Motherhood and Pensions.
[Legal issues]. Richmond, Mary E. Motherhood and Pensions. Reprinted from The Survey, March 1, 1913.
Slim 8vo.; wrappers; front panel off-set and water-stained; near fine.
First edition. Mary Ellen Richmond (1861-1928), teacher, physician, and theoretician in the American Charity Organization Society Movement, gained recognition for her pioneering social work, providing professionals and charity organizations specific tenets in two books, What is Social Casework? and Social Diagnosis. Richmond defined social casework as “those processes which develop personality through adjustments consciously effected, individual by individual, between men and their social environments.”
In 1900 she was elected to the position of general secretary of the Philadelphia Society for Organized Charity, and in 1909 she served as director of the Russell Sage Foundation. From 1920 until 1922, when she was defeated in he bid for the presidency of the National Conference of Social Work—in part because of the “schism” she had created within the profession by espousing views strongly opposed to any public relief to families—she conducted institutes for caseworkers and supervisors, “stimult[ing] creative thinking and experimentation with new ways of improving family life.” She also was a distinguished faculty member at the New York School of Philanthropy at Columbia University, and in 1927 was instrumental in the organization of the fiftieth anniversary of the American Charity Organization Society Movement, during which she coined the motto “Light from Hand to Hand, Life from Age to Age.”
Motherhood and Pensions illustrates Richmond’s particular concern for the welfare of women and children in the work force, focusing on the issue of pensions for women. Of the lack of any effort to provide pensions to women, she reproaches:
The advocates of mothers’ pensions have no such carefully thought-out program, or, if they have, they have not yet stopped to realize the demoralization that must come to social plans and social results from government per capita grants that are open to all objections ever made against our present pension system. No attempt has been made to keep to widow’s pensions in this discussion, because the legislation already proposed in many states goes far beyond this.
As a rectification, she articulates:
I have said that no one remedy can meet that need or even relieve it…Untiring work must follow. People and not surveys or exhibits must make things different by hard and steady pulling together. And to the solution of one family’s difficult problem, to the safeguarding of one child’s right to health and a fair chance, might well be brought, in contribution, everything human ingenuity has devised or human sympathy has longed for.
A very scarce pamphlet.
(#4310)
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