In 1933, Argentine Minister of Foreign Affairs and Religion Carlos Saavedra Lamas submitted a draft bill on social assistance and social security based on the findings of the First National Conference on Social Assistance. This bill required the national government to ‘organise and co-ordinate private and public action in this field’, with the state playing a subsidiary role. To this end the state should ‘encourage private action and use its institutions to undertake a mission of cooperation, mostly through subsidies’.Footnote 1 It was concern for mothers’ and children's protection that marked the emergence of Argentina's first health care and social welfare laws and programmes, whose implementation, as in other European and Latin American countries, was delegated to private philanthropic associations run by upper-class women working alongside various governmental agencies.Footnote 2 This paper deals with the women's association movement and its connection with social policy between 1920 and 1940 in the city of Buenos Aires.
The development of social policy from the late nineteenth century to the 1940s has been, notes Juan Suriano, a topic in historiography on Argentina over the last two decades, analysed from disparate perspectives.Footnote 3 The approach centred on the relationship between women and the emergence of social policy has mainly focused, with few exceptions, on the activities of the Sociedad de Beneficencia (Benificent Society) and of feminist organisations, and has argued that by the 1930s the significance of the women's movement in the creation and supply of welfare services had started to decline and be replaced by a new institutional structure: social welfare services led by public health professionals (higienistas).Footnote 4
This paper seeks to problematise such a conclusion by analysing three of the most relevant associations in the period and their connection with the nascent social state.Footnote 5 The Cantinas Maternales (Mothers’ Canteens), the Sociedad Damas de Caridad de San Vicente de Paúl (Society of Ladies of Charity of St Vincent de Paul) and the Conferencias de Señoras de San Vicente de Paúl (St Vincent de Paul Ladies’ Conferences) were charitable bodies founded by upper-class women of the city of Buenos Aires (porteño) elite linked to Catholicism and scarcely examined in historical studies of Argentina. Subsidised by the state, these associations provided a significant number of social assistance services for mothers, women and children and had a powerful impact on the design of social policy. Having become the maternal face of the state, they kept playing a central role in the provision of social assistance until well into the 1930s, thus helping prevent the state from becoming a ‘colossal bureaucratic machine’.Footnote 6 This is even more significant when compared with the cases of neighbouring countries in the Southern Cone, as it demonstrates how the relative strength of Argentine matrons in comparison with their Uruguayan and Chilean counterparts slowed down the emergence of a state which was actively involved in the social area.
By first reviewing the interwar social context, this paper analyses the ways in which the state dealt with the problem of helping and protecting mothers and children. It then examines the three women's associations devoted to protecting mothers and assisting minors and women, focusing on these organisations’ activities, their forms of social intervention, their changing relationship with the state and the grounds underlying their actions. The associations and the state became involved in a debate about the principles that should guide in private philanthropy, its relationship with public assistance, the role the state should play and the significance of women's associations in social welfare programmes. This debate brought about specific consequences in the emergence and interaction between social assistance and social security systems and among women as social policy agents and targets. The analysis of these associations’ history not only highlights the role that some women played in providing social assistance to children and other women, but also provides a new perspective on the birth and development of a social state.
Interwar Buenos Aires: The Social Question, the Family Question, and Mother and Child Policies
The interwar period in Buenos Aires was a time of huge social, political, economic and cultural change. Rapid urbanisation, the advent of mass politics and resulting political polarisation, and the impact of the 1929 crash all called into question older certainties. The capital city grew very rapidly, reaching a population of 2.3 million inhabitants by 1930.Footnote 7 This accelerated growth unleashed an inexorable transformation in the city's appearance. Certain urban sectors were labelled as in need of special protection – these included women, particularly female heads of households and workers, who were viewed as mothers or potential mothers whose maternal role could be harmed by work. Another category was that of ‘abandoned’ children, living in conventillos (overcrowded tenement houses) and roaming the streets, with or without parents.
