Historical Connotation of Dependency

• Examining the historical connotations of "dependency" is crucial to understanding the stereotype's force and how to challenge it.

Registers of Meaning

• The verb "to depend" originally meant one thing hanging from another.
• Currently, dependency has four registers: economic, sociolegal, political, and moral/psychological.
• Economic dependency involves reliance on others for resources.
• Sociolegal dependency refers to legal or public identity, like marital coverture.
• Political dependency is subjection to an external power, typical of non-citizen residents.
• Moral/psychological dependency is a character trait, such as lacking willpower.
• These registers provide a matrix for tracing the historical changes in the understanding of dependency.
• The shift goes from patriarchal preindustrial society in which women and many men shared a common dependency to a modern, industrial, male-supremacist society.
• This then constructed a specifically feminine sense of dependency.
• Currently it is giving way to a postindustrial understanding where many women claim independence while a stigmatized dependency is attached to "deviant" groups.
• Racializing practices and changes in social organization play a role in these shifts.

Preindustrial Dependency

• In preindustrial times, dependency primarily meant subordination.
• Economic and sociolegal registers were undifferentiated, reflecting societal hierarchy.
• The moral/psychological register was almost nonexistent.
• The earliest definition of "dependent" in the OED is "to be subordinate".
• A dependent was someone relying on another for support or position, a subordinate or servant.
• A dependency was either a group of servants or a foreign territory/colony.
• The term applied broadly in a hierarchical context, where everyone was subordinate to someone without stigma.
• "Independence" applied to aggregate entities like nations or churches in the 17th century.
• By the 18th century, independence meant owning enough to live without labor.
• To be dependent meant gaining one's livelihood by working for someone else.
• Dependency was normal, a social relation without moral disapproval.
• Preindustrial definitions implied trust and reliance.
• Dependency meant legal cover-ture and status inferiority, being part of a unit headed by someone else.
• All members of a household other than its head were dependents.
• Dependency had political consequences, existing in a social order of subjection, not citizenship.
• Independence connoted privilege, like freedom from labor.
• Property ownership was a prerequisite for political rights.
• When dependents claimed rights, they became revolutionaries.
• Women's dependency was like being on a lower social rung.
• There was no implication of unilateral economic dependency for agrarian families, women's and children's labor was recognized as essential.
• Dependency in preindustrial society was less gender-specific, similar for subordinate men, children, servants, and the elderly.
• Preindustrial arrangements often failed to provide for the poor.
• England's Poor Law of 1601 aimed to return the vagrant poor to their traditional dependencies.
• Dependency faced challenges in the 17th century with liberal-individualist politics.
• "Dependence" and "independence" were central in political debates, like the Putney Debates.
• The "independence" of "out-of-doors" servants was a figure of disorder, contrasting with the "dependence" of "welfare mothers" today.

Industrial Dependency

• With industrial capitalism, dependency's meaning shifted.
• Independence, not dependence, was central in economic discourse.
• What was normal became deviant and stigmatized.
• Intensified gender differences led to specifically feminine forms of dependency.
• Racial constructions deemed dependency appropriate for the "dark races."
• The unity of dependency fractured, becoming sociolegal, political, and economic.
• Dependency could designate an individual character trait.
• Roderick McDonald elaborated a new positive image of individual independence.
• Depending on a master was like depending on false gods.
• Status hierarchies were not natural or just.
• Rejection of dependence on a master was rejecting false gods.
• Political and sociolegal subjection were offenses against human dignity, and defensible only under specific conditions.
• Throughout the industrial era, these beliefs informed social movements including abolitionism and labor organizing.
• Abolition of slavery and some gender inequalities were won by these movements.
• Developing new notions of citizenship rested on independence; dependency was deemed incompatible with citizenship.
• Independence was tied to wage labor.
• Workers claimed a new form of independence within wage labor.
• The victorious wage labor system was reclaimed by workers.
• Independence encompassed the ideal of the family wage, where men earn enough to support a dependent wife and children.
• Economic independence expanded to include a form of wage-based property ownership unlike self-employment.
• As wage labor became definitive of independence, those excluded from it personified dependency.
• "The pauper," "the colonial native/slave," and "the housewife" emerged as the principal icons of industrial dependency.

Icons of Industrial Dependency

• The first icon was "the pauper," relying on poor relief instead of wages.
• Paupers were seen as degraded and lacking character due to reliance on charity.
• Pauperism was related to economic conditions and character defects.
• The pauper's dependency was seen as unilateral, not reciprocal, and outside the system of productive labor.
• The second icon was "the colonial native" and "the slave”.
• They were inside the economic system, but personified political subjection.
• Their images became intertwined with justifications for colonialism and slavery.
• Dependency shifted from a relation of subjection to an inherent character trait.
• Colonials were conquered because they were dependent.
• The dependency of natives and slaves justified colonization and enslavement.
• The dependency of the native and the slave was elaborated largely in the moral/psychological register.
• The traits justifying imperialism and slavery arose from the supposed nature of human groups.
• Racism transformed dependency as political subjection into dependency as psychology.

