As a mother with young children, and as an academic who works almost exclusively from my home, I was especially eager to read Forced Labor. The book documents the steady progression of the status of the family in the U.S. economy through the twentieth century, from an economic and cultural regime in which a single breadwinner could support his family on a single income (with mother at home)—the so-called “family wage economy”—to the current condition in which most mothers of families work outside the home, frequently forced to do so by anti-family tax and wage policies that render it impossible for a single earner to support his family.

Though Robertson concludes that a complete return to the family wage economy of the early twentieth century is unattainable today, he offers his own recipe for restoring economic and cultural justice to the traditional family. He argues so on the grounds that there is no “neutral” family policy (tax-wise or otherwise); policy either supports the family or it does not. If it does not, then it supports whatever is not the traditional family; namely, individuals, couples without children, and mothers with illegitimate children. Since the traditional family is the only place where stable, well-formed citizens can be reliably and consistently brought-up, Robertson argues, and since there is no such thing as policy neutral to family form, policy ought to favor and support the traditional family form consisting of father/breadwinner, mother/homemaker, and children.

Robertson’s proposals for restoring the family to economic and cultural respect are familiar and include: ending discrimination in the tax code against married couples and families; eliminating “no-fault” divorce; reforming the welfare system so that illegitimacy is not encouraged; protecting the “domestic economy” from invasion by ending undue governmental regulation of home education and child-rearing; and encouraging zoning-law reform to allow for more work-at-home options for mothers.

Although he recognizes that the change is politically impossible, Robertson would additionally favor deleting “sex” from the language of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, thereby making it possible for employers to pay family-supporting men more than they pay single men or women. (The word sex had been added originally in a desperate attempt by some southern Democrats to sink the legislation.) It is not clear, however, that this move would advance the interests of the family, since employers would then have an incentive to hire single women and unattached men, making it even more difficult for family-supporting men to procure a job.

An interesting undercurrent in the text is the tension between Robertson’s respect for the free market and his recognition that the protection of traditional families requires governmental regulation of the market that might offend some laissez-faire conservatives. The family-wage economy of the early twentieth century was originally made possible only through the protective legislative machinery promoted by women’s groups, who wished to shelter women and children from work outside the home and from neglect in the case of deceased or disabled husbands. This legislative machinery included so-called “women’s pensions” at the state and federal levels—subsidies paid by the government to women with children whose husbands were unable to support them (at the time, exclusively available to married women)—and the creation of federal bureaus such as the Children’s Bureau, the Women’s Bureau, and the Bureau of Home Economics at the Department of Agriculture.

Ironically, although this machinery was originally used to create and sustain the family wage economy, it was this same machinery—at the hands of 1960s Friedan-style feminists, equipped with the anti-maternalist arguments of post-war sociologists—that provided the mechanism for the eventual destruction of the family wage economy. Admittedly, however, Robertson’s own suggestions for reform are not similarly intrusive or burdensome.

Robertson’s description of the early feminists is fascinating. There is, for instance, his account of the Mothers’ Congress, founded in 1897, the stated aim of which was to carry “mother-love and mother-thought into all that concerns or touches childhood in the home, school, church, or state; to raise the standards of home life; to develop wiser, better-trained parenthood.” The dominant view of the radical feminists of the time was precisely opposed to the Friedan-style feminism that would later become orthodoxy: “It is because most women have not had the knowledge and training that would enable them to evolve the beautiful possibilities of home life,” stated early feminist Alice McLellan Birney, “that they have in many instances found that sphere narrow and monotonous.”

Perhaps the real puzzle of the early feminists, for anyone concerned about reclaiming culture in favor of traditional families and values, is explaining why the Mothers’ Congress initiative and a multiplicity of similar efforts ultimately failed—and this over a century ago when, arguably, culture was more receptive to their message. One suspects that although policy reform, legislative action, and social activism are all necessary, they are not sufficient, and they are liable to prove ineffective if not accompanied by deeper changes in the cultural “heart” of society.