Home Slackers: Men, the State,
and Welfare in Modern America

Michael Willrich

As the United States stood at the threshold of the twentieth century, heightened public concerns about "home slacker" husbands, wage earners who failed to support their families, gave rise to new forms of social regulation that have left a lasting imprint on welfare policy. The new, court-centered regime of male breadwinner regulation emerged at a moment when the facts of modern social life—wage labor, urban living, ethnic and racial diversity, and a population in perpetual motion—seemed dangerously corrosive to traditional family bonds. Those bonds were, in the first instance, legal, an interlocking chain of rights and duties that governed the domestic relations of husband and wife, parent and child. As social experts and moral authorities warned that families were "breaking down" at an alarming rate, private charity officials, women reformers, state lawmakers, and judges invented a new system of regulation to reinforce what they saw as the chain's weakest link: workingmen who shirked their "natural and legal duty" to support their families, shifting that burden to the public.1	1
"Delinquent husbands." "Shiftless and lazy drunks." "Married vagabonds." "Worthless men." "Home slackers." Epithets of the era, as often hurled by a judge from the bench as by a minister from a pulpit, recall a proliferation of cultural representations of unwilling or failed breadwinners as common criminals, unfit citizens, and half-men. Between 1890 and 1915, every state in the union enacted new laws that made a husband's desertion or failure to support his wife or children a crime, punishable in many locales by imprisonment at hard labor. To administer the statutes more effectively, cities across the nation during the 1910s and early 1920s rolled out a new piece of judicial machinery, the "socialized" family court. Part criminal court, part "social agency," these novel tribunals teemed with psychiatrists, social workers, and probation officers, in addition to the usual cast of judges, bailiffs, and prosecutors. The courts' chief purpose was to compel the delinquent husband to fulfill his manly duties—to "keep sober, work and support his family," as a typical probation order put it—thus keeping his family intact and, not incidentally, off the welfare rolls. "The chief value of a good law, well enforced," the New York charity worker Lilian Brandt observed in 1905, "is that it expresses the estimation in which society holds men who shirk their obligations to their families, and that it relieves society of the necessity of assuming their responsibilities."2	2
This essay recovers the largely forgotten history of breadwinner regulation during the Progressive Era (1890–1919). By deliberately moving wage-earning men to the foreground, it builds upon, challenges, and aims to broaden the rich new feminist literature on gender and welfare state formation in Europe and the United States. Feminist scholars have firmly established the historical significance of welfare as a "women's issue." But they have paid too little attention to the role of men—either as makers and implementers of policy or as subjects of welfare discourse and intervention. This leaves us with an incomplete understanding of welfare's gendered past. I argue that a court-centered regime for policing delinquent wage-earning husbands emerged alongside the better-known American welfare innovations of the early twentieth century: state-administered workmen's compensation systems and state-funded "pensions" to mother-headed households. No less than these other gendered policy "tracks," breadwinner regulation was vital to the ideological and political development of modern welfare governance in its formative era.3	. . .