Ladies of the Leisure Class by Bonnie G. Smith

Author:Bonnie G. Smith [Smith, Bonnie G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, France
ISBN: 9780691209487
Google: df3RDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2020-03-31T01:13:39+00:00

The Replacement for Caritas

Commonplace in France under the Third Republic, these attacks were accompanied by projects to replace the outmoded organizations with more modern, and of course more republican, facilities for the poor. Local governments courted the loyalty of the poor by instituting bureaucratic welfare. For example, in Lille they reallocated funds from the creche society to a government agency charged with distributing money to poor women who would remain at home to care for their children. This precursor of a national allocation familiale aimed at making the working class see in the government and its functionaries a protection in times of trouble. It aimed as well at blanketing areas with assistance through the use of efficient bureaucratic procedures. Local governments also encouraged and even sponsored all sorts of republican organizations that might rally the poor. The 1880s witnessed a proliferation of groups for gymnastics, popular libraries, vacations, lunch programs, stamp collecting, camping, debate, music, and marching. Participants, it was hoped, would notice the concern of the republic for its citizens, and by the same token interpret membership in these small groups devoted to their amusement, edification, and assistance as symbolic of membership in the republic.79

There was initially a place in this network for the efforts of wealthy women, a place that most of them refused to occupy. Republicans still professed to want their assistance with schoolchildren, and they created, among other supporting groups for the newly secular schools, a women’s auxiliary that seemed to be a revival of the old organization of dames patronnesses. Yet this new society of dames laïques, stripped of all but the most ornamental functions, appealed to almost no one among the wealthy women of the Nord. Peopled with a few schoolteachers’ wives and several spouses of government functionaries, it was defunct by the turn of the century.80

Republicans conceived another organization to handle the problem of young children and infants: the Society for the Protection of Young Children. Acting under the aegis of the Roussel Law, a piece of early Third Republic legislation for the inspection of conditions under which poor children were put out to nurse, both local and departmental officials in the Nord assigned public health doctors to visit the children and their guardians. In addition, certain cities and towns encouraged the formation of women’s committees to assist the doctors in such an enormous undertaking. Because the clientele consisted of both legitimate and illegitimate children, republicans were apparently fortifying their democratic rhetoric with specific action.81

In Lille, the city for which an account remains of the activities of women volunteers, some twenty wealthy women devoted their efforts to visiting both children’s guardians and their mothers to check on sanitary conditions and to provide the usual advice on care for the infants. They even “shunned the clerical banner,” as one woman wrote, because they knew that they could check baby bottles and the cleanliness of cradles without the advice of priests. For a while the republicans seemed pleased with those efforts. In 1883 the city

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