“The Mother State and Her Weaker Children”

Abstract

In the United States, the institutionalization of people labeled feebleminded gained significant momentum during the Progressive Era. In this article, I use a biographical approach to examine social work’s role in the expansion of institutions for this population. I employ feminist standpoint theory to detail how the profession used its dominant standpoint—maternalism—as a political strategy to justify the segregation of people labeled feebleminded. Implications for future scholarship and for social work are presented.

I think no one distrusts and shrinks from the idea of a paternal government more than I …. Yet… I also believe that toward this vast dependent multitude, a fatherly or motherly care is the just attitude of the State. Their lives should be guarded and governed, their work and play, their food and clothes, their business and their leisure, should all be chosen for them. They should be directed, guided, controlled. The State should say to each of them: ‘My child, your life has been one succession of failures. You cannot feed and clothe yourself honestly. You cannot control your appetites and passions. Left to yourself, you are not only useless, but mischievous ….You are incurable, a degenerate, a being unfit for free social life … you will abstain from interfering with your neighbor to his detriment … you will never procreate your kind … here is a village of the simple, a happy and useful place for you … if you are physically strong and have some intelligence, you shall earn your own living, and perhaps something toward the maintenance of your weaker brothers and sisters … you shall go out no more until such time as your heavenly Father takes you to a still more permanent home …. (National Conference on Social Welfare [NCSW], 2005g, p. 6)

In his 1897 presidential address of the National Conference on Charities and Corrections (NCCC) entitled The Mother-State and Her Weaker Children, social worker William A. Johnson depicted for his colleagues their shared vision for the “feebleminded” (one early term used to refer to persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities). “Does all this sound far away, a dream of the future?” he asked (NCSW, 2005g, p. 6). While the address foretold the contributions his profession later made to realize the “dream,” the foundation on which it was built antedated social work by several decades.

Long after the founding of asylums in the 1820s and 1830s for other populations, the first institution for the feebleminded opened in 1878 (Rose, 2008). The New York State Custodial Asylum for Feebleminded Women had been in the making for more than 30 years. As early as the 1840s, social reformer Dorothea Dix (2001) exposed appalling conditions forced upon “idiots” (a synonym of feebleminded) living in poorhouses and jails and advocated for their removal. At the same time, Édouard Séguin transformed the education of idiots in Paris. He disagreed with his mentors whom, after their unsuccessful attempt to cure the Wild Boy of Aveyron, believed idiocy was incurable (Itard, 1962; Trent, 1994). Instead, Trent (1994) described the condition as deviant behaviors due to “separation of the normal functioning of the nervous system from the will” that could be repaired. To this end, between 1838 and 1847, Séguin taught in a handful of schools and published several books on his pedagogy (Trent, 1994, p. 46).

Séguin’s pedagogy soon crossed the Atlantic. By the time he emigrated from France to the United States in 1850, there existed many special training schools modeled after his methods. Instructors selected students of “the improvable class” (Illinois Board of Public Charities, 1907, p. 156), the “educable,” and the “trainable” to attend (Tyor & Bell, 1984, p. 21). Training schools followed a traditional schedule, in which students visited home for holidays and summers. The French educator praised American instructors for educating children instead of forcing them to work “as a machine to make money with” (Trent, 1994, p. 55).

Among those lauded was Hervey B. Wilbur, a trained physician and superintendent. Wilbur measured success by the independence of trainees and their return to the community (Rose, 2008). Yet he did not realize his goal to reintegrate all trainees. Local authorities pressured superintendents to house unemployable idiots, a force intensified by widespread failure to reintegrate graduates. In spite of Dix’s efforts a decade earlier, after the employed feebleminded lost jobs in the economic decline of 1857, many became residents of the lunatic asylum, poorhouse, or jail (Trent, 1994).

By the mid-1870s, Wilbur viewed custodial institutions as necessary. After failing to secure funding for a custodial institution in New York, Wilbur joined forces with social reformer Josephine Shaw Lowell, the first female member of the New York State Board of Charities. Lowell instilled in state officials a fear of hereditary degeneracy that plagued female idiots. Albeit for different reasons, Wilbur and Lowell successfully acquired state monies (Rose, 2008). Together, they set the stage for institutionalization, and while Wilbur clung to his goal of releasing capable trainees, it did not become his modus operandi. By the late 1860s, the number of individuals living in institutions for the feebleminded had swelled (Trent, 1994).

During the same time period, social challenges wrought by capitalism in an increasingly industrialized, urban, and unequal 19th century fashioned a climate conducive to the proliferation of voluntary and state organizations within which a profession called social work was born. In 1877, 1 year before the first institution opened, Charity Organization Societies created the affluent “friendly visitor” (The Social Welfare History Project, 2013a). Twelve years later, the women of Hull House embarked on their unprecedented social reform (The Social Welfare History Project, 2013b). In roles associated with these two pillars of the profession and in others, social workers developed policies and programs that gave rise to the American welfare state.