The new concern for these social groups derived partly from what was deemed a birth-rate crisis. As Marcela Nari notes, if between 1890 and 1920 one of the main anxieties about the future of the nation was the high child mortality rate, from 1920 to 1940 such concern was partially replaced by a worry about falling birth rates.Footnote 8 Women's participation in the labour force, which had been regarded as a social problem since the late nineteenth century, then gained special relevance. As recent studies have shown, between 1914 and 1940 there was a decrease in the proportion of women working in domestic service and an increase in the rate of those engaged in manufacturing, such as in the textile, chemical and food industries. Women's presence was also important in the service sector, particularly in administration, communications and education.Footnote 9
The lower fertility rate and the decreasing immigration flows following the First World War and the 1929 crash, together with women's growing participation in the labour market and what was considered the consequently higher number of neglected or delinquent children,Footnote 10 fuelled an apocalyptic view among economists, physicians and politicians about the future of the Argentine ‘race’ and, hence, of the nation. Stress was thus laid on the family/fatherland bond, and especially on women's reproductive role, as one of the solutions to the problem of the nation's future. Under both the Radical governments and the conservative regime of the 1930s, different social reformist sectors (liberals, Catholics and Socialists) called for greater state intervention in the so-called ‘family question’, often based on a common public-health and eugenicist view of the roots of the country's problems. Such a view sought to improve the ‘genetic stock’ of the population through social reform, specifically through programmes combining health care with social assistance, and to fashion a healthy and vigorous population as the core of the fatherland. This found practical application through policies that would support the ‘traditional’ family and thereby prevent problems such as unmarried couples, infanticide, illegitimacy and neglected or offending children.Footnote 11
During this period, several social reforms addressed the family question. Health care institutions expanded, providing assistance to children and instruction to mothers concerning hygiene and nutrition, particularly through house calls by ‘home visitors’, a practice that gained momentum in the late 1930s.Footnote 12 As regards social legislation, two laws are significant here. First, law No. 10,903, better known as the Agote Law, was enacted in 1919, with the crucial support by the then president of the republic, Hipólito Yrigoyen. It gave the state, under certain circumstances, the power to remove parental authority and to exercise guardianship of minors considered ‘abandoned and delinquent’. These minors were held at the Patronato Nacional de Menores (National Board for the Care of Minors), a public entity reorganised by decree in 1931. Given the constant shortage of places to accommodate them, many of these minors ended up being sent to private associations, which made it difficult to keep a record of the official number of delinquent, abandoned or simply poor minors in Buenos Aires.Footnote 13 Second, in 1933 paid maternity leave for working women was approved, consisting of mandatory contributions by female workers, employers and the state. This was one of the few social laws approved during this period which dovetailed with the notion of social security.Footnote 14
It was public health workers who pressed the hardest to extend state health care and social assistance to women and children in need and to organise a centralised mother and child protection system. As Susana Belmartino notes, by the early 1930s the public health school of thought advocated greater state intervention in the organisation of health care and welfare services, bringing order to the decentralised system of the period, where public institutions, usually led by doctors and dependent on ministries and levels of government, co-existed with private associations that were heavily financed by the state through subsidies. The idea was taking hold that social assistance was a duty of the modern state and, hence, a right of the assisted individual.Footnote 15 This in turn meant a rationalisation of subsidies to private social assistance associations and the subordination of private associations to health care guidelines drawn up by public agencies.Footnote 16 The 1929 crash and its social consequences played an important role in this change, partly explaining the burgeoning number of bills on social policy backed by a new parliamentary consensus thanks mainly to political support from conservative forces. This represented a remarkable shift when compared with the long period of legislative paralysis that dominated the years from 1916 to 1930.Footnote 17
This move to centralise welfare provision was played out in a number of bills, some of which passed into law. The most important of these was the law governing the creation in 1936 of the Dirección Nacional de Maternidad e Infancia (National Bureau for Maternity and Childhood, DNMI). One of the DNMI's purposes was to supervise public and private entities devoted to mothers and children – except for those dependent on the Sociedad de Beneficencia – and to create state institutions for protecting mothers and children. It achieved little during this period, however, mostly due to its limited budget and the jurisdictional overlaps among different institutions and government levels.Footnote 18 As Asunción Lavrin argues, these types of endeavours were marked by the sluggishness of the state bureaucratic structure and by the heavy costs imposed by the bureaucratic machinery to put them into practice.Footnote 19
Alongside these demands and the enactment of some of them, the state launched a subsidy rationalisation policy. Key measures included the 1937 decree establishing the Registro Nacional de Asistencia Social (National Registry of Social Assistance), under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Religion. Any social assistance undertaking had to be logged in this registry, the responsibilities of which included (besides record-keeping) involvement in the granting of subsidies and coordination of welfare services, both private and public. Failure to register prevented a charity from receiving public subsidies and would result in the automatic loss of legal status.Footnote 20 Such measures sought to put an end, at least from a legislative perspective, to higienistas’ ongoing criticism of the chaotic manner in which the state funded private associations. There were no clear criteria for the award of public subsidies, which were granted more on the basis of connections between association managers and public officials than that of the efficiency of the services delivered by such associations.
The subsidy rationalisation policy was accompanied by an increase in state subsidies to private associations, particularly in the 1930s. In 1940, Luis Siri, assistant director of the DNMI, studied the trend of the national government's allocation for social welfare, showing that these funds amounted to 2.5 per cent of the overall national budget in 1910–20, 2.74 per cent in 1920–30 and 3.22 per cent in 1930–40. This latter figure equalled m$n 28 million, a clear leap in the amount of money that the state invested in social assistance, most of it allocated to private institutions.Footnote 21
To sum up, during the interwar period the state passed social laws to protect working mothers and neglected children, and reorganised its health care services aimed at protecting mothers and children. In an attempt to make these services more efficient, it tried to centralise and rationalise them, either through more effective co-ordination of private and public social assistance services under a single agency, or through more effective control of the subsidies given to private entities. The 1930s also saw a rise in subsidies to private associations engaged in social assistance. What role did upper-class ladies play in this process?
Matrons and Private Philanthropy: Social Assistance to Mothers, Children and Women
In the context described above, many women's associations, alarmed by the increase in the number of children living in a state of destitution and the number of working mothers and working women, founded homes and boarding schools to protect and assist these women and children. The women who organised these associations belonged to the porteño elite, were strongly identified with Catholicism and were the wives, daughters or sisters of major city politicians. For instance, Silvia Saavedra Lamas de Pueyrredón, the manager of the Cantinas Maternales, was the sister of Carlos Alberto Saavedra Lamas, a congressman, minister of justice and public education (1915) and minister of foreign affairs and religion (1932–8). Not only were these women related to the upper echelons of the porteño political scene, but they had also woven a dense network of connections among the various women's associations. For example, Dolores Anchorena de Elortondo, the president of the Conferencias de San Vicente de Paúl, was simultaneously a member of the executive board of the Sociedad de Beneficencia, a member of the high council of the Liga Argentina de Mujeres Católicas (Catholic Women's League of Argentina) and a member of the Cooperadoras Salesianas (Salesian Cooperators).Footnote 22 These relationships show the power wielded by the city's upper-class women in the cause of philanthropy.
