Maternal public policy emerged in the United States towards the end of the nineteenth-century, with scholars such as Kathryn Kish Sklar attributing this to failures within the male-dominated political sphere to remedy contemporary social ills creating “an urgent public demand for the skills of white, middle-class women possessed and the agendas they represented.” Sklar specifically notes “the arrival of hundreds of “new” immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, the intensification of industrial growth, and the explosive expansion of urban areas” as general trends within American society that contributed to the growth of the maternalist movement.
[2] An early success for reformers was the landmark United States Supreme Court decision Muller v. Oregon, 208 U.S. 412 (1908), which upheld the constitutionality of a law that limited the maximum working hours of women.
The decision in Muller was based on a scientific and sociological study that demonstrated that the government has a legitimate interest in the working conditions of women due to their unique ability to bear children.
[5] Maternalist reforms came during a time in American history where there was strong resistance to large-scale social provision policies as a result of the pension system for Civil War veterans ballooning “to such outsized proportions” that many were unwilling to engage in “further experiments with government benefits.”[6] Despite this barrier, Progressive Era maternalist reformers had several successful initiatives such as those that helped establish the federal Children's Bureau (1912), pass the Sheppard-Towner Infancy and Maternity Protection Act (1921), and expand mothers' pensions to most states.
[9] These attacks were effective in undermining some previous successes, such as the repeal of the Sheppard-Towner Infancy and Maternity Protection Act as well as the prevention of the addition of universal health coverage into the New Deal.