Maternalism

Until the 1990s, scholars of welfare state history focused on policies and programs that benefited the labor force and targeted both genders, such as medical care and senior benefits. They also focused on men’s roles in fashioning the welfare state (Koven & Michel, 1990). However, in the 1990s feminist scholars turned attention toward women’s roles through the lens of maternalism, a concept that has since become a valuable transdisciplinary and international interpretative and classificatory tool (van der Klein & Plant, 2012).

In the United States, maternalism is associated with the Progressive Era (O’Brien, 2009). While an ideology, policy, or program can be described as maternalist, maternalism is not any singular social movement (Koven & Michel, 1990). In early scholarship, Koven and Michel (1990) defined maternalist as “ideologies that exalted women’s capacity to mother and extended to society as a whole the values they attached to that role: care, nurturance, and morality” (p. 1079). Scholars contested this definition. Ladd-Taylor (1993) condemned its generality, in which any female activist who used motherly rhetoric could be deemed maternalist. Scholars also debated the harmony and discord between maternalism and feminism. Boris (1993) reasoned that maternalist politics equated motherhood with women, thus undermining feminist ambitions, such as equal rights for working women. In contrast, Taylor Allen (1993) argued that as a branch of feminism, maternalism “takes women’s experience as mother and nurturer as the basis for interpretations of women’s history, for distinctively female approaches to ethical and social questions and for improvements in women’s status” (p. 99). Furthermore, conceptualizations of maternalism vary from individual relationships to political movements to state interventions and span countries and continents (van der Klein & Plant, 2012).

A consequence of the multitude of contexts in which it is examined and the associated diverse interpretations generated, maternalism is concurrently branded “feminist, anti-feminist, conservative, radical, or some combination thereof” (Weiner, 1993, p. 96). This ambiguity has endured a quarter century, and current scholarship suggests that well into the 21st century, it is as multifaceted as ever (van der Klein, Plant, Sanders, & Weintrob, 2012). Some scholars charge that this vagueness dilutes its utility. Yet van der Klein and Plant (2012) propose the opposite, suggesting that maternalism’s plasticity is a strength. Given the range of contexts in which it is observed, they argue, that maternalism reveals the phenomenality of sociohistorical developments across time and space is desirable. They contend that this versatility is justifiable as long as authors offer clear definitions.

Indeed, the introduction of maternalism as a concept worthy of attention engendered a new generation of intellectuals who filled a conspicuous gap in scholarship by concentrating on women, the role of women as mothers, and the middle-class women activists working on the front lines of developing welfare states. This new focus transformed interpretations of a rapidly changing time period. Still, despite being used in discourse that, by confirming the vacuity of their rights and humanity ironically justified women’s rights and humanity (Baynton, 2013), the experiences of persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities have not been given due consideration in this new scholarly direction for at least two reasons. First, the history of disability is a burgeoning area of research ending an extensive period of intellectual silence that likely contributed to a similarly muted maternalist inquest. Second, after the mid-19th century, and particularly after the Great War, the synchronous increase in institutionalization and worsening conditions of impoverished women and children shifted maternalists’ focus away from disability issues toward those concerning mothers and children (Michel, 2012). Nevertheless, there is evidence to suggest that this resolution is premature.

Current Study

I build on earlier scholarship by investigating social work’s role in the institutionalization of people labeled feebleminded. Feminist standpoint theory provides a useful framework for examining social work’s involvement. A feminist critical theory that originated in the 1970s and 1980s to study the relationship between the construction of knowledge and power (Harding, 2004), its purpose is “to help move people toward liberatory standpoints, whether one is in a marginalized or dominant social location” (Harding, 1998, p. 161). A standpoint is not an individual perspective of a person or persons, but “the combination of resources available in a specific context from which an understanding might be constructed” (Sprague & Hayes, 2000, p. 673). By examining social work’s role, a profession that served as a bridge between America’s borderlands on the one hand and her public and political domains on the other, I argue that social work’s dominant standpoint—maternalism—overshadowed the marginalized standpoint of people labeled feebleminded. I also contend that social work employed maternalism as a political strategy to promote institutionalization, and I demonstrate that this strategy was not restricted to female social workers. Finally, I conclude that while well intentioned, social work was instrumental in the construction of a fundamental yet tragic component of the emergent American welfare state built on the misguided promises of maternalism.