Among the many women's associations, this paper focuses on the three most important ones in their respective fields. The first, the Cantinas Maternales, tackled the health and welfare of mothers; the second, the Sociedad Damas de Caridad de San Vicente de Paúl, was devoted to protecting children; and the third, the Conferencias de Señoras de San Vicente de Paúl, was engaged in helping and protecting women. These three associations, besides dealing with the most pressing problems of the time by leading programmes with high numbers of beneficiaries, were among those that received the largest government subsidies.Footnote 23
The Cantinas Maternales association and the issue of destitute mothers
The Cantinas Maternales, founded in 1915 by Julia Acevedo de Martínez de Hoz, were created as free soup kitchens ‘for any mother raising her child’ and also provided health care to children and practical childcare lessons to mothers. According to its articles, the association sought to ‘promote a healthy population, preventing diseases among mothers and their newborns through healthy food. It also has the goal of ensuring and encouraging breastfeeding, as an imperative of nature and in the interest of mothers, children and the social order.’Footnote 24
In 1916, a year after the foundation of the Cantinas Maternales, there were four canteens operating in the city of Buenos Aires. These served ‘mothers in need, regardless of marital status, on the sole condition that they breastfeed their children’.Footnote 25 In addition, that year one of the canteens began a home care service providing medical assistance for childbirth to those women attending the canteen. Over time, home care extended to all those mothers requesting the service. Besides health care, medicines, cradles and baby clothes were also handed out. In the 1920s, the Cantinas Maternales added school canteens to their premises, particularly attended by beneficiary mothers’ school-age children, who were given lunch and afternoon tea.Footnote 26 By 1929 two more mothers’ canteens had been opened, totalling six establishments, plus the four school canteens. During the 1930s two more mothers’ canteens were added, reaching a total of eight in Buenos Aires.Footnote 27 The relationship between the Cantinas association and the state health care bureaucracy was complex. On the one hand, there were attempts at cooperation between both sides, particularly in the area of mothers’ and children's nutrition. In 1922, the Protección a la Primera Infancia (Early Childhood Protection) agency of Asistencia Pública (the national public welfare body) seemed to reach an agreement with the Cantinas association to implement the canteen system at the 23 childcare establishments under the aegis of Asistencia Pública, starting with two municipal premises located in the Belgrano and La Boca neighbourhoods.Footnote 28 For unknown reasons, this project was never put into practice. Some years later, in 1928, the National Education Board asked the Cantinas association president to found and manage another six soup kitchens like those that operated in the mothers’ canteens, but under the aegis of the Board in this case. These worked for one year under the direction of Mrs Martínez de Hoz, who had to resign from her leading position due to her multiple tasks at the association.Footnote 29
However, if the welfare side of the Cantinas association enjoyed a good reputation in the eyes of the state health care lobby, the same could not be said of the provision of health care services. In 1933, León Velasco Blanco, who formed part of the social service panel of the First National Conference on Social Assistance, sponsored by Argentine President Agustín P. Justo, pointed out that the canteens, despite their excellent work,
have invaded other fields of action of social medicine, such as care of sick children and childbirth assistance. This has been detrimental to their true and mandatory activities, perhaps because of the lack of cooperation with those institutions in charge of such social medicine duties … [This] forces the institution to divert funds that it could use in order to fulfil its only goal – feeding a child-rearing mother.Footnote 30
It followed that the health care role should be played by Asistencia Pública. This view was shared by other medical professionals, such as Alberto Peralta Ramos, the director of the Instituto de Maternidad (Maternity Institute), who in 1928 said, ‘I believe that the Cantinas Maternales should in the future, while maintaining their complete autonomy, coordinate their action and work jointly with the technical services of maternity wards to mutually complement their action.’Footnote 31 The same physicians who criticised certain actions by the association also recognised that many of the social services had originally been devised by the ladies and only later adopted by state institutions. Alberto Peralta Ramos himself argued that ‘the home care service was first implemented in Buenos Aires … by the institution Cantinas Maternales … Asistencia Pública in the capital city has subsequently put into practice over the last few years this home care arrangement that we currently have.’Footnote 32 For doctors the time had come for those tasks specifically related to medical work to become the state's responsibility.
