Hard and Unreal Advice: Mothers, Social Science and the Victorian Poverty Experts PDF
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Hard and Unreal Advice This page intentionally left blank Hard and Unreal Advice Mothers, Social Science and the Victorian Poverty Experts Kathleen Callanan Martin © Kathleen Callanan Martin 2008 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2008 978-0-230-20189-7 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-30009-9 ISBN 978-0-230-59405-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230594050 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 Contents Prologue: Victorian Social Science in a Twentieth-Century World vi Acknowledgments viii 1 Introduction to Victorian Poverty Studies 1 2 Two Royal Commissions 10 3 Protestant Paradigms in Victorian Poverty Studies 21 Temptation, transcendence, denial: religious threads in 30 late nineteenth-century poverty studies 4 Political Economy and the New Poor Law 48 5 From Political Economy to Social Science 63 6 Ignoble Savages on Relief: Social Darwinism in Late 82 Victorian Poverty Studies 7 Science and Pseudoscience in Victorian and Edwardian 93 Poverty Studies 8 Three Case Studies in a priori Social Science 134 Uneconomic woman goes shopping: reckless 134 improvidence in East London Resting in the daytime: negligent slum mothers in 140 the Slough of Despond Economic woman liquidates an asset: the infant 152 life insurance scares 9 Unanswered Questions, Unasked Questions, and 159 an Experimental Counter-Hypothesis 10 Why Critique the Victorian Social Science of Poverty? 174 Notes 183 Bibliography 212 Index 224 v Prologue: Victorian Social Science in a Twentieth-Century World Long after the Victorian Poor Law had ceased to function, long after the last workhouse in Britain had shut its doors, the U.S. Congress began to debate how to “end welfare as we know it.” A widespread belief that public assistance does the poor more harm than good prompted legisla- tors to a drastic overhaul of the U.S. welfare system, setting limits to the period of eligibility and imposing “workfare” requirements on recipients. Among the sparks that ignited this movement for reform was, by all accounts, a study of the effects of public welfare by political scientist Charles Murray, in a 1984 book called Losing Ground. ThatLosing Groundhad a significant influence on politicians and public alike no one disputes, although the extent of that influence can be debated. Murray himself points out that the Reagan administration had in mind drastic reform, while the logic of Murray’s argument points toward actual abolition of the system. “And yet,” he acknowledges, “observers from left and right agree that it has had an enormous impact on the social policy debate.”1 Lest Murray’s assessment be written off to self-promotion, we should note the comment of sociologist William Julius Wilson, no friend of Murray’s perspective, on Losing Ground: “Probably no work has done more to promote the view that federal pro- grams are harmful to the poor.”2This influence has not, of course, met with uniform approval. Michael Katz, prominent historian of American welfare policy, has characterized it as “the most notable right-wing attack on the social programs of the 1960s and early 1970s” – which of course it was.3Murray’s affiliation with the Manhattan Institute and later with the American Enterprise Institute made aspersions on his political motives inevitable. But, politics aside, was he correct in his analysis? Murray presents a dazzling array of statistical graphs and charts pur- porting to show that the social programs of the “War on Poverty” and its successors actually worsened the lot of the poor and hastened the deterioration of family life in the inner cities, promoting the prolifera- tion of illegitimacy and female-headed households. These statistics he supplements with a series of “thought-experiments” about how the incentives provided by public welfare assistance have affected decision- making among the poor. The most famous of these, the hypothetical couple called “Harold and Phyllis,” is intended to demonstrate that more vi Prologue vii generous AFDC payments, coupled with the removal of “man in the house” restrictions, changed the incentives governing decisions to marry (or not to marry) made by low-income people confronted with an unplanned pregnancy – with disastrous effects on the lives of ghetto children. As Murray sees it, “Interconnections among the changes in incentives I have described and the behaviors that have grown among the poor and disadvantaged are endless. So also are their consequences for the people who have been seduced into long-term disaster by that most human of impulses, the pursuit of one’s short-term best interest.”4 Impressive as Murray’s graphs and tables seem at first glance, they have not held up well under close examination. Katz’s comment that Murray’s use of