To study social work’s dominant standpoint, I use primary and secondary sources to apply a biographical approach. A recent cross-disciplinary upsurge in the interest of biography as a methodology, what Caine (2010) refers to as a “biographical turn” (p. 1), is largely due to the acknowledgment that the lives of a group of people in a particular social location and historical moment can be understood by examining the lives of others who shared that location and moment (Caine, 2010). Thus, I examine social work’s contribution to the welfare state via the interconnected efforts of three social workers: William A. Johnson (the superintendent), Julia C. Lathrop (the reformer), and Elizabeth S. Kite (the field-worker). Their work as practitioners and their profound impact on social work education inform an understanding of the profession’s effect on persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Importantly, historically accurate terms are used, as they convey the embedded meanings for those who used them (Trent, 1994).

The Superintendent, Social Reformer, and Field-Worker

William A. Johnson was born on January 2, 1847, in Ashton-Under-Lyne, Lancashire, England to John and Amelia Hill Johnson (Banta, 1949). His family had “for generations past been natural reformers” (McGrath & Stoddard, 1899, p. 508). His paternal grandfather was a leading English radical in the 18th century, and his father, one of the first Chartists, took part in various social reforms. At 22 years old, Johnson immigrated to Ontario, where he worked in the clothing industry. He split the next 12 years in Chicago (1873–1879) and Cincinnati (1879–1884), and in 1881, he became a director and volunteer friendly visitor for the Associated Charities of Cincinnati (McGrath & Stoddard, 1899). By assuming these roles, he set his professional trajectory on a course that would make him one of the most influential social workers of his generation.

After 3 years of service, Johnson was elected general secretary of the associated charities. In 1884, the same year he gained national recognition for his efforts in Cincinnati to feed, clothe, and house victims of the great flood (McGrath & Stoddard, 1899), he became an official member of the NCCC (De Schweinitz, 1922). With 5 years of friendly visiting under his belt, he returned to Chicago as secretary of the city’s Charity Organization Society (COS; McGrath & Stoddard, 1899). During his 4 years in this role, Johnson focused on the organization of charities in Illinois generally. The Society’s efforts included institutions for all persons dependent on society, from the State Soldier’s Home to the Illinois Training School for Boys to the Working Home for the Blind (NCSW, 2005b, 2005a). In 1889, however, as the founding secretary of the Indiana State Board of Charities, Johnson became keenly attentive to institutions for the feebleminded. He believed there was nothing “more statesmanlike, humane, and Christian as the care of the feeble-minded” (NCSW, 2005c, p. 318). At the 16th NCCC, he voiced that maternal “care” was best performed in institutions (NCSW, 2005c). Early on, he established the conference as a platform from which to project idealized notions of motherhood to the welfare state.

Superintendents of state institutions were most often physicians, but in 1893, Johnson assumed his station as head of the Indiana School for the Feebleminded (Trent, 1994). During his 10 years of service to the Fort Wayne institution, his influence on social work did not waver. In 1896, he was appointed President of the 1897 NCCC (NCSW, 2005g), and he served in leading roles on standing committees that advocated for custodial care, including the committee On Prevention of Feeblemindedness from a Legal and Moral Standpoint (2005g) and the committee On Care of Feebleminded and Epileptics (NCSW, 2005h).

In his 1897 presidential address, Johnson depicted a dream for people labeled feebleminded (NCSW, 2005g, p. 5). As Taylor Allen (1993) asserts, “speech is not just an individual but a social act, the product between the interaction of individual creativity and the intellectual paradigms and frameworks provided by a given culture and period” (pp. 99–100). Johnson’s address illustrates his use of maternalism as a political strategy. Let us first consider the title. Merriam-Webster defines “mother country” as “the country where you were born or where your family came from” (Mother country [Def. 2], n.d.). Thus, a definition of “mother state,” which is not listed in the dictionary, is produced by substituting “state” for “country.” At face value, this definition applies to the title. Yet the context of its delivery warrants a different meaning. One year earlier, Johnson defined the term. “We believe the mother State (and that means ourselves in our corporate capacity) has a duty to her helpless children” (NCSW, 2005f, p. 215). Here, he conflated motherhood with social workers and the means by which they cared for the people they called feebleminded. His use of the word “children” reinforced notions of motherhood, where the mother state’s responsibility was to care for people labeled feebleminded.

Johnson preceded the dream with unapologetic objection to paternalism in government. By presenting it as the unwelcome opposite of maternalism, he revealed a dichotomy that legitimized control by concealing it under a cloak woven of motherly qualities. In a juvenile democracy determined to be an exceptional example of independence and liberty, paternalism was blasphemous. Yet Johnson conditioned this taboo. A paternal approach was forbidden for citizens of America, or “Us,” but it was necessary and desirable for the people they called feebleminded, or “other.”