The complex relationship with the state health care system was associated with the financing of the Cantinas Maternales and the multiple activities they performed. The association was financed mostly from private sources and to a lesser extent by state contributions, subsidies which nonetheless increased significantly in the 1930s, alongside the association's growth.Footnote 33
In spite of this increase, some public health officials and legislators as well as matrons complained about the scant importance assigned by the state to the welfare activities of the Cantinas association. In 1933 León Velasco Blanco argued that ‘the tiny number of canteens currently operating across such a big city and after nearly 20 years of existence clearly shows that the [government] authorities have been indifferent to their actions and have left their maintenance to private charity’.Footnote 34 At the same time, the association authorities themselves declared in 1923 that ‘there is still a great deal to be done; we will not help the large population in Buenos Aires with only four canteens, but if this institution realised its ideal, of being … adopted by the public authorities, because of its social welfare work, its efficacy would be greater and its action more extensive’.Footnote 35 In fact, in 1927 congressman Juan B. Castro, working jointly with the Cantinas association, submitted a bill proposing to extend the reach of the association throughout both the city of Buenos Aires and the whole national territory through a pro rata increase in government subsidies, to be managed by the ladies, with the association thereby maintaining its autonomy.Footnote 36
The will to extend the services administered by the Cantinas Maternales thus stemmed both from doctors at Asistencia Pública and from the association's female managers. Some doctors felt that this should be done by rationalising the association's activities, giving higher subsidies for the welfare side but transferring the health care aspect to state entities. The ladies, however, wanted the government to give them greater subsidies, even suggesting that the state should adopt the system of the association's own institutions but leave management of the same in the hands of the association. In fact, the state significantly increased its subsidies to the Cantinas Maternales during the 1930s, thus recognising the relevance of its social work. Nevertheless, as shown in the first section of this paper, the state was also interested in becoming directly involved in this area, and it was the DNMI that took charge of the setting up of mothers’ canteens, a task that was only partially accomplished in this period due to the meagre budget allocated to this government agency.Footnote 37 Rather than mothers’ canteens, it was children's soup kitchens that were started up through Asistencia Pública in the city of Buenos Aires, and the National Education Board.Footnote 38
The Sociedad Damas de Caridad de San Vicente de Paúl and the issue of defenceless children
The Sociedad Damas de Caridad de San Vicente de Paúl, or the Damas de Caridad, as it was most commonly called, stood out as one of the first and few associations providing both support to ‘defenceless’ children without separating them from their parents, thus preventing abandonment of children, and lodging to abandoned or delinquent girls sent by various government agencies.
Maternal homes, the Damas de Caridad's major area of activity, had the purpose of giving shelter to children deprived of family support. By 1918 the organisation had five homes managed by the sisters of St Vincent de Paul. Such mothering homes fed and educated pre-school and school-age children whose parents and especially mothers worked outside home. In the words of the institution's president, parents were offered ‘a stay in a safe place, education and food for their children, leaving them the freedom to devote themselves to their daily chores and the chance to meet their children at home in the evening’.Footnote 39 Underage orphaned girls were also admitted, particularly those sent by the Patronato Nacional de Menores; these were girls over ten years old who would remain at the association until they were 22. The girls could join the ironing and sewing workshops set up at the homes. Until 1928 they were distributed among the five homes; later they were congregaged at Asilo San José, which had a capacity of approximately 120 minors.Footnote 40
The 1920s saw strong growth in the Damas de Caridad. There was an increase not in the number of homes but in the number of assisted people. After the 1930s, the figures for both started to drop slightly.Footnote 41 One plausible reason for the lower number of underage inmates could have been the rising competition from state-owned kindergartens and institutions under the aegis of the Patronato Nacional de Menores, which expanded during this period.Footnote 42
The Damas de Caridad's funds, which came from both private contributions and state subsidies, reflect these shifts. Subsidies did not vary much during this period, with the association receiving an annual average of m$n 108,000 for the 1920s, while in the 1930s the annual average was m$n 96,000. As regards private contributions, there is no information available for much of the period, although they seem to have declined in the 1930s.
Table 1. Sociedad Damas de Caridad de San Vicente de Paúl: Private Income and State Subsidies (m$n)
Sources: Damas de Caridad, Actas, 1920–40; Congreso Nacional, ‘Presupuesto anual del Diario de Sesiones’, Diario de Sesiones de la Cámara de Diputados, 2 (1920), p. 800, 8 (1934), pp. 276–84, and 2 (1937), pp. 114–21; ‘Primer Censo de Instituciones Oficiales y Privadas Protectoras de la Infancia Abandonada y Delincuente’, Infancia y Juventud, 5 (1937), pp. 69–70. Author's own compilation.
In fact, annual reports reveal the association's growing concern for generating its own resources to deal with its financial difficulties. In 1933, the president declared: ‘We believe the time has come to strengthen the work at our homes’ workshops and to extend our social assistance endeavours, for the purpose of obtaining larger revenues which, by offsetting the decline in state support, could bring us gradually closer to our aim of having our homes supported by their own resources some day.’Footnote 43 On the other hand, the annual reports also record requests for subsidy increases, which became recurrent throughout this period and rose after the crash of 1929 and the subsequent overall decrease in subsidies. These requests required a direct petition to members of the executive branch of government, particularly to the minister of foreign affairs and religion or to the president of the Budget Commission of the House of Representatives, so that they might arrange for an increase.Footnote 44
Alongside these requests, the state started controlling the association's activities and resources, especially in the 1930s. By way of example, in 1937 the association's reports showed that the budget law authorised the executive branch ‘to suspend the subsidies voted through by the Argentine Congress for institutions that do not supply free assistance to individuals, and also for any subsidised entity that fails to place a visible sign stating “Subsidised by the National Government”.’ The president of the Damas de Caridad decided not to place such a sign for the time being, claiming that the subsidy received from the government was very far from covering the association's expenses.Footnote 45 The Damas de Caridad perceived such requirements as government meddling in issues whose management ultimately concerned only the association, as it was only partially subsidised by the government.
