The editors of The Wall Street Journal have <a href="https://www.wsj.com/opinion/you-cant-legislate-fertility-budget-tax-break-pronatalism-6f1e0394">long argued</a> that there is no public policy that might raise marriage and birth rates. They have focused special ire on the current Child Tax Credit. In her fine book on the mothers of large families, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/s?k=hannah%27s+children&amp;adgrpid=186716693695&amp;hvadid=792781531915&amp;hvdev=c&amp;hvexpln=0&amp;hvlocphy=9009675&amp;hvnetw=g&amp;hvocijid=10795035046916083159--&amp;hvqmt=e&amp;hvrand=10795035046916083159&amp;hvtargid=kwd-2286705702633&amp;hydadcr=12776_13765111_2457259&amp;mcid=cb99743e35223c469c676039f7670d7f&amp;tag=googhydr-20&amp;ref=pd_sl_5yqc89uv8h_e">Hannah’s Children</a>, Catharine Ruth Pakaluk agrees: “There is no historical example of a policy that meaningfully increased birth rates.” I dissent. And a look back at the history of federal family policy explains why.
Following an intense lobbying campaign by women’s groups across the land, the U.S. Congress created the Children’s Bureau in 1912. Housed within the Department of Commerce and Labor, the Bureau’s Chief was Julia Lathrop of Rockford, Illinois (my home for the last 45 years). <a href="http://https//socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/federal/lathrop-julia-clifford">As a veteran of Settlement Work with immigrants at Chicago’s Hull House</a>, Lathrop described her new task as “baby-saving.” More specifically, Lathrop said that the “power to maintain a decent family living standard” was “the primary essential of child welfare.” This required, in turn, “a living wage and wholesome working life for the men” and “a good and skillful mother at home to keep the house and comfort all within it.” She added, “Society can afford no less and no exceptions. This is a universal need.” So began the 60-year-long federal campaign to secure the Breadwinner/Homemaker family model for all American children.
Major steps followed within the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The Smith-Lever Extension Act of 1914 funded new, state-level teams of specialists to train farm women in home economics and modern housekeeping. Following complaints by Lathrop and others that the public schools “actively” diverted “the little girls from homelife” in favor of being “machine tenders,” another law, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Smith-Hughes-Act">the Smith-Hughes Vocational Act of 1917</a>, provided federal funds to school districts to hire teachers who would promote healthy family living. Boys would receive training in woodworking, metalwork, and the other industrial and agricultural arts. Girls would be trained in cooking, food preservation, home sanitation, sewing, and infant and child care. Gender crossovers were unthinkable.
With this federal patronage, the field of home economics exploded in size. By the 1950’s, almost all American school districts — urban and rural — had embraced such gender-specific training. Membership in the American Home Economics Association, mostly teachers, soared past 50,000, and the organization could correctly label the homemaker as “the largest single occupation of college women graduates” and cite its success in preparing the female student for “homemaking rather than for a wage-earning <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Cottage-Work-Station-Familys-Industrial/dp/0898704294">profession</a>.” Indeed, it would be difficult to overstate the influence of this federal project on the assumptions and expectations adopted by tens-of-millions American girls and boys coming of age in the mid-twentieth century.
The economic collapse of 1929 to 1933 generated an array of new federal efforts to rebuild and protect the Breadwinner/Homemaker family. Viewed from the household level, the Great Depression was primarily a crisis within the industrial and agricultural sectors and concentrated among formerly breadwinning men. Employed women tended to be in the lower-wage service sector, much less affected by the economic collapse.
Early government relief efforts openly favored higher pay for men, in line with the “family wage” model. The Civil Works Administration paid $1 per hour for skilled male labor compared to 30 cents per hour “for persons on relief and educational projects — largely women.” Young men in the Civilian Conservation Corps received room and board and $1 per week for their labor; young women, 50 cents. The latter also received training in “cooking, nutrition, and table setting as well as…personal hygiene.” In the much larger Works Progress Administration, over half of the women involved found places in “sewing rooms” where they repaired damaged clothing or sewed new garments from scrap. These WPA women — disproportionately immigrants — also took classes in “American” maternal skills such as cooking, care of the house, child care, washing, and ironing.
Furthermore, the “Crown Jewel” of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal was “<a href="https://www.ssa.gov/history/1939amends.html">The Social Security Amendments of 1939</a>.” This measure, wildly popular, took the “individualistic” Social Security system launched in 1935 and transformed it into a program to promote and defend the Breadwinner/Homemaker family. Specifics included:
<ul class="ul1">
<li class="li3">Creation of a Homemaker’s Pension, which was available to women who reached retirement age who were married for at least five years to eligible men, and worth 50% of their husband’s benefit; neither prior contributions nor paid work were required; divorced women were excluded, so were non-working men married to working women.</li>
<li class="li3">The Act removed widowed mothers with children from the welfare-oriented ADC program, receiving instead a monthly Survivor’s benefit equal to 75% of what the husband would have received so long as she did not earn more than $15 a month and did not remarry.</li>
<li class="li3">Surviving children received a benefit equal to half of what their father would have received.</li>
</ul>
Taken together, these measures made intact marriages, the “family wage,” the stay-at-home mother, and the large family the openly-favored objects of federal policy. As feminist historian Gwendolyn Mink has correctly <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Wages-Motherhood-Inequality-Welfare-1917-1942/dp/0801495342">noted</a>, the 1939 Amendments also assumed that conformity to this family model “would assure” racial minorities of an “uplift to equality.” These acts further affirmed “that the well-spring of family security and the sign of ‘American’ family values was the husband.”
Subsequent changes in Federal tax policy further reinforced this commitment to family well-being. Specifically, the Tax Reform Act of 1948 cut the income tax in a family-supportive way: 40% of the cut occurred by raising the personal exemption to $600 per person, about 18% of median household income. Accordingly, a married couple with three children, earning the median national income of $3,000, would now be relieved of nearly all federal tax liability through this measure alone. Another 13% of the tax cut came through the introduction of “income splitting” for married couples throughout the land. Under a system of “progressive taxation,” with numerous tax brackets, this technique of tax calculation gave a strong incentive to full-time homemaking. Put another way, the homemaker became a valuable tax shelter.
The 1948 Act also expanded the generous treatment accorded owner-occupied homes: the “imputed rent” of the home was exempted from taxation; the interest paid on a mortgage was also exempted, as were most capital gains from the sale of a house if a new one was purchased within a given time. Simultaneously, Veterans Administration (VA) and Federal Housing Administration (FHA) policy priorities, along with underwriters’ guidelines, delivered over 98% of new, tax-favored, government-insured loans to young married couples.
Relative to the Breadwinner/Homemaking model, these same underwriting regulations included only the husband’s earnings when calculating ability-to-repay. A wife’s earnings were always excluded under the assumption that she might become pregnant at any time and then leave her job. This policy had the indirect benefit of holding housing prices down (e.g., fewer dollars chasing the same housing stock) and further encouraged young women to become mothers and homemakers.
Pulling all of these initiatives together, the family policy edifice existing circa 1960 was coherent and impressive. <a href="https://uncpress.org/9780807844953/u-s-history-as-womens-history/">Historian Alice Kessler-Harris summarizes the matter well</a>. Federal laws and regulations, she notes, “brilliantly” conveyed messages on how people should live. Women were expected to marry and stay married. It was assumed that a man would gain little if his wife had to go to work, and a woman “would have to work mighty hard” to surpass the benefits of staying at home with her children.
These policies did have consequences. During the economic crisis of the early 1930s, aggravated by the clumsy and arguably anti-family response of the Herbert Hoover administration, American marriage and fertility rates reached historic lows. Then, these numbers turned around. American entry into World War II in 1941, expected to suppress family formation once again, actually accelerated the change. By the 1950s, the nation was in the midst of both a Marriage Boom and a Baby Boom, which would have echoes as late as 1970.
Those post-war “Happy Days,” I assert, were in significant ways the product of deliberate policy choices. The average age of first marriage for both men and women fell to near-record lows. The proportion of <a href="https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1975/compendia/hist_stats_colonial-1970.html">adults</a> who were or had been married reached 95%, and the total fertility rate rose to 65 percent. Consistent policy, guided by a clear family ideal, clearly worked.
Why did the system then fail? That story must await a separate telling.
***
This is republished with permission from the Institute for Family Studies. The original can be found <a href="https://ifstudies.org/blog/federal-policy-and-the-breadwinner-homemaker-family">here</a>.
Dr. Allan Carlson is a scholar and former professor of history at Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan. He is the President Emeritus of the Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society, and former director of the Family in America Studies Center. His books include “The ‘American Way’: Family and Community in the Shaping of the American Identity.”

