The disinherited family : a plea for direct provision for the costs of child maintenance through family allowances / by Eleanor F. Rathbone.

  • Eleanor Rathbone
Date:
[1927]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The disinherited family : a plea for direct provision for the costs of child maintenance through family allowances / by Eleanor F. Rathbone. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    has been not so much disparaged or negatived as ignored. In saying this I do not forget the work, to which this book itself owes much, of Mr. Seebohm Rowntree and of the sociologists and labour leaders who have followed him in pleading for the claim of the wage-earner to “ a living wage ” based on the needs of a family. But unfortunately their plea assumes acceptance of a supposition which it is one of the main objects of this book to refute—that all men are heads of families and that all families are of the same size, or rather can justifiably be assumed to be so for the purpose of regulating wages. As I shall try to shew, this fiction bears so little relation to the real facts that the attempt to base a wage system upon it inevitably breaks down. Or rather it does worse than break down. It exerts just enough pull on the industrial machine to drag it off the high road of a remorseless but efficient commercialism into a morass of confused thinking and frustrated, because impracticable, humanitarian purpose. Further, those who have put forward this theory of the “living wage” regard the family not as it really is—an aggregate of individual human beings, each with an actual or potential value to the community—but as the depen- dants ” of the wage-earner. The very word suggests some- thing parasitic, accessory, non-essential. A wife and children, and the wherewithal to keep them, are conceded to the wage- earner as though they were part of the “ comforts and decen- cies promotive of better habits ’ ’ for which he may reasonably ask as necessary to his development as a full human being. But if he prefers to use the margin thus allowed him for breeding pigeons or racing dogs or for some other form of personal gratification, instead of for keeping a family, that is assumed to be his affair, not the State s or his employer s. His wages are his remuneration, earned by the sweat of his brow or the travail of his brain, and how he spends them is no one’s business but his own.
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