statistics “has been attacked with devastating effectiveness” is nothing short of the truth, although Murray insists in the tenth- anniversary edition of Losing Groundthat, “surprising though it may seem for such a controversial book, there are not any errors of numbers or facts in Losing Ground that need to be corrected.”5 William Julius Wilson, whose analysis of changes over time in the structure of the unskilled labor market and in patterns of residential segregation points to “the extraordinary rise in black male joblessness” as “the most important factor in the rise of black female-headed families,” sees Murray’s approach as ignoring the economy in favor of a return to an old-fashioned focus “exclusively on individual characteristics.”6Ironically, Murray predicted in the introduction to the tenth-anniversary (1994) edition of Losing Ground, that, following upon his successful wake-up call to the poverty experts, “Sooner or later, social science will catch up.”7 In reality, the approach taken by Charles Murray in Losing Ground is not something new to which social science must “catch up.” What Murray is doing, in a very real sense, is Victorian social science. Any- one familiar with the Victorian social science of poverty recognizes immediately in Murray’s analysis of public welfare its typical concerns, techniques, assumptions, blind spots, and behavioral models. Far from thinking outside the box, Murray is marching confidently down a path laid out long ago, a path now so comfortable to people raised in the culture of the English-speaking world that they scarcely notice the other possible paths they might have taken instead. Anyone truly wishing to understand poverty, rather than to parrot what is usually said about poverty, must therefore take a closer look at how the customary path was established and the reasons for its comfortable continuing use. To do this, it is necessary to begin with the world of Murray’s predecessors, the Victorian poverty experts. Acknowledgments This book has been many years in the making. Along the way I have amassed quite a few debts that in justice should be acknowledged here. I owe profound thanks to two of my undergraduate instructors at Dickinson College. One of them is Professor Marvin Israel, who taught me why I should be skeptical of all numbers in social science. He ruined me for an academic career in sociology but prepared me admir- ably to write this book. The other is Professor Vytautas Kavolis, whose many kindnesses sustained me and who taught me what social theory is really for, as well as how best to use it. For what he gave me, no thanks could ever be enough. Thanks are also due to the graduate program in Comparative History at Brandeis University. The archival research for this project was done on a research travel grant from Brandeis. I am very grateful to Professor Eugene Black for giving me the chance to return after a long absence to complete my work, to Professor John Schrecker, Professor Silvia Arrom, and Dean Milton Kornfeld for generous moral support. Thanks to Professor Mark Hulliung for encouraging my faith in this project when I most needed a boost. I am grateful as well to colleagues at the College of General Studies, Boston University, who read part of the manuscript and offered useful suggestions: Professors Shelley Hawks, Susan Lee, and Polly Rizova. I am particularly grateful to Susan Lee for reassurance on my analysis of the religious foundations of Victorian poverty theory. My thanks to Cambridge University Press for permission to reprint the passages used as epigraphs in Chapters 1 and 10. They are taken from Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nine- teenth Century(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pages 14 and 202 respectively. The passage used as an epigraph to Chapter 2 is reprinted with the permission of The Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group, from How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life by Thomas Gilovich. Copyright 1991 by Thomas Gilovich. All rights reserved. The passage used as an epigraph to Chapter 5 is reprinted with the permission of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group, from Stigma: Notes on Management of Spoiled Identity by Erving Goffman. Copyright viii Acknowledgments ix 1963 by Prentice Hall, Inc. Copyright renewed 1991 by Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved. The passages used as epigraphs to Chapters 6 and 7 are taken from The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould. Copyright 1981 by Stephen Jay Gould. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Finally, I am grateful to my husband, Joseph Martin, for endless moral support, patient computer consulting, and superb, uncomplaining proofreading. Words alone cannot convey how much his participation in this project has meant to me.
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