Table Of ContentHard and Unreal Advice
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Hard and Unreal Advice
Mothers, Social Science and the Victorian
Poverty Experts
Kathleen Callanan Martin
© Kathleen Callanan Martin 2008
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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.
