Temperance and Maternal Welfare: A Novel Theory of Welfare State Development

• In Event: 3451 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 10. Political Parties, The State, and Social Movements

Abstract

Theda Skocpol has famously argued that the precocious maternalist welfare state developed in the United States in the early twentieth century owed its existence to three factors. First, American women achieved higher levels of education earlier than women in other countries. Second, the United States was a predominantly Protestant country with no state church, and thus female-led, transdenominational women’s groups in America faced less resistance from institutional religion. Third, nineteenth-century American women were disenfranchised more purely on the basis of their sex and were therefore more likely to organize self-consciously as women and on behalf of women’s issues.

This paper reviews the evidence for these factors and builds upon Skocpol’s work by arguing that the political influence of American women’s groups in the early twentieth century also resulted from cultural and organizational legacies of the American temperance movement. Temperance was the primary vehicle through which nineteenth and early twentieth-century American women entered ‘public sphere’ political movements, developed their political consciousnesses, and established sophisticated, female-dominated social networks and political organizations—many of which survived well into the twentieth century.

This paper further suggests that international variation in the strength of national-level temperance movements can help illuminate patterns of maternalist social policy achievement. Nearly everywhere in the nineteenth-century Western world, drinking—and especially drinking to excess—was largely the province of men, and its social harms fell (or were perceived to fall) disproportionately upon their wives and children. But while gendered drinking attitudes and behaviors were common in many cultures, they came to influence political structures and forces only when and where liquor itself became a significant political issue. Most notably, countries which developed particularly strong temperance movements in the late nineteenth century—such as Australia, Canada, Finland, and New Zealand—also developed comparatively advanced maternalist welfare states in the early twentieth century.

Author

• Austin Abernethy Stimpson Jenkins, Northwestern University