As Sprague and Hayes (2000) summarize in their application of feminist standpoint theory to 21st-century discourse on developmental disorders, the construction of knowledge via dichotomy is a central feminist critique of knowledge creation. This Aristotelian approach, where everything is either “A” or “not A,” resulted in the transformation of “thinking and feeling people” into “abstract bearers of attributes or traits” (Sprague & Hayes, 2000, p. 674). Without a self, persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities were other. Contrary to the current emphasis on self-determination and empowerment (Sprague & Hayes, 2000), this approach was undeniably paternalistic. Thomson’s (1996) analysis of maternalism among literary characters with physical disabilities and their mothers in the mid-19th century offers another way to portray Johnson’s dichotomy. That is, the “maternal benefactress” versus the “vulnerable other” (Thomson, 1996), the former the mother state, comprised of social work and institutions, and the latter the defenseless people they referred to as feebleminded. The antithesis to what he coveted for himself and his colleagues, Johnson, however well-meaning, was determined to see the feebleminded live segregated lives devoid of choice. As such, he and his colleagues, in positions of power, defined and pronounced the needs of the other.

Johnson subsequently asserted that “a fatherly or motherly care” was required, thus equalizing men and women in their capacity for care. As superintendent, he considered himself—a man—as central to the mission of institutions and as capable of caring for the feebleminded. While Johnson used the term “control,” a quintessentially paternalistic word, he more often emphasized the terms care and “guide,” underscoring maternal qualities. As Trent (1994) observed, both care and control were used in actions taken to address people labeled feebleminded. Still, control was associated with fatherly, authoritarian paternalism, and aware of this, Johnson likened his role to that of mothers, a more acceptable approach in the political sphere.

The NCCC was not the only outlet for Johnson to project the need for maternalism and the institutional remedy. For years he communicated to the public the imperative role of the mother state in some of the most prominent newspapers of his day. In The Indianapolis Journal (Johnson, 1900), the Los Angeles Herald (Associated Press, 1906), and The Washington Herald (Associated Press, 1913) he asserted, “I don’t like paternalism in government, but you can’t have too much maternalism.” He was not the only social worker to use such discourse. In 1896, he quoted Alice J. Mott of Minnesota, who also highlighted motherly traits.

Sentiment is inseparable from such work … quickened feeling, tenderness, patience, self-forgetfulness. These characteristics, as they develop in the individual who devotes himself to the care of the witless, must develop … in the national temper of a State which assumes maternal care of helpless, irresponsible innocence. (NCSW, 2005f, p. 213)

Perhaps unique to people labeled feebleminded, unlike many maternalists depicted in scholarship (Michel, 2012) Johnson spoke the word “maternalism” to promote his agenda. As Uno (1993) observed, maternalist goals take hold only if related qualities and responsibilities are important to society at large, resulting in a “national ideological platform” (Michel, 2012, p. 28). To take this further, if we, as Michel suggests, “consider the rhetorics of contemporary male-dominated politics” (Michel, 2012, p. 28), it may not only be that motherhood is effective when valued and desired. Rather, it may also be when its opposite (i.e., paternalism) is devalued and undesired. Using this discourse to his advantage, Johnson inspired action.

After 10 years as superintendent, Johnson resigned and became the general secretary of the NCCC. When the New York School of Philanthropy offered its first yearlong program in 1904, he became a leader in social work education (Department of Philanthropy, Charities and Social Problems, 1904). As an associate director, he taught courses (e.g., The Principles and Practices of Social Philanthropy) alongside other prominent leaders, such as Graham Taylor and Florence Kelley (Devine & Kellogg, 1906). In his new role, he had a greater impact on social work and people labeled feebleminded (Trent, 1994).

In his 8 years as secretary, Johnson witnessed a 155% increase in membership, from 1,273 to 3,500 members (De Schweinitz, 1922). With his personality and inspiring spirit (De Schweinitz, 1922), his contribution to social work persisted, his reputation enhanced with time. By 1907, he was the editor of Charities and the Commons, the principal magazine of social work and welfare backed by New York’s COS (1907) and later titled The Survey (The Social Welfare History Project, 2013c). He lectured at the Chicago School of Social Science, where he co-taught Survey of the Field with codirector, Graham Taylor, as well as summer courses on Institutions and Care for the Insane (COS, 1907). Soon, with the aid of a bold, Hull House-trained social reformer and the research of a prolific field-worker, his impact would intensify.

