In “The Sentimental State: How Women-Led Reform Built the American Welfare State,” Dr. Elizabeth Garner Masarik argues, “Grief and sentimentalism were major factors that influenced [women’s] political activity” and “sentimentalism gave middle-class women the language to demand protections of the mother and child connection, particularly when it came to issues of infant and maternal mortality or the sexual ‘fall’ of girls and women” (p. 2). Masarik further argues that her “subjects created the associative welfare state by creating organizations that eventually became associational arms of local and state governments, which later fed into national government entities such as the U.S. Children’s Bureau” (p. 10). She draws upon the work of scholars such as Laura Wexler and Ellis Hawley, though she counters Hawley’s rhetoric against big government despite his useful model for examining government development (p. 9). She structures her work around an examination of sentimental fiction, the development of social ideas regarding maternal bonds in the Victorian era, the actions of Black women in segregated post-Civil War America, and the actions during the Progressive Era that bridge early nineteenth-century activities with modern politics.
Describing the role of early sentimental fiction, Masarik writes, “These sentimental writers used emotion to push readers to feel anger, sadness, or empathy for the characters that they read about, as well as feel anger or frustration at the social conditions that forced protagonists into horrific situations” (p. 19). She argues, “Sentimental culture captured the anxieties of two periods of danger, death, and grief in mother’s lives. One trop celebrated and mourned the purity and innocence of infancy and early childhood, the other warned of and mourned the loss of purity in late girlhood… The dangers to the family led some women to eventually move beyond sentimental reads to social activism by taking not just their own but ‘the sorrows of others’ to their hearts as well and acting upon those sorrows. Sentimentalism and emotion were core, driving forces behind middle-class women’s push into the political realm” (p. 39). Turning to political activity, Masarik opines, “It is worth noting how the funding that supported many philanthropic endeavors was coded male, while the reproductive labor of the day-to-day operations was coded female” (p. 42).
Masarik writes of Victorian concepts of motherhood, “Nineteenth-century sentimental understandings of the mother and child bond, and the manner in which girls should transition into women, meant that any deviation from a sexually pure childhood and legally sanctioned sexuality in marriage was anathema. Therefore, social purity reformers were not just lamenting the rise of sex work on city streets but also the affront to middle-class standards of sexuality in young adulthood” (p. 56). Further, “The infantilization of young girls in need of rescue rallied middle-class women to their cause and perhaps filled a need for women who felt compassion in a different way, through their love of their own daughters both living and dead” (p. 65). Reformers did not solely focus on women and children. Masarik writes, “Raising moral boys was imperative to changing the status quo. Additionally, astute reformers argued that it was also a way to curb the sexual violence white men committed against Black women… [Martha] Schofield unabashedly highlighted the constant danger that some white men posed to Black girls and women, noting that white people were aware of this threat and did nothing” (p. 66).
Age of consent laws offered an avenue for women to advocate for significant political change. Masarik writes, “…The battle over the age of consent caused a variety of reformers with different backgrounds to come together and argue that women had to be the maternal protectors and shields of the home. Many social purity reformers’ outspokenness was always couched in the understanding that these reforms were for the protection of the home, and particularly for the children that inhabited it” (p. 67). Describing urbanization in the New South, Masarik writes, “Women’s bodies became a central flashpoint in determining the future image of Atlanta. Prominent Atlanta citizens viewed women as either the city’s ‘best hope’ for future progress as respectable mothers raising prosperous citizens, or as the city’s ‘greatest threat,’ by embodying sin and vice” (p. 75). Contrary to the expectation of women’s labor occurring in the background, Masarik notes that “maternalists like Waller Barrett were very aware of the fine line they had to tow when entering the political realm, a space historically off-limits to women. They were stepping out of the Victorian home and into the turn-of-the-century public sphere by extending a woman’s capacity to mother, care, and nurture from her own family to the vulnerable of society” (p. 80).
Addressing the early Progressive Era, Masarik writes, “As the Victorian nineteenth century gave way to the Progressive Era of the early twentieth, ideas about betrayed and fallen women took on more biological meanings, and a transition in the way reformers and social workers understood female sexuality took place” (p. 87). This entailed the transition from strictly moral language to terms incorporating eugenics and linking biology to morality in a far different manner. To this end, “The increasing connections between private charity and public welfare created spaces for women to hold positions of authority… This network of reform-minded women’s clubs was part of the Progressive Era movement toward an expanding state and federal apparatus in support of social benefits. However, this network largely maintained vestiges of nineteenth-century sentimental ideas about family and motherhood, and their romanticized views worked their way into public policy” (p. 93).
Masarik notes that Black women faced their own challenges and paths to sentimental activism in the post-Civil War era. She writes, “Through social welfare, middle-class women would guide the race toward uplift and respectability. Black women reformers founded social welfare organizations, such as settlement houses, kindergartens, and rescue homes, to build their communities while imposing a moral ideological framework centered on middle-class values” (p. 98). Further, “Black women reformers developed a reliance on a Victorian sexual morality based on an ideology of sexual control or even denial to counteract the white social construction of ‘devious’ blackness. Members of the Black middle class felt intense pressure to adhere to Victorian sexual respectability, for their own safety against white men, and to control their tenuous grasp on their middle-class economic and social power” (p. 105). The labor market brought its own moral pitfalls. As Masarik notes, “Within the Victorian code of sexuality, the appearance of purity or moral sexuality was easier to claim when one labored inside of one’s own home. A majority of Black women of all economic statuses worked outside of the home, primarily out of economic necessity” (p. 110).
Activism from club and other associational organizations achieved official success through the creation of the U.S. Children’s Bureau in 1912 (p. 135). Further, “to make lawmakers listen and act, large numbers of American women agitated en masse for their demands through the women’s welfare network” (p. 137). Of sentimental organizations, Masarik concludes, “Longstanding women’s voluntary organizations, coupled with the long histoy of grief and sentimentalism surrounding child and maternal death, wove the threads that knitted the associational state to the realm of reform and volunteerism” (p. 141). Masarik continues, “Groups like the GFWC, DAR, and the National Congress of Mothers were at the forefront of demanding change,” helping to advocate and publicize the work of the Children’s Bureau (p. 147). Masarik argues, “Despite a small budget, the Bureau was able to accomplish so much because of the support of the women’s welfare network” and that “the government relied on the groundwork that local organizations laid while local organizations benefited by having their causes supported and taken seriously by the government” (p. 153). These efforts were chronically underfunded and – as a result – understaffed while mothers’ pensions similarly suffered from a lack of funding and political will. Masarik writes, “Thus the need for an associational welfare state continued” (p. 161).
Masarik concludes, “Sentimentalism is still an important element in public discourse surrounding children, sexuality, and welfare… The piecemeal, associational welfare state that we have today has of course aided in lowering child mortality in the United States, but the country is in no way at the vanguard of safeguarding infant and maternal health” (p. 171). She argues, “The limited supports of the current welfare state have their roots in the powerful networks of women who marshalled both sentiment and social science to advance women’s presumed shared interests” (p. 172). She argues that such collective action and modern sentimentalism offers hope for policy change to “promote the welfare of all” (p. 172). Masarik’s “The Sentimental State” offers an excellent study connecting several threads of nineteenth-century political thought as well as the role of race and gender in the United States to explore the link between decades of activism and modern political efforts. She uncovers the often-obscured role of women in these activities, highlighting how gender could offer an avenue for entry into the political arena that would normally be denied to women.