Comparative Maternalism: Mother's Aid in Maine and New Brunswick, 1917–50

My poster will explore the origins and implementation of the earliest form of state-sponsored welfare in the United States and Canada: mother’s aid.  These pensions appeared in stages across the United States and Canada, as well as parts of Europe, during the Progressive Era.  While a great deal of research has examined the role of maternalists in both creating and implementing these policies, most research has focused in the United States on the maternalist reformers of the federal Children’s Bureau, founded in 1912 and staffed almost exclusively by women.  On the Canadian side, only mother’s pensions in Ontario have been investigated at book length, with Manitoba and British Columbia have been explored at the article-level.  Maine and New Brunswick have thus far been unexplored even at the article level.  I intend to add to this historiography with the first look at the politics and practice of the mother’s pensions in Maine and New Brunswick from 1915 through 1950.  This research is also the first to explore mother’s aid and social welfare through the lens of a Canadian-American comparative and transnational perspective.  A poster provides an excellent vehicle to present this research, because it allows for a visualization of the Maine and New Brunswick borderlands region, as well as comparative mapping of ethnic groups, jurisdictions, monetary levels, and aid applications and approvals.

Mother’s pensions provide insight into a number of related research areas.  I am particularly interested in the relationships between maternalism, social welfare policy, and citizenship in the Progressive Era.  For example, what range of purposes were reformers hoping to achieve with the pensions?  What public and private organizations were involved?  How do varying geographic, political, and cultural influences shape the development and practice of mother’s aid?  Whereas Maine was in the middle chronologically with its 1917 mother’s pension legislation, and boasted some of the highest per capita spending on mother’s aid in the United States, New Brunswick was one of the last provinces to enact legislation in 1930 (finally implemented in 1943) and had much stricter eligibility requirements.  The New Brunswick pensions have been totally unexplored, and my research includes the campaign for the pensions, implementation, and changes over time due to cultural and economic fluctuations.  A comparative approach to maternal and child welfare aid reveals the critical role of centralized state power, as in Maine, and county-based governmental structures, as in New Brunswick, in determining the adoption of mother’s aid programs.  The decentralized nature of state-sponsored aid in New Brunswick may be a key factor in the late appearance of mother’s aid in New Brunswick.  Further, the Native American experience relating to mother’s pensions has been completely unexplored in both the United States and Canada.  My cross-border comparison highlights the varying perceptions and treatment of Anglophone, Francophone, and First Nation women and families in Maine and New Brunswick.