Julia C. Lathrop was born in 1858 in Rockford, Illinois, to William and Sarah Adeline Lathrop (Who’s who in the Nation’s Capital, 1921). Her father was a self-made lawyer who escaped his father’s farm (Addams, 1935) and served as a state representative in 1856 and 1857 (U.S. Congress, n.d.). Her mother was an active member of the Second Congregational Church and a graduate of Rockford Female Seminary. Lathrop’s parents encouraged her to read and freely express herself. As a young woman, she spent one year at Rockford, where she met Jane Addams and Ellen Starr (Addams, 1935), and 3 years pursuing her bachelor of arts at Vassar College in New York (Bond Hill, n.d.). As Addams (1935, pp. 45–46) recalled in Lathrop’s biography, “There is no record of her inner readjustments during the eighties, those first years after college so difficult for many gifted young people…whatever Julia Lathrop personally experienced she never told.” By 1890, however, she was a resident of Hull House.

Three years after she joined the settlement movement, Lathrop was appointed by her governor to serve as the first female member of the Illinois State Board of Public Charities (Addams, 1990). Among other goals, the Board aimed to achieve “necessary teaching and care for defectives” (NCSW, 2005d, p. 305) and was familiarizing itself with the state’s institutions for all populations. In 1894, she presented the first report of the newly convened Board at the NCCC. Concluding her presentation with an impromptu statement, she seized the opportunity to offer a testimonial intended to level the expectations of men and women on Boards.

… as the first woman to be appointed… I trust I shall not seem out of order if I venture to say something about … the opportunities and the duties of women on State Boards …. I do not believe that solely because we are women we shall necessarily have any more light or inspiration on the Board than the men have. I have a suspicion that the common dust out of which men and women were made enjoyed no spiritual transmutation when it passed through Adam’s rib …. I am sure that we do not monopolize any of the finer qualities of human nature…the powers of tenderness and sympathy and adaptation … belong to choice individuals, and not to man or woman as such. (NCSW, 2005d, pp. 306–307)

In her work on the history of feminism in Europe, Offen (2000) suggests that two types of feminisms exist: equal-rights feminism, which emphasizes the similarities of men and women, and relational feminism, which stresses the differences between men and women, and specifically the maternal qualities of the latter. While these separate ideologies are extracted today, Taylor Allen (1993) argues that they were used opportunistically by women to achieve their aims. Lathrop’s statement at the NCCC illustrates this point. She communicated her view that women and men were equally capable of possessing qualities associated with women and their customary role as mothers (e.g., tenderness). Hence, to testify about matters that impacted her public role as well as the roles filled by other women Board members, Lathrop employed equal-rights feminism. Yet Lathrop is acclaimed for her later work to secure federal women’s and children’s services, and to this end she simultaneously embraced the maternalist argument that women were innately capable of nurturing and raising children (Ladd-Taylor, 1993). Also apparent in Lathrop’s testimonial is the connection between her equal-rights-informed method and Johnson’s discourse. She displayed how the mother state embodied both women and men who were able to exercise Johnson’s motherly or fatherly care, respectively.

Lathrop served two of three appointments on the Board consecutively (1893–1901; Addams, 1990). During that time, she worked alongside Johnson on NCCC committees. In 1895, the two reported back to back on feebleminded institutions in their sister states (NCSW, 2005e). It was also the year when the renowned publication Hull House Maps and Papers was circulated. Lathrop’s contribution to this historical enterprise of social science, The Cook County Charities, included reports of investigations on the conditions of state institutions. Of one poorhouse she described, “Ward 3 B, with beds crowded together, others made on the floor, and filled with a melancholy company of feeble and bedridden men and idiot children, must haunt the memory of whoever has seen it” (Residents of Hull House, 1970, p. 122). She advocated for “feeble … and idiot children” to be removed from poorhouses, an initiative that began decades before but had yet to be fulfilled. In her autobiography Twenty Years at Hull House, Addams (1990) explained that because Lathrop lived in the settlement among the poor, she viewed institutions from the “standpoint of the inmates rather than from that of the managers” (p. 181). Nonetheless, she aimed to improve circumstances within institutions, not offer an alternative to them. Addams also shared the impact of Lathrop’s work on Hull House residents.

… residents of Hull-House have spent much time in working for the civil service methods of appointment for employees in the county and State institutions; for the establishment of State colonies for the care of epileptics; and for a dozen other enterprises which occupy that borderland between charitable effort and legislation. (p. 182)

In 1897, Lathrop attended the NCCC held in Toronto, where Johnson proclaimed the dream in his presidential address. There, she reported on the Board’s legislative successes and failures as well as the numbers of people classified as feebleminded in Illinois institutions (i.e., 644). Over the next decade, Lathrop and Johnson were members of the same professional circles and served together on committees, including the executive committee (NCSW, 2005i) and its Committee on International Prison Congress with Addams (NCSW, 2005j).