Apart from these attempts to control the association's activities, the relationship between the government and the Damas de Caridad was quite harmonious. There was an interesting change in the role played by the Damas de Caridad, who gradually became providers of social welfare services for the government, receiving money for each minor admitted by the association under the Agote Law. On the association's balance sheets there were state contributions which, unlike subsidies – that is, long- and indefinite-term state transfers – were given in consideration of the services provided by the association. In fact, back in 1920 the association had agreed to house delinquent or abandoned minors, particularly girls, given the special lack of state institutions for them, making it the first private entity to offer this service.Footnote 46 That year the government offered the association 30 bursaries of m$n 25 a month from the funds that the National Congress had approved for this purpose. In turn, two members of the association were appointed honorary inspectors to monitor some minors set free and left to the care of their own families. During their inspections they seized the opportunity to ‘improve the morals’ of one of the households, making the minor's parents as well as one of her sisters get married.Footnote 47 After 1931, when the Patronato Nacional de Menores was reorganised, the association started to receive an increasing number of minors and more money for its services. In 1931 maternal home no. 5 housed ‘50 orphaned girls sent by the Patronato Nacional de Menores, with which an agreement has been entered into’.Footnote 48 In 1936 the Patronato Nacional de Menores accepted the Damas de Caridad's request to extend the agreement with the institution, increasing the number of scholarships from 80 to 100 for a ten-year period.Footnote 49
In fact, various social and governmental players sought advice from the Damas de Caridad on how to deal with the problem of vulnerable and needy children. In 1933, upon the organisation of the First National Conference on Abandoned and Delinquent Children under the auspices and with the attendance of Argentine President Agustín P. Justo and his cabinet, with Jorge Coll (who was the head of the Patronato Nacional de Menores and later minister of public instruction, and the husband of María Martel de Coll, a managing member of the association) as president, the Damas de Caridad were invited to discuss the topic. They sent María Martel de Coll as their representative, who focused on the problem of minors’ reintegration into society after staying at the homes.Footnote 50
The Damas de Caridad even consented to the centralisation of the system of social assistance – one of the major subjects of debate and demands by the state health care lobby – for instance through their participation in the creation of a ‘general file of individuals dependent on the Nation's social work’, always labelling any petitions in this sense as highly commendable.Footnote 51 In 1933, following the Conference on Abandoned and Delinquent Children, the Patronato Nacional de Menores, following a request by the executive branch, undertook the First Census of Public and Private Entities Protecting Abandoned and Delinquent Children, which published the data provided by, among others, the Damas de Caridad, on the kind of public and private resources they obtained, the number of people assisted and the institution's expenses.Footnote 52 This cooperation between the government and the Damas de Caridad is even more remarkable if one takes into account that the Sociedad de Beneficencia refused to deliver such data.
In fact, the crucial assistance given by private associations in implementing Law No. 10,903 was recognised by a number of specialists in child welfare. José Paz Anchorena, a legal specialist in the subject and a member of the Patronato de la Infancia, pointed out in 1931 the significance of private associations, arguing that ‘with their establishments, they contribute to the achievement of the goals sought by the law, because if purely official action had been taken into account, the law would have failed’.Footnote 53 He added that it was necessary to centralise public and private institutions into a single agency in order to render legislation effective. Both public and private institutions were useful and had to cooperate. In the division of tasks,
public entities mainly have inflexibility, severity, so they are highly useful as day camps for rebellious minors, who need almost military discipline. We will leave the private entities, less costly and less rigid in this sense, for those abandoned minors who are simply undisciplined. In this sense, both are necessary because in some cases it is pointless to make the state bear the cost of a minor who can be perfectly well accommodated in a private institute.Footnote 54
Clearly, the Damas de Caridad took advantage of the institutional void that emerged after the enactment of the Agote Law, particularly as regards female minors, thereby expanding the organisation's activity and working in parallel, although in close association, with the state. Accordingly, in view of the state's need for places to house these minors, the association became the practical counterpart of social legislation concerning children, with the consequent saving of the costs involved in maintaining this kind of institution.
As to the view of the Damas de Caridad on their social programmes, they saw themselves as performing both a material and, perhaps more importantly, a moral task. In 1924, the president of the association said that social undertakings ‘in their double material and moral aspect manage to cover a large part of the wide range of human support that the state leaves to private endeavour, even though it had previously stimulated it with its own resources. They correspond completely to the lofty Christian aims that inspire them.’Footnote 55
One moral activity par excellence was the attempt to reconstitute families based on an ideal model of the nuclear family, performing marriages, baptisms and communions. The maternal homes were strongly oriented towards prevention. From the Damas de Caridad's perspective, the homes delivered a unique benefit: they ensured that families stayed together, preventing the consequences that children would have suffered in case of family separation or absence. According to the president of the association, ‘there are poor families and there are mothers who are forced to earn their children's bread, and lacking enough time, they are forced to neglect them … It is to make up for this lack of early education by families that the homes have been founded.’Footnote 56 Whenever the situation so required, the Damas de Caridad also housed in their institutions abandoned and delinquent children, adding their efforts to those being made by the state in this field.
It was precisely in this moral mission that the association's ladies found the most significant rationale for their work. The moral space that the state accorded the Damas de Caridad was, according to their president, the ideal space in which they could realise their vision. Here lies the division of tasks shared by the ladies and the state. In their capacity as the nation's moral guarantors, the ladies had to work separately from the state, but with the same goal – that of achieving social peace and order.
