Between Mothers and the State: Mothers' Allowances in Maine and New Brunswick, 1915-1960
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation examines the origins and implementation of mothers’ allowance legislation in Canada and the United States in the early to mid twentieth-century through the lens of two borderlands locations: the State of Maine and the Province of New Brunswick. Mothers’ allowances provided a monthly “payment for motherhood” to prevent the break-up of needy families bereft of their “natural” breadwinner. This legislation served as a key administrative and ideological template for all later state and federal expansions of public welfare in the United States and Canada, yet it has been understudied at the local level. These state and provincial programs varied significantly in terms of funding and eligibility, a diversity that has continued to persist into the present era. In addition, a comparative approach to this concept of “payment for motherhood” helps to reveal the ways that ideologies of motherhood were entwined with class-based notions of respectability, national identity, and social and political citizenship. Close reading of case files, government records, and the records of both public and private charitable organizations help us to reconstruct the social landscape of poverty in Maine and New Brunswick, with a particular emphasis on the gendered experience of mothers in relation to evolving public welfare services. Potential recipients had to negotiate a complex terrain of social and legal expectations in order to access aid for their families, a process monitored by a new bureaucracy of field agents and investigators. In both places, state and provincial-level officials had great confidence in their superior abilities to improve families and manage public funds, and they envisioned a fairly swift end to poverty and ignorance through their skillful efforts. In addition, a concentrated study of Maine and New Brunswick reveals useful variations on the established historiography about infant mortality as a driving force behind the allowance movement. Overall, the focus on these two local programs as case studies provides critical insight into the gendered dynamic of the public welfare system, as well as the social lives of marginalized women, men, and families in the northeastern borderlands.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".