| Abstract: | Humans are dependent on others for their livelihood for many years before they become economically productive and self-supporting. In modern industrial societies productivity and the capacity to be self-supporting also require costly investments in human capital. What is the proper division of responsibilities between parents and other members of society for rearing children and thus, collectively, reproducing the population? And how equitable is the sharing between husband and wife of the burdens that fall on the immediate family? To what extent should social responsibilities for childrearing be formalized in explicit institutional arrangements? While certainly long-standing, these questions acquired a special urgency in industrial countries beginning with the second decade of the twentieth century as a result of the convulsive experience of the world war. (In subsequent decades, below-replacement-level fertility amplified such concerns.) Total mobilization for war resulted in the massive influx of female workers into industry, thus undercutting prevailing assumptions about the logic and equity of an industrial system characterized by sharp divisions of labor by sex, discrimination in hiring and remuneration in the job market, and routine reliance on unpaid female labor in childrearing. In the March 1917 issue of The Economic Journal, Eleanor F. Rathbone addressed these issues in an article titled “The remuneration of women's services.” This article is reproduced below in full. “Perhaps the most important function which any State has to perform—more important even than guarding against its enemies—is to secure its own periodic renewal by providing for the rearing of fresh generations,” asserted Rathbone. How is this burden paid for? She saw the existing system as iniquitous and haphazard—requiring a disproportionate and unremunerated contribution from the adult female population, a contribution supplemented only in a “hesitating and half-hearted way” by the state. The modern state gradually accepted responsibilities to cover some of the costs of formal education and started to make minor provisions for child nurture and medical expenses. Still, she noted, “the great bulk of the main cost of population] renewal the state] still pays for… by the indirect and extraordinarily clumsy method of financing the male parent”—thus accomplishing the task “in a very defective and blundering way.” Rathbone argued for a radical rethinking and revision of the existing system. She further elaborated her proposals in a book, The Disinherited Family, published in 1924. This book was republished posthumously in 1949 under the title Family Allowances. Lord Beveridge, father of the post–World War II British welfare state, in an Epilogue written for that book, attributes the intellectual preparation of the 1945 Family Allowances Act “first and foremost” to the author of The Disinherited Family. Eleanor Rathbone was born in 1872 to a prominent Liverpool family. Educated at Oxford in classics and philosophy, she played an active public role as a suffragist, feminist, and advocate of social reforms. She was a member of the British Parliament, as an Independent, from 1929 to her death in 1946. |