The Conferencias de Señoras de San Vicente de Paúl and the protection of women
The social work carried out by the Conferencias de Señoras de San Vicente de Paúl, known as the Damas Vicentinas, was very wide-ranging, including both house calls, when they would take food and clothing vouchers and hand out Catholic literature to working families, and large-scale endeavours devoted to social welfare, a task at which they excelled and for which they received large sums of money both from the state and from individuals. Some enterprises are worth mentioning in this regard, such as the Casa de Santa Felicitas (1905); Colonia Obrera (1910), which provided low-rent houses in Nueva Pompeya for working families; the Asilos para Viudas (Widows’ Home), set up in 1909; the Instituto Profesional de Economía Doméstica (Professional Institute of Domestic Economy), also established in 1909, which taught first aid, cooking and hygiene; and the Asilo Nocturno de Mujeres (Women's Night Shelter), set up in 1918 for poor women with children. All these institutions were managed and financed by the General Council.Footnote 57
The leaders of the Damas Vicentinas saw their social undertakings in the following terms, as rendering various social services to the ‘needy classes’:
At Colonia Obrera they provide a home, at the Asilo in Villa Devoto they educate their daughters from the most tender age, at Santa Felicitas they complete this education from an occupational point of view and they offer a hospitable family environment to the young women … that lack it, through the workers’ kitchens they provide healthy nutrition and at a really low price … to industrial neighbourhood workers.Footnote 58
This shows the preventive understanding that the Damas Vicentinas had of social welfare, viewed as material and moral support for the poorest classes and especially women. The association's moralising action is clearly demonstrated through the operation of the Casa de Santa Felicitas, which due to its size also gives an idea of the association's work. This institution's goal was to build ‘a home for young working women to supplement the enterprise in Villa Devoto, providing a job and home to women from early on when they start out on life's struggle’.Footnote 59 At the home there were large-scale laundry and ironing workshops where women worked to be able to afford some of their living expenses. The rest of the salary was saved, so that workers could accumulate a small amount of capital and in the process become familiar with the habit of budgeting and saving. In turn, there was also teaching, mostly in areas related to domestic life. The steam from the modern electric laundry where many of these women worked was even used to help prepare meals for the workers’ soup kitchen. Alongside these female workers, there was a hostel for young female employees or teachers, who paid rent in return for accommodation and meals.Footnote 60 Thus the General Council turned the home into the centrepiece of the association's social welfare services, concentrating them in one facility to ensure they were interconnected and additionally, the annual reports show, to reduce costs by making each enterprise bear the relevant portion of the overheads.Footnote 61
The Damas Vicentinas stressed the idea of work as a method for moral regeneration. They felt that certain types of jobs, such as the sewing, embroidery and knitting workshops, would divert some women from factories and from prostitution, imbuing them in turn with values such as discipline and a work ethic. Typically these jobs were considered short-term, until the young women could get married and quit such trades. Where this was not possible, the association offered its inmates some kind of training in order to ensure they could lead ‘a decent life’ in the future. Thus, as Marcela Nari notes, ‘economic independence was perceived as a safeguard for female morals’.Footnote 62
All the social programmes managed by the General Council maintained a comparable level of performance during the 1920s and 1930s, except for the Cocina Obrera (Workers’ Kitchen), whose level of assistance dropped markedly. By contrast, the number of beneficiaries of the Asilo in Villa Devoto and the Casa de Santa Felicitas increased during the 1930s.
Table 2. Annual Average of Lunchtime Meals at Cocina Obrera and Monthly Average of People Assisted at the Other Institutions Dependent on the General Council of the Conferencias de Señoras de San Vicente de Paúl, 1920–1940
* Number of people/lunchtime meals per year.
** Monthly average number of people assisted. This measurement is valid for all the Council's institutions.
Source: Memorias anuales del Consejo General de las Señoras de San Vicente de Paúl, 1920–40. Author's own compilation.
As regards the association's general income, in the 1920s the Damas Vicentinas received an average of m$n 378,264 per year from private sources and an average of m$n 327,066 per year from state subsidies, with state contributions accounting for 46 per cent of the association's total income. In the 1930s the average income from private sources was m$n 292,206 per year, while the average sum of state subsidies was m$n 300,092, with state contributions accounting for 51 per cent of the association's total income. What this trend shows is that both state subsidies and private donations, despite year-on-year variations, reached comparable figures in absolute and relative terms for both periods, but with a certain decrease in privately generated income after the 1930s as a result of the 1929 crash and its economic impact.
Table 3. General Council of the Conferencias de Señoras de San Vicente de Paúl: State Subsidies and Private Income, 1920–1940 (m$n)
Source: Memorias anuales del Consejo General de las Conferencias de Señoras de San Vicente de Paúl, 1920–40; Congreso Nacional, ‘Presupuesto anual del Diario de Sesiones’, Diario de Sesiones de la Cámara de Diputados, 2 (1920), p. 800, 6 (1933), p. 459, 8 (1934), pp. 276–84, and 2 (1937), pp. 114–21. Author's own compilation.
A breakdown and analysis of the trends in the association's private sources of income for the whole period shows the importance of the profits derived from the workshops, lodgings and rentals, given the alarming decrease in member enrolments in the 1930s and the continuous ups and downs in private donations.
Table 4. General Council of the Conferencias de Señoras de San Vicente de Paúl: Private Income (m$n)
Source: Memorias anuales del Consejo General de las Conferencias de Señoras de San Vicente de Paúl, 1920–40. Author's own compilation.