<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<script async src="https://www.tiktok.com/embed.js"></script>
<script async src="https://www.instagram.com/embed.js"></script><div data-widget-host="revcontent" data-pub-id="165152" data-widget-id="290588"></div><script src="https://delivery.revcontent.com/165152/290588/widget.js"></script>

Making America Booming With Babies

CONTINUE READING

DW Opinion

American family

Birth Rates

Family policy

A video goes viral showing a baby being refused his mother by two gay "dads". This is just the tip of the iceberg, which is why we will have an important discussion today about surrogacy. 

Hour 1

The Matt Walsh Show

Ep. 1765 - This Video Is One Of The Worst Things I've Seen In A Long Time 

The Strait of Hormuz officially opens for business (kind of), the Pope makes “shocking” comments on immigration, and President Trump promises UFO disclosure at TPUSA. 


The Michael Knowles Show

Ep. 1956 -  Pope Leo's "SHOCKING" Immigration Comments EXPLAINED

A false miscreed has corrupted our leadership class.


The Andrew Klavan Show

Ep. 1275 - Dumb, Dumber and Progressive

President Trump announces a 10-day ceasefire between Lebanon and Israel, a murder-suicide involving former Democratic Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax shakes Virginia, and France and Britain hold a conference to secure the Strait of Hormuz – after the Iranian conflict ends. Get the facts first with Morning Wire.

- - -

Ep. 2738

- - -

Wake up with new Morning Wire merch: https://bit.ly/4lIubt3

- - -

Today's Sponsors:

Alliance Defending Freedom - Visit https://JoinADF.com/WIRE or text 'WIRE' to 83848 to learn more.

Pocket Hose - Text MORNING to 64000 to get a FREE pocket pivot and their 10-pattern sprayer with the purchase of ANY size Copper Head hose. Message and data rates may apply.

Morning Wire

U.S. Expands Hormuz Blockade & VA Fairfax Deaths Investigated | 4.17.26

U.S. Expands Hormuz Blockade & VA Fairfax Deaths Investigated | 4.17.26 [Member Exclusive]

A ceasefire goes into effect between Israel and Lebanon, a tragic murder-suicide rocks Virginia, and Dairy Queen deploys AI in the drive-thru. Get the facts first with Evening Wire.
- - -
Ep. 2737
- - -
Wake up with new Morning Wire merch: https://bit.ly/4lIubt3 
- - -
Today’s Sponsor:

Alliance Defending Freedom - Visit https://JoinADF.com/WIRE or text “WIRE” to 83848 to learn more.


Menu

— DW Opinion —

Making America Booming With Babies