Beginning in 1904, Lathrop served as a chairman and member of the NCCC’s State Supervision and Administration standing committee to address administrative challenges within institutions. The following year, she returned to its Board for her third and final appointment (Addams, 1935). In this familiar role, she demanded improvements in facility conditions, such as enhancing ventilation, enlarging institutions to address overcrowding (e.g., in 1907 the Illinois Institute for the Feebleminded was short 129 sleeping rooms), building a second institution for the feebleminded, separating women of childbearing age from other residents, and establishing laboratories for physicians to study residents (Illinois Board of Public Charities, 1907).

Like Johnson, Lathrop was also influential in her role as educator. By 1907, she was a pioneer of social work education. As cofounder and codirector of the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, she employed social workers, including Johnson, to teach General Training for Social Work (COS, 1912). After a mere 5 years, her effect on social work was undeniable. In celebration of her position as founding chief of the Federal Children’s Bureau, established April 9, 1912 (Lindenmeyer, 1997), colleagues described her as:

one who now is, and for many years past has been, an active participant in our labors, an able and energetic member of the Illinois State Board of Charities, the efficient organizer of the most valuable research work undertaken by the Russell Sage Foundation… friend of all in distress, the wise, broad-minded woman – Julia Lathrop. (NCSW, 2005k, p. 5)

Once in office, Lathrop was obligated to select priorities for the young bureau. In spite of her previous work in the field, she did not want to engage the ongoing debates between professionals about the most appropriate course of action for feebleminded children. She did not “care to be drawn into either camp regarding the feeble-minded” and selected the task of reducing infant mortality over “mental defectives” (Lindenmeyer, 1997, p. 47).

Despite this decision at the federal level, she created a course for social workers employed in Illinois institutions for people labeled insane or feebleminded (NCSW, 2005j). News of its value spread, and students traveled from other states to enroll (Lathrop, 1912). Lathrop also co-taught Administration of Institutions with Johnson (NCSW, 2005j). As educators, both contributed to the rise in institutions. Individually and as a team, they built a labor force legitimized by instructors of powerful national influence in the care of the feebleminded.

As Lathrop took the reins of the Federal Children’s Bureau, the infamous study The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness was published (Goddard, 1912). The official report, which sold for US$1.50 in The Survey, documented the lineage of an 8-year-old resident of the Training School for Feeble-minded at Vineland in New Jersey. Allegedly, the resident was born into a line of degeneracy caused by the child of an honorable, Quaker revolutionary war solider, Martin Kallikak, and a feebleminded woman. The results convinced Goddard, remembered today as one of the most prominent eugenicists (Zenderland, 2001), and his field-worker that “they had discovered a dramatic example of generational inferiority” (Trent, 1994, p. 163). These findings legitimized eugenics and sparked the development of extreme to address feeblemindedness, such as sterilization (1995). While Goddard took credit for the study, his field-worker was undoubtedly an equal partner in its creation and its ensuing influence on social work. Further, their deductions would pull Lathrop back into the debate and arm their soon-to-be coworker, Johnson, with justification for expanding institutions.

Elizabeth S. Kite was born on December 4, 1864, to James and Mary Anna Kite. When she was 3 years old, her devout Quaker family moved from her birthplace in Philadelphia to Chester Hill, Ohio. Kite was educated via her governess and the Westtown Boarding School. Her family spent summers in Nantucket where her aunt Huldah, who worked in Quaker missions with American Indians and African Americans during the Reconstruction Era, lived. In the summer of 1892, Kite joined her aunt on a mission and studied botany at the State College of Colorado Springs. There, she made a conscious decision to never marry, “feeling it was God’s will … to lead a single life” (The Women’s Project of New Jersey, 1996, p. 160).

Over a 6-year period, Kite furthered her education at the University of Goettingen (1895–1897), studied history at the University of London (1904), where she converted to Roman Catholicism (1904) and received the Diplome d’Instruction, Primaire-Superieure from Sorbonne in Paris (1905). After her return to the states, she taught in private schools in Pennsylvania, California, and Massachusetts. Her research on feeblemindedness began soon thereafter (Scanlon & Cosner, 1996; The Women’s Project of New Jersey, 1996; Zenderland, 2001).

In 1909, 45-year-old Kite embarked on what became 9 years of intensive, highly influential research. Professor E. R. Johnstone, Johnson’s brother-in-law and former employer at the Indiana Training school, had established The Psychological Research Laboratory at Vineland 3 years earlier and hired Goddard as its director (Zenderland, 2001). When Goddard employed Kite, her unique qualifications as a trained historian (O’Connell & Russo, 1988) and her dedication to research created a synergy within the laboratory that, while simultaneously gaining international recognition (2001), helped mold a young, impressionable social work profession. As Trent (1994) noted, when psychometric testing flourished after 1910, teachers in the training schools flocked to psychology and social work.