It is evident the Damas Vicentinas were funded less by private contributions and more by self-generated income. This brought the association closer to the ideal of partial self-sufficiency, expressed in the statement that ‘in the St Vincent enterprise private initiative stands first, the state's action comes afterwards with a subsidiary role’.Footnote 63 Just as at the level of general income the association felt a primary duty to support its institutions from private sources, with state subsidies as a secondary contribution, so it applied this same idea to the justification of its social work. The Damas Vicentinas, like the Damas de Caridad, felt their role to be supplementary to state action. The cooperation they advocated was based on the understanding that charity work should lie in the hands of non-profit associations and not of the state. The ladies argued that
The church and the state constitute two essentially independent communities … [J]ust as humankind is divided into two sexes, each of which has its own duties and rights which, together, accomplish the whole of human endeavour, so too the church and the state form a great opposition, united and separated at the same time. The state in general is the manly expression of humankind (the nation), man with his self-awareness, strong will, potent action; the church, in general, represents humankind with faith, the pious woman devoted to God, who acts morally.Footnote 64
Thus, the Damas Vicentinas found that they could ‘cooperate with and complement state action’, as their institutions were ‘not only manifestations of religious morality, but also high exponents of civic spirit’. They further claimed that because the state viewed the association in the same way, it had chosen to finance the social work done by the association. State authorities had ‘managed, without the enormous expense of the huge administrative body that such roles entail, to accomplish the paternal mission that is today assigned to the state with respect to the deprived classes’. Thus, the Damas Vicentinas had ‘been able to spare them [the state authorities] the assembly of the colossal bureaucratic machine that in other countries is a requirement and an inescapable consequence of the existence of official charity’.Footnote 65
Various social actors acknowledged the significant role of this type of association, given the shortage of public institutions performing these tasks. The statement drafted by Panel XII of the First National Conference on Social Assistance held in 1933, presided over by Monseñor de Andrea and in charge of analysing, among other issues, the question of women's moral protection, acknowledged that this was ‘a social problem that public authorities have not yet addressed’. The panel suggested that this problem should be dealt with through the ‘few existing laws’ and the experience of private associations, ‘a joint action [that] will enable the nation to reap the maximum benefit with the least expense and effort’.Footnote 66 According to the draft statement, it was the responsibility of public authorities, among other things, ‘to officially acknowledge the associations devoted to this noble moral mission, granting them power to act whenever required’. They also had the duty to ‘raise the necessary funds to build protection homes and moral uplift homes, and to support them’. This was virtually a duty of the state, since these associations pursued the goal of keeping women ‘physically and morally healthy for society’. Private associations were to be responsible for ‘founding, leading and managing protection or preventive homes and moral enhancement homes’.Footnote 67
Like the Damas de Caridad, the Damas Vicentinas constructed a representation of themselves as protective mothers of the nation by applying the notion of a feminised church role. This was what the association ladies could offer to society: by being the maternal face of the state, they were able not only to spare the state the cost of setting up lumbering bureaucratic agencies, but also to provide a moral message through their social work.
Matrons and social policy: by way of epilogue
It could be concluded that the three associations analysed here were strongly identified with Catholicism and that it was religious principle that guided these women's actions, although it was a principle which was also justified on civic and patriotic grounds. The women sponsored different social programmes, for while the Cantinas Maternales association played an important role both in health care and in social assistance, the Damas de Caridad devoted themselves to assisting defenceless children, whereas the Damas Vicentinas dealt mostly with the moral protection of women.
In terms of gender roles, these associations all promoted an ideal of domesticity, either by encouraging breastfeeding and imparting the basics of childcare, thus reinforcing the mother–child dyad, as in the case of the Cantinas Maternales, or by strengthening the ideal of the family, as in the cases of the Damas de Caridad and the Damas Vicentinas, who ensured that the women they served would become future good mothers and wives. Their programmes tended to carry a moralising message for these women. Both the Damas de Caridad and the Damas Vicentinas tended to normalise social situations through their house calls, performing marriages, baptisms and communions. However, they were also pragmatic and adapted their vision to the realities they encountered in order to prevent even worse scenarios. For example, whenever the Damas de Caridad encountered cases where mothers were forced to work and therefore neglect their homes, they created places for these women's children, trying to avoid what they considered a worse fate for these minors. The Damas Vicentinas accepted the fact that some women had to work for wages to be able to support themselves or their families and thus set up lodgings for these young women.
With regards to financing, the associations continued being subsidised during the period in question, and the subsidies remained at comparable levels both in the 1920s and in the 1930s. There was even an increase in the amount of money that the state granted to some of these associations in the 1930s. While the Cantinas Maternales saw an increase in subsidies, the Damas de Caridad started receiving money in return for specific social programmes dealing with the problem of abandoned children. Following the 1929 crash, funding became tight and the attempted solution was self-generation of private income. Both the Damas de Caridad and the Damas Vicentinas associations founded boarding houses and workshops that could ensure a continuous income stream to offset the variations in private donations, which helped the associations support themselves despite the economic crisis and its impact.
It is interesting that the Damas de Caridad and the Damas Vicentinas, which exist to this day, kept on acting in the field of social wealfare during the Peronist governments, even though the national government cut off their subsidies, which forced them to adjust their finances and the social tasks they undertook.Footnote 68 Social policy under Peronism, apart from extending social benefits to the whole population, continued to use private money to implement social plans. The most relevant entity was the Fundación Eva Perón (Eva Perón Foundation, FEP), a private institution heavily supported by state subsidies, which covered the needs of unprotected women and children through halfway houses and the Casa de la Empleada for women and boarding schools for children – the very same social groups to which the matrons had been devoting themselves.Footnote 69
During the period covered here, the state adopted two different strategies concerning social policy. On the one hand, it entrusted voluntary associations with the implementation of welfare programmes for mothers, children and working women and continued financing them, especially in the 1930s, even when the loudest calls were made for more efficiency in health care and social welfare. This shows that the state still saw validity and value in the moral role claimed by the ladies from the various associations. Similarly, while upper-class women could attract or generate private funds for their programmes, either through donations or through their own resources, the state had no real incentive to replace their work, and sought only to exert greater control on the application of subsidies that it gave them.
