Organizing Home Care: - School of Social Service Administration

Draft Paper Not for Citation or Quotation with Authors’ Permission 4/24/2007
on pay day,” who would bathe and feed an infant before thinking of picking up her own
wages. 31 Further, New Deal labor law refused to recognize the home as a workplace. Nurse
companions, homemakers, and other in-home care workers became classified as domestic
servants, thereby outside of recently enacted old age insurance, unemployment benefits,
collective bargaining, minimum wages, maximum hours, or other labor laws. 32
Nor did
employees of non-profits come under the labor law, which excluded most nurses and
health aides. The extension of women’s work for the family into the market had created
an arena easily cordoned off as impossible to regulate. 33 While most home care programs
in the post-war period would not allow clients to hire family members, some would,
further confusing the legal standing of the workforce. As state funded programs grew, so
did the fiction that the needy hired the homemaker/attendant, removing the state from the
status of employer. 34
The U.S. Children’s Bureau served as a midwife to the promotion of homemakerhousekeeper
services. Organizing private as well as state providers of what social service
professionals referred to as a “‘substitute mother’ movement,” in 1939 it formed a group
that became known as the National Committee on Homemaker Service, which attempted
to define and disseminate the standards of the occupation. 35 The Children’s Bureau
expected local entities to establish programs. Despite its push for national standards,
regional variation distinguished child and family welfare; as with so much social policy,
racism interfered with universal access and quality of services, as did dependence on the
fiscal largess of individual state and local governments. Given this divided responsibility,
where the public ended and the private began was not always apparent.