Through friendly visiting, Kite gathered information about the relatives of Vineland residents, alive and dead, to investigate the pedigree of mental deficiency. Charles Davenport, close colleague to Goddard and resident director of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Springs Harbor, who trained 258 field-workers between 1910 and 1924, including 240 women, (Bashford & Levine, 2010), proudly described the value of field-workers in institutions at the 1915 NCCC.

At the home, to a tactful and gracious field worker, the true facts of family history are readily divulged. The trained field worker also secures a fuller account of the developmental history … and learns the general conditions of development and of the specific stresses to which the patient is subjected.… But perhaps the most important and indispensable service that the field worker performs … which we cannot at present properly measure at the institution…is the emotional control that the person has; especially his reactions to the stimuli which rain in on him in the real, tumultuous world of affairs outside the institution’s walls—his capacity for reacting according to the mores—his morality. (NCSW, 2005l, p. 314)

Within the eugenics community, fieldwork was a branch of social work. Not only were these terms used interchangeably, but field-workers and social workers attended the same lectures and read the same texts, including Mary Richmond’s hallmark Social Diagnosis (American Eugenics Society, Eugenics Research Association, Eugenics Record Office, & Carnegie Institution of Washington Eugenics Record Office, 1919). During her prolific decade of research, Kite often published in The Survey and received praise from social workers for her investigations (NCSW, 2005i). In 1913, 1 year after releasing The Kallikak Family, she published her first solo article in a series she called The Pineys (COS, 1913). Social workers purchased a 25-cent copy of The Survey to learn of “The Pineys” or “Pine Rats” of the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, ostensibly descendants of mental degeneracy. Kite presented her findings as a critique of morality (COS, 1912).

Kite’s influence on social work was not confined to Vineland. She was employed by the Commissioner of Charities and Corrections of New Jersey to conduct pedigree studies, and she was involved in Catholic settlement work (Leonard, 1914). Still, it was her research at Vineland that had the most profound impact. In a period when social work was just beginning to harness the nascent scientific method to pursue multiple versions of social advancement (Croly, 1911), the production of knowledge Kite facilitated furnished leading social workers with “social facts” (Durkheim, 1982) that supported the dream Johnson professed.

In 1913, Johnson’s brother-in-law offered him the position of founding director of Vineland’s Extension Department (Trent, 1994). There, he joined Goddard and Kite in a eugenics laboratory (Zenderland, 2001). The dream he depicted 16 years earlier seemed within reach.

So much attention has been given the case of the defective delinquent … that there seems some hope that active measures for the care and control of this very dangerous class may be taken in the near future. It is easy to get control of the lower grades of the feeble-minded—all the idiots and many imbeciles—they are brought to institutions as fast as room is provided. For them we do not need compulsory measures. This means that control of about one-half of the feeble-minded can be had by extending present institutions with little, if any, changes of law. (COS, 1913, p. 355)

By 1914, Johnson’s goal was to educate the public about “mental defectives” (Trent, 1994). Armed with Kite’s research, he traveled the country between 1915 and 1918 to deliver 1,100 lectures in venues such as legislative assemblies, universities, civil clubs, and national conferences (Johnson, 1923). He spoke at “schools of social work in seven different cities,” “social workers’ clubs,” “national and state conferences of charities,” and “settlements” (Johnson, 1923, pp. 396–397). In every publication of The Survey during these years, as the “national authority” on feeblemindedness (COS, 1915), Johnson left his mark on social work and the welfare state.

Meanwhile, Lathrop tirelessly labored at the federal level. By valorizing the role of motherhood to meet their objectives (Ladd-Taylor, 1993), she and the women of the bureau earned recognition and respect male administrators did not expect (Ladd-Taylor, 1991). Among the first leaders of the maternalist movement (2004), she is deemed a “professional maternalist” (Knupfer, 2001, p. 2). Nicknamed “America’s First Original Mother” (Vassar Historian, 2005), she is credited for with procuring a federal position for maternalists working on behalf of women and children nearly a decade before the vote (Mink & O’Connor, 2004). However, despite her initial hesitation to address issues related to feebleminded children, two years after her appointment at the bureau she secured a federal platform for maternalists working to institutionalize the feebleminded.

In May of 1914, Lathrop sent a letter to Goddard, as well as other leaders in the field of feeblemindedness to express President Wilson’s interest in supporting an inquiry into the feebleminded. She requested assistance to plan an exhaustive study (Trent, 1994) that resulted in the bureau’s 1915 report on “mental defectives” (Lindenmeyer, 1997). Lathrop also received letters from desperate parents seeking placements for their children. “I am trying to locate a reliable school… for subnormal children … I know such schools exist, but I do not know where,” said one mother (Zenderland, 2001, p. 234). “Can pay moderate price and make most any sacrifice for him,” wrote another (p. 234). Lathrop referred them to Johnstone and to Kite and Goddard’s research.