On the other hand, the state started to get directly involved in some areas, particularly those related to the health and hygiene of mothers and children from the poorest classes, and abandoned and delinquent children. Overall there was a trend towards health care becoming progressively dominated by the higienistas, who from the 1920s and especially in the 1930s advocated direct intervention by the state in this area through the creation of public institutions. Given the sluggishness and cost of the state bureaucratic structure, however, private associations actually implemented many of the bills passed during this period. It was in this field that women's associational activity blossomed, such as in the areas of mothers’ canteens and the guardianship of abandoned and delinquent children.
Finally, as regards the upper-class women's discourse, these associations based their activity on the notion that non-proit associations subsidised by governmental authorities constituted a different body, separate from the state, which nonetheless could be represented as the mothering face of the state. Having become the protective mothers of the nation and the state's moral face, these matrons could justify their social role in society, helping poor and needy women and minors with moral and material support, as well as helping the state to avoid becoming a ‘colossal bureaucratic machine’.
Conclusion
By using a maternalistic discourse, women's associations exerted a significant influence on the definition of mothers’ and children's needs and on the design of various programmes to meet those needs. Their justification for action centred on their beneficiaries’ need for moral guidance – as defined by the associations. This implied not only a moral reform of the character of the working women, mothers and children these associations helped. Such a notion also resulted in selectivity in the apportioning of welfare aid and in the requirements for receiving it, quite counter to the idea of assistance as a social right. While elite women played a decisive role in the gestation and implementation of such programmes, most poor women and children actually depended on social assistance to cover their needs. Thus, social welfare became a space where women were the main protagonists, both as the agents and the targets of social policy.
These social programmes and their underlying philosophy had a major influence on the process by which a social state in Buenos Aires emerged during the interwar period. At a very direct level, certain social programmes run by the associations – such as mothers’ canteens, school canteens and house calls – proved to be spaces where proto-social policies were tested, later to be adopted by the state, acting alongside the associations. In most cases, however, women's associations required greater commitment by the state to the welfare of certain social groups in the form of a subsidy policy, and the state continued promoting social programmes managed by the matrons through financial transfer. That was the case with homes for abandoned or delinquent minors, homes for minors whose mothers had to work and homes for working women, all of which were meeting a demand the state could not handle. Without the help of private associations, many of the proposed or enacted social policies could not have materialised. In this sense, the associations contributed to the practical implementation of social legislation, thereby playing an important role in the emergence of a social state. However, even though the programmes managed by these high-society ladies provided benefits to the needy that had previously not existed or had been very partial, it is arguable that overall they had the effect of actually slowing down the development of direct state involvement in social welfare issues. In other words, the alliance between the state and private associations simultaneously widened the scope of social benefits but limited their democratisation, in the sense of universal access or entitlements.
This becomes more evident when Argentina is compared with the cases of Uruguay and Chile. Unlike these two countries, Argentina maintained a more structured and longer-term alliance between the state and private association matrons. Christine Ehrick has argued that Uruguayan upper-class women, while playing a similar role to that of their Argentine counterparts, retained less and shorter-term power than the latter. In a relatively brief period between 1910 and 1930, elite women moved from playing an important quasi-official role, leading publicly funded private organisations, to becoming marginalised from social assistance structures. This was precisely due to the parallel development of a welfare state that rendered their roles obsolete: they also lost the support of the elite and, consequently, private donations, became totally dependent on state subsidies and were finally replaced by women who were professionally trained by the state.Footnote 70 As pointed out in the historiography, ultimately the relative historical weakness of the Uruguayan social and political elite in relation with its Argentine counterpart contributed to the birth of the Batllista state and of early welfare policies.Footnote 71 Something similar happened in the case of Chile, where transition to a social assistance and social security system was the result of early social welfare policy, particularly through the creation of the Caja de Seguro Obligatorio (Compulsory Insurance Fund, CSO) in 1924. As Karin Rosemblatt notes, this policy was emphasised during the Frente Popular (Popular Front) period (1938–52), when state intervention provided a counter-balance to the power of the Chilean elite, eliminated the charitable help provided to the poor by wealthy ladies, which was considered paternalistic, and promoted and extended a public social welfare system based on female social workers.Footnote 72
In the Argentine case, the development of a social state depended largely on private associations. Porteño elite ladies, thanks to their economic as well as social power and to their consequent alliance with the state, played a key role in the design and realisation of social-welfare policies, as opposed to their Uruguayan and Chilean counterparts, who were unable to maintain such a role. Historiography on the birth of social policy in Argentina has tended to focus on the interventionist role that the state started to play in the 1930s, mainly through studies of social legislation. However, this paper has argued that such studies have overlooked the persistent overlap between public efforts and private philanthropy in the generation and, most of all, implementation of these social policies, an overlap that allows us to better understand the very particular nature of the welfare regime that developed in Argentina through the middle of the twentieth century.
