Dissertation Information for Ricky Jane Manoff NAME: - Ricky Jane Manoff
DEGREE:
- Ph.D.
DISCIPLINE:
- History
SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (1998)
ADVISORS: - Robert P. Brenner - Albion M. Urdank
COMMITTEE MEMBERS: - Kathryn Norberg - Karen Brodkin
MPACT Status: Fully Complete
Title: Rethinking maternalism: The Women's Industrial Council and the making of the British welfare state
Abstract: In 1894 a group of predominantly middle-class British women, many with a background in women's trade union organizing, formed the Women's Industrial Council. Their express purpose was to use social investigation to lobby the government to improve industrial conditions for women. Over the next 25 years the Council continued to work for working women, focusing on everything from technical training to protective labor legislation to educational and recreational programs for young women and girls.
These efforts embodied a wide range of concerns, some of which reflected 19th-century "maternalist" assumptions about women's work and women's place in society. The Council's maternalism, however, was complex and raised fundamental issues involving class and gender. More important, it underwent significant change as the Council's investigations led them to challenge many of their own earlier ideas about women's economic dependency. As a result, Council members were among the first women activists to argue that married women had the right to work and that work could in fact be beneficial for married women.
The investigatory and lobbying efforts of the Women's Industrial Council contributed to the formation of the early British welfare state. That many of these early welfare policies were gendered is a reflection of not only the ideological milieu in which both the women of the Council and the policy makers lived but also of real economic and political constraints.
More generally, the Council was part of a pre-World War I consensus among women labor activists that helped to raise the issue of women's unpaid domestic labor. These concerns, which would eventually culminate in the new feminist campaign for the endowment of motherhood, were predicated on the idea that fundamental changes in welfare policy were needed if women were to win their economic independence. The story of the WIC suggests that such changes may not be possible.
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calculated 2008-10-08 21:58:36
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