.ltAllowances for families

The Times,
6 August 1946

FRESH CHAPTER IN 150-YEAR-OLD CAMPAIGN
FIRST PAY-DAY UNDER NEW ACT  

"There shall be paid by the Minister," says the Family Allowances Act, "out of moneys provided by Parliament, for every family which includes two or more children and for the benefit of the family as a whole, an allowance in respect of each child in the family other than the elder of eldest at the rate of five shillings a week", and, "in the case of a family of a man and his wife living together," the allowance shall belong to the wife.  This is the first pay-day under the Act.
  
How many mothers, when they draw their allowances to-day, will think either of William Pitt or of Eleanor Rathbone?  It is fitting that they should be remembered - Pitt, because he first sought to introduce family allowances by legislation; Miss Rathbone, because more than any other single individual she made family allowances legislatively possible a century and a half later.
  
Pitt's contribution to social thought is instructive.  In December, 1795, Samuel Whitbread presented the Commons with a Bill to empower justices of the peace to prescribe minimum wages for "labourers in husbandry."  Fox, who supported him, maintained that "the great mass of the labouring part of the community" did not derive "sufficient means of subsistence from their labour" and were obliged to apply for poor relief.  He urged the House to accept the principle of raising "the price of labour to a rate proportionate to the price of the articles of subsistence."
  
When the measure was read a second time in February, 1796, Pitt argued against it and secured its eventual withdrawal.  He was then preparing an alternative measure, and used the occasion "to lay before the House the ideas floating in his mind."  His fundamental objection to Whitbread's Bill was that it would prevent the price of labour from "finding its own level"; but he made good use of another argument:-
  
As there was a difference in the numbers which compose the families of the labouring poor . . . by the regulations proposed, either the man with a small family would have too much wages, or the man with a large family, who had done most service to his country, would have too little.
  
The remedy, he suggested, was the payment of allowances for children from public funds:
  
Let us make relief in cases where there are a number of children, a matter of right and an honour, instead of a ground for opprobrium and contempt.  This will make a large family a blessing, and not a curse; and this will draw a proper line of distinction between those who are able to provide for themselves by their labour, and those who, after having enriched their country with a number of children, have a claim upon its assistance for their support.
  
Accordingly, in the "Bill for the better Support and Maintenance of the Poor" which he introduced in the following December, he provided that a weekly allowance should be paid to every poor man with more than two children who were not self-supporting and to every widow with more than one such child.  Nothing came of this Bill.
  
MOTHERHOOD AND THE STATE  

The initial inspiration came from the more thoughtful Socialists, social reformers, and feminists, who, from the founding of the Fabian Society in 1883, began to pursue the implications of Mill's dictum that the mid-Victorian family was "a school of despotism."  The original purpose was to enable the mother to be financially independent of the father while her children were dependent on her.  The method was the "endowment of motherhood," the placing, according to Sidney Webb, of "this most indispensable of all professions upon an honourable economic basis.  At present it is ignored as an occupation, un-remunerated, and in no way honoured by the State."
  
But how?  For years there was no clear answer (except from Bernard Shaw), until Eleanor Rathbone and Beatrice Webb extracted from the hazy notion of "motherhood endowment" a more precise proposal for "family endowment," partly by means of social services but more particularly by cash allowances.  As practical social investigators, their starting point was the discrepancy between the wages paid to men and women for the same work, the one imperfect manner in which the wage system recognizes the existence of the dependent family.  Soon after the Boer War Miss Rathbone was writing that the unfair competition between men and women workers could be eliminated only when society substituted "a system of direct payment of the costs of its own renewal" for "the arrangement by which the cost of rearing fresh generations is thrown as a rule upon the male parent."
  
This line of thought was brilliantly developed by Mrs. Webb when she found herself alone in a minority in the Committee on Women in Industry appointed by the War Cabinet in 1918.  Let men and women receive equal pay, she argued, and let there be "a fair field and no favour" for men and women to compete for employment, by making the community bear the cost of child-rearing from an Exchequer-financed children's fund-"the 'bairn's part' of the national income."  She added, significantly, "if the nation wishes the population of Great Britain to be maintained without recourse to alien immigration on a large scale, it will be necessary for the State to provide, through the parents, for the maintenance of the children during the period of their economic dependence."
  
MISS RATHBONE'S TRIUMPH  

Miss Rathbone's great service lay not in originating this conception of family endowment but in making herself for 30 years its most disinterested, single-minded, and untiring exponent.  In 1918, with five collaborators, she produced a booklet, "Equal Pay and the Family," which stimulated the formation of the Family Endowment Council, later Society.  Until 1926 all went well.  The Liberals and the eugenists were interested; Sir William Beveridge introduced allowances at the School of Economics; the Independent Labour Party, then the political driving force of the Labour Party, included family allowances and a legal minimum wage in its "living wage programme"; the Samuel Commission proposed a children's allowance scheme for the coal industry, with the strong support of the miners' union, if only because the allowances would keep the miners' children "out of the firing line" if their fathers went on strike.
  
From the collapse of the general strike until 1934 interest in family endowment was everywhere on the wane, and especially in the Labour movement.  When interest revived it had a different emphasis: the feminist and "living wage" motives became the merest undertones.  Conservatives and Liberals, social investigators and administrators, doctors, nutrition experts, and demographers, took up the cause in the outburst of controversy about malnutrition, the state of the unemployed, and the general discovery of the significance of the declining birth rate.
  
Family allowances were now advocated simply as one of the methods of abolishing childhood poverty, not as a means of relieving fathers of the cost of child-rearing or mothers of financial dependence on their husbands.  They were supported, too, in the hope that, by bringing social resources to the aid of husband and wife, partners in the enterprise of parenthood, they might be encouraged to have larger families.  (Family allowances, though belonging to the mother, are, it will be noted, "for the benefit of the family as a whole.")
  
In the Beveridge report, which achieved the final conversion of the Labour movement, the arguments are once again those of Pitt and Whitbread, not those of the early Socialists and feminists: that a national minimum of income for every family is essential, but cannot be achieved directly through the wage system, "which must be based on the product of a man's labour and not on the size of his family"; and that family allowances "can help to restore the birth rate, both by making it possible for parents who desire more children to bring them into the world without damaging the chances of those already born, and as a signal of the national interest in children, setting the tone of public opinion."
  
Much more still remains to be done if the conflicting interests of "the disinherited family" and of the community are to be harmonized.  But at least, with the Family Allowances Act, the thin end of Miss Rathbone's wedge has been well and truly hammered into our social system, and Pitt and Whitbread are vicariously triumphant over Bentham and Chadwick.  

.lcA state allowance for each child in a family, irrespective of parents' income, was one of the central innovations of the post-war welfare state.

.llThe Workplace: Unequal pay
Power: Britain
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.lsWR02:WR02_10S
WR10:WR10_04S
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