The Housewife

• The native and slave, like the pauper, were excluded from labor.
• White workingman presupposed the family wage, supporting a nonemployed wife and children.
• White female economic dependency was required for white male independence.
• Women transformed "from producers to consumers".
• The family wage held greater sway among whites than blacks.
• Families depended on the labor of women and children since few husbands could support a family.
• The family wage norm commanded loyalty, especially within the organized working class.
• Different registers of dependency converged in the figure of the housewife.
• This figure combined traditional sociolegal and political dependency with economic dependency in the industrial order.
• Continuing from preindustrial usage was the assumption that fathers headed households.
• The legal doctrine of coverture codified this.
• Sociolegal and political dependency of wives enforced economic dependency.
• Married women wage workers could not legally control their wages under coverture.
• White women remained politically dependent while men gained rights.
• Coverture was feminized, stimulating agitation and dismantling it.
• New personifications of dependency combined to form the underside of the workingman ideal.
• Those aspiring to full membership in society had to distinguish themselves from the pauper, the native, and the housewife to construct their independence.
• The ideal of the family wage was a vehicle for elaborating meanings of dependency and independence.
• These meanings were deeply inflected by gender, race, and class.
• The White workingmen redefined economic independence, but their independence was both real and ideological.
• Few actually earned enough to support a family, and most depended on women and children but the hierarchy between peasant and landlord was mystified in relation with the operative to factory owner.
• The white workingman's economic dependency was spun by linguistic sleight of hand.
• Economic inequality among whites did not create dependency.
• Now, sociolegal and political hierarchy was separated from economic hierarchy, and the former seemed incompatible with hegemonic views of society.
• It followed that only moral or psychological dependency would remain after sociolegal and political dependency disappeared.

American Welfare Dependency: 1890-1939

• A welfare-related use of dependency developed in the United States.
• Originating in the late 19th-century discourse of pauperism, it was modified in the Progressive Era and stabilized in the New Deal.
• This use was ambiguous, shifting from an economic to a moral/psychological meaning.
• The United States was especially receptive to elaborating dependency as a character defect.
• The absence of a feudal legacy and its reciprocal obligations meant the pejorative meanings of dependency were stronger.
• The American Revolution emphasized independence, stripping dependency of voluntarism and imbuing it with stigma.
• The result was to change how people viewed women's social and dependent roles and made them seem distasteful.
• American's love affair with independence was double-edged.
• Absence of a social tradition facilitated hostility to public support.
• The American state was comparatively decentralized which proved fertile for a psychological discourse of dependency.
• Non-wage-earning was the most general definition of dependency.
• "Good," household dependency was predicated of children and wives.
• "Bad" charity dependency was predicated of recipients of relief.
• Both senses involved the family wage but would eventually get put into national language.
• Reformers in the 1890s introduced "dependency" as a substitute for "pauper" to destigmatize help.
• After World War I, "dependency" replaced "pauperism", it became the hegemonic word for a recipient of aid.
• A two-track welfare system intensified the dishonor of seeking help.
• Experts worried that relief created "habits of dependence" or an attitude of entitlement.
• The Depression saw a slight improvement, though chiseling and corruption continued to embarrass public assistance and many welfare beneficiaries took public aid only with great hesitation because of its stigma.
• First-track programs like unemployment were offered without stigma but excluded minorities and white women.
• Second-track programs (ADC/AFDC) continued searching out the deserving among the needy.
• Funded from general tax revenues, these programs gave the appearance that recipients were getting something for nothing.
• Different conditions were established for receiving first-track and second-track programs like low stipends/morals-testing.
• Racial and sexual exclusions of the first tier were designed to keep blacks dependent in other ways.
• The Social Security Board promoted Social Security Old Age Insurance as more dignified than public assistance, and stigmatized public assistance.
• The result was to differentiate conditions for receiving assistance and making them racially motivated.
• Constructed politically were underlying assumptions where the provision of welfare created dependency.
• Programs of public provision shore up some dependencies and subvert others.
• Public assistance programs enforce the dependence of the poor on low-wage labor and of children on their parents.
• The conditions of second-track assistance made dependence on public assistance inferior to wage labor.
• Wage labor was so naturalized that its inherent supervision could be ignored.
• ADC designers intended mothers to depend on a male breadwinner.