Throughout the Progressive Era, Lathrop supported the dream decreed by Johnson who, through his position at Vineland, gained national recognition for himself and legitimized social work (Trent, 1994). Johnson’s autobiography, Adventures in Social Welfare: Being Reminiscences of Things, Thoughts and Folks during Forty Years of Social Work (Johnson, 1923), was well received, and his impact on social work lauded (De Schweinitz, 1922). Upon his death in 1941, “Uncle Alec” was fondly remembered by his colleagues for the “contribution he had made in the building of social forces in America” (“Alexander Johnson: 1847–1941,” 1941, p. 565). To be sure, Kite’s research, widely consumed by social workers, was a key instrument in Johnson’s and in Lathrop’s efforts. Combined, the work of these three social workers was essential to the institutionalization of persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Conclusion

Recorded histories that trace social work to its roots are abundant. From Charity Organization Societies to the settlement movement to labor reform, the likes of Mary Richmond, Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, and countless other celebrated champions of social change are depicted in various histories of the profession (Lubove, 1980; Popple & Leighninger, 2010; Trattner, 2007). Yet the icons often portrayed in social work history are not remembered for their impact on the lives of persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities, including the contributions illustrated in this article.

As Foucault (1980) states, the work of the specific, applied intellectual has, “whether in the service of the State or against it, powers which can either benefit or irrevocably destroy life” (p. 129). In the case at hand, social work endorsed and established a branch of the emergent American welfare state that is today identified as an inhumane tragedy (Trent, 1994) and a “maternalistic fallacy” (Zenderland, 2001, p. 318). By venerating the promises of a maternal approach, social workers justified the institutionalization of the people they called feebleminded, whom for decades were disempowered and silenced. What resulted was a component of the welfare state that was neither maternalist nor feminist. Instead, maternalist discourse was a smoke screen for paternalistic measures of governance and control over an increasingly marginalized group of boys and girls, men and women, rather than women and children.

Accordingly, feeblemindedness is a unique case in welfare state history important to maternalist scholarship. Most historians define maternalism as female proponents of maternal ideology, or “women welfare reformers” (Mink & O’Connor, 2004) who proposed that “women—especially mothers—were uniquely qualified to right the wrongs of an uncaring society” (O’Brien, 2009). Yet Johnson used maternalism as a political strategy to encourage institutionalization, often utilizing the word maternalism as a tool. He also argued that he and other male social workers possessed qualities associated with mothers required to care for the feebleminded. Likewise, Lathrop expressed men’s equal capacity for applying these qualities to their work. Feeblemindedness, therefore, was an area of social reform in which men and women social workers united. In response to the unique circumstances of people labeled feebleminded, it was acceptable for men to participate in reform efforts. Perhaps advocacy to expand the welfare state via institutions for the feebleminded was more palatable than issues of women and children alone because men filled administrative roles in these institutions and were leaders of the cause (Ladd-Taylor, 1993; Trent, 1994). Furthermore, within maternalist discourse the feebleminded were viewed as children, where both males and females required care. This may have encouraged male social reformers to view the cause as spanning otherwise distinct gender lines. Future research in this area is necessary to advance our understanding of maternalism in this specific context. To achieve this, a new term is required to incorporate all welfare state beneficiaries. Whereas “feminist welfare state” is used to advance knowledge on issues of women and children (Sarvasy, 1992), the mother state or the “mother welfare state” better applies to persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities viewed as needing a mother to nurture, guide, and govern their lives.

Implications for Social Work

Just as persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities captured the attention of social work during the Progressive Era, in the 21st century there is a heightened focus on their rights to participate in decisions about their own lives. In 2006, the global community expressed the significance of protecting the rights of persons with disabilities in the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Article 4(3) states:

In the development and implementation of legislation and policies to implement the present Convention, and in other decision-making processes concerning issues relating to persons with disabilities, States Parties shall closely consult with and actively involve persons with disabilities, including children with disabilities, through their representative organizations. (UN General Assembly, 2006)

In the United States, this provision is most recently embodied by the final rule issued by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (2014) in the context of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The final rule is a collection of regulations that includes a mandate for states to “make significant efforts” (Public Notice and Input, para. 1) to solicit public input from stakeholders, including individuals with disabilities, in current transitions and future revisions to home and community-based services waivers. This mandate aligns perfectly with social work’s ethical principle to “respect and promote the right of clients to self-determination and assist clients in their efforts to identify and clarify their goals” (Code of Ethics of the National Association of Social Workers, 2008). It also provides an opportunity for social work to ensure that the standpoint of persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities is central in shaping the contemporary welfare state.