Mothers’ Pensions and the ‘Civilised’ Black Poor: The Racialised Provision of Child Maintenance Grants in South Africa, 1921–1940

This article discusses the origins and early 20th-century administration of child maintenance grants, first introduced in South Africa in 1921 as an amendment to the Children’s Protection Act of 1913 and popularly known as ‘mothers’ pensions’. The grants were patently racialised: in the 1920s, government officials administered the grants so as to exclude people categorised as ‘native’ and as ‘Asian’. This article traces how, from the late 1920s, liberal members of the self-styled ‘Child Welfare Movement’ (which had established a country-wide network of local branches after the First World War) began advocating the extension of maintenance grants to African communities. During this period, mission-educated African women were also becoming increasingly involved in questions of social welfare. From the mid 1930s, growing numbers of Child Welfare Societies, along with some sympathetic magistrates, were advocating the extension of mothers’ pensions to indigent African mothers and children. In this context, senior bureaucrats in the national departments of Native Affairs and Social Welfare sought to clarify the social responsibilities of the state towards its impoverished ‘native’ subjects. The article considers the collaboration and the escalating contestation between organisations active in child welfare, civil servants and ministers of state. The qualified extension of maintenance grants resulted in a policy of limited social assistance to impoverished African families living in towns and cities throughout South Africa. The child welfare movement and its allies were partly successful in their attempts to limit racialised application of the Children’s Protection Act from the 1940s until the late 1950s. The powerful officials in the national departments of Native Affairs and Social Welfare were fully convinced that the demands of segregation must determine how the state should intervene in questions of state social assistance and parental responsibility. In principle, they had little or no sympathy with representations that the state should provide social assistance to impoverished African mothers and African children in need of care. In 1940 – in response to pressures from the child welfare coalition – they reluctantly included the urban-based African poor as recipients of child maintenance grants. This marginal assistance took place within a social welfare system designed to protect ‘civilised’ (defined as ‘European’) labour and to complement policies of segregation. In fact, the policy revision involved continued official commitment to the gendered geography of racial segregation and delimitation of civic access to state resources that placed ‘native’ families in the reserves and on white-owned farms beyond governmental regimes of child welfare.