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The editors of\u00a0The Wall Street Journal\u00a0<\/i>have\u00a0long argued<\/span><\/a>\u00a0that 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,\u00a0Hannah\u2019s Children<\/i><\/span><\/a>,\u00a0<\/i>Catharine Ruth Pakaluk agrees: \u201cThere is no historical example of a policy that meaningfully increased birth rates.\u201d I dissent. And a look back at the history of federal family policy explains why.<\/p>\n Following an intense lobbying campaign by women\u2019s groups across the land, the U.S. Congress created the Children\u2019s Bureau in 1912. Housed within the Department of Commerce and Labor, the Bureau\u2019s Chief was Julia Lathrop of Rockford, Illinois (my home for the last 45 years). As a veteran of Settlement Work with immigrants at Chicago\u2019s Hull House<\/span><\/a>, Lathrop described her new task as \u201cbaby-saving.\u201d More specifically, Lathrop said that the \u201cpower to maintain a decent family living standard\u201d was \u201cthe primary essential of child welfare.\u201d This required, in turn, \u201ca living wage and wholesome working life for the men\u201d and \u201ca good and skillful mother at home to keep the house and comfort all within it.\u201d She added, \u201cSociety can afford no less and no exceptions<\/i>. This is a\u00a0universal need.<\/i>\u201d So began the 60-year-long federal campaign to secure the Breadwinner\/Homemaker family model for all American children.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cactively\u201d diverted \u201cthe little girls from homelife\u201d in favor of being \u201cmachine tenders,\u201d another law,\u00a0the Smith-Hughes Vocational Act of 1917<\/span><\/a>,\u00a0provided 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.<\/p>\n With this federal patronage, the field of home economics exploded in size. By the 1950\u2019s, almost all American school districts \u2014 urban and rural \u2014 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 \u201cthe largest single occupation of college women graduates\u201d and cite its success in preparing the female student for \u201chomemaking rather than for a wage-earning profession<\/span><\/a>.\u201d\u00a0Indeed, 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\u00a0century.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Early government relief efforts openly favored higher pay for men, in line with the \u201cfamily wage\u201d model. The Civil Works Administration paid $1 per hour for skilled male labor compared to 30 cents per hour \u201cfor persons on relief and educational projects \u2014 largely women.\u201d 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 \u201ccooking, nutrition, and table setting as well as\u2026personal hygiene.\u201d In the much larger Works Progress Administration, over half of the women involved found places in \u201csewing rooms\u201d where they repaired damaged clothing or sewed new garments from scrap. These WPA women \u2014 disproportionately immigrants \u2014 also took classes in \u201cAmerican\u201d maternal skills such as cooking, care of the house, child care, washing, and ironing.<\/p>\n Furthermore, the \u201cCrown Jewel\u201d of President Franklin D. Roosevelt\u2019s New Deal was \u201cThe Social Security Amendments of 1939<\/span><\/a>.\u201d This measure, wildly popular, took the \u201cindividualistic\u201d Social Security system launched in 1935 and transformed it into a program to promote and defend the Breadwinner\/Homemaker family. Specifics included:<\/p>\n Taken together, these measures made intact marriages, the \u201cfamily wage,\u201d the stay-at-home mother, and the large family the openly-favored objects of federal policy. As feminist historian Gwendolyn Mink has correctly noted<\/span><\/a>, the 1939 Amendments also assumed that conformity to this family model \u201cwould assure\u201d racial minorities of an \u201cuplift to equality.\u201d These acts further affirmed \u201cthat the well-spring of family security and the sign of \u2018American\u2019 family values was the husband.\u201d<\/p>\n 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 \u201cincome splitting\u201d for married couples throughout the land. Under a system of \u201cprogressive taxation,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n The 1948 Act also expanded the generous treatment accorded owner-occupied homes: the \u201cimputed rent\u201d 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.\u00a0Simultaneously, Veterans Administration (VA) and Federal Housing Administration (FHA) policy priorities, along with underwriters\u2019 guidelines, delivered over 98% of new, tax-favored, government-insured loans to young married couples.<\/p>\n Relative to the Breadwinner\/Homemaking model, these same underwriting regulations included only the husband\u2019s earnings when calculating ability-to-repay. A wife\u2019s earnings were\u00a0always\u00a0<\/i>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.<\/p>\n Pulling all of these initiatives together, the family policy edifice existing circa 1960 was coherent and impressive.\u00a0Historian Alice Kessler-Harris summarizes the matter well<\/span><\/a>. Federal laws and regulations, she notes, \u201cbrilliantly\u201d 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 \u201cwould have to work mighty hard\u201d to surpass the benefits of staying at home with her children.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0American 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.<\/p>\n Those post-war \u201cHappy Days,\u201d 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 adults<\/span><\/a> who were or had been married reached 95%, and the total fertility rate rose to 65 percent.\u00a0Consistent policy, guided by a clear family ideal, clearly worked.<\/p>\n Why did the system then fail? That story must await a separate telling.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n This is republished with permission from the Institute for Family Studies. The original can be found here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n 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\u00a0\u201cThe \u2018American Way\u2019: Family and Community in the Shaping of the American Identity.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n\n