American intellectual life in the early 20th century has a dirty secret and its name is Eugenics. Alex Tabarrok points out an excellent article by Thomas C. Leonard on Protecting Family and Race: The Progressive Case for Regulating Women’s Work (PDF). Leonard makes the point that Progressive support for exclusionary labor legislation for women, including the minimum wage, was based among other things on ensuring “that women could better carry out their eugenic duties as ‘mothers of the race’”. Though most know that eugenics had some sort of open popularity prior to the Nazis giving it a bad name, few know how thoroughly it was supported by all the “best and brightest”. Here’s a partial list from Leonard’s paper: Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, Sidney Webb, George Bernard Shaw, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence and economist Irving Fisher.
Progressives, in part for eugenic reasons, wanted to make women and other groups unemployable. Their chosen tool: the minimum wage.
…these progressives argued that minimum-wage-induced disemployment was a social benefit. Legal minimum wages and other statutory means of inducing undesirable groups to leave the labor force were, in the progressive view, a eugenic benefit.
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What, the Progressives and their intellectual descendants having anything but the purist and most pristine intentions and agendas, how can that be possible? This must be propaganda from Neanderthal reactionaries.
The Progressives were instrumental in giving us the Fed, the Income Tax, prohibition, and U.S. entry into World War I. That they would think along these lines regarding eugenics, women, and motherhood is par for the course. Thank you Mr. Carson for drawing attention to this issue.
We had a analagous situation here in Australia in the 1960s and 1970s. The “balance of power” between the conservative government and social democratic (Labor) opposition in our federal parliament’s Senate was controlled by the Democratic Labor Party (DLP). The DLP were a right-wing, socially traditionalist, anti-communist and catholic dominated breakaway group from Labor.
Although they were mortal enemies of the leftist and feminist dominated ‘progressives’ of Labor, the DLP had a better grasp of basic economics.
The DLP sided with Labor to support and push through “equal pay for equal work” legislation, although their motives were opposite from the progressives. The DLP believed, and said so quite explicitly in their policy platforms, that equal pay legislation would slow or even partly reverse the drift of women from the household into the workforce.
Lets also not forget that that progressive Christian institution- the YMCA- also supported the eugenics program!
On the other hand, we practice anti-eugenics by permitting people with genetic defects to pass on their DNA to the next generation.
So the reason that the minimum wage was begun was to prevent women from working in jobs that men were in?
I haven’t read through that PDF paper, but color me skeptical…
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