Child Welfare from the Empire to the Federal Republic. Cambridge, Mass., 1996.

Finalyson, Geoffrey. Citizen, State, and Social Welfare in Britain, 1830–1990. Oxford, U.K., 1994.

Fuchs, Rachel G. Abandoned Children: Foundlings and Child Welfare in Nineteenth-Century France. Albany, N.Y., 1984.

——. Poor and Pregnant in Paris: Strategies for Survival in the Nineteenth Century. New Brunswick, N.J., 1992.

Gouda, Frances. Poverty and Political Culture: The Rhetoric of Social Welfare in the Netherlands and France, 1815–1854. Lanham, Md., 1995.

Horn, Pamela. Children's Work and Welfare, 1780–1890. Cambridge, U.K., 1995.

Humphreys, Robert. Sin, Organized Charity, and the Poor Law in Victorian England. New York, 1995.

Katz, Michael B., and Christoph Sachße, eds. The Mixed Economy of Social Welfare: Public/Private Relations in England, Germany, and the United States, the 1870s to the 1930s. Baden-Baden, 1996.

Kertzer, David I. Sacrificed for Honor: Italian Infant Abandonment and the Politics of Reproductive Control. Boston, 1993.

Kidd, Alan J. State, Society, and the Poor in Nineteenth-Century England. New York, 1999.

Lees, Lynn Hollen. The Solidarities of Strangers: The English Poor Laws and the People, 1700–1948. Cambridge, U.K., 1998.

Lewis, Jane. The Voluntary Sector, the State, and Social Work in Britain: The Charity Organisation Society/Family Welfare Association since 1869. Aldershot, U.K., 1995.

Lindemann, Mary. Patriots and Paupers: Hamburg, 1712–1830. New York, 1990.

Lindenmeyr, Adele. Poverty Is Not a Vice: Charity, Society, and the State in Imperial Russia. Princeton, N.J., 1996.

Mandler, Peter. ed. The Uses of Charity: The Poor on Relief in the Nineteenth-Century Metropolis. Philadelphia, 1990.

Prochaska, Frank. Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England. Oxford, U.K., 1980.

Ransel, David L. Mothers of Misery: Child Abandonment in Russia. Princeton, N.J., 1988.

Steinmetz, George. Regulating the Social: The Welfare State and Local Politics in Imperial Germany. Princeton, N.J., 1993.

Thane, Pat. Foundations of the Welfare State. London, 1982.

Van Leeuwen, Marco H. D. The Logic of Charity, Amsterdam, 1800–50. Houndmills Basingstoke, U.K., 2000.

Rachel G. Fuchs