Universal family allowance, now known as child benefit and no longer universal, was paid for the first time 70 years ago today. It was primarily the work of Eleanor Rathbone.

When suffrage was won, many who had fought hard for it left the movement to pursue the careers they had previously been denied. But for Rathbone, suffrage was a preliminary goal in the quest to change the situation and status of “the sweated woman worker, the unhappily married wife, and the poor law widow”.

She was from a wealthy and unusual ship-owning family in Liverpool, which had earlier refused to transport slaves. Her father had sought Florence Nightingale’s advice to improve healthcare in the workhouse, and in the process of carrying out her instructions had founded district nursing.

Eleanor Rathbone continued in this tradition: she campaigned for money for war widows, against slum housing and the casualisation of dock labour; she helped Spanish refugees who had fought Franco and Jews escaping Hitler. Few social justice issues escaped her concern and that of her lifelong companion and supporter, Scottish social worker Elizabeth Macadam.

As a feminist, Rathbone’s first commitment was to working-class housewives overlooked because their work of reproducing the human race brought neither recognition nor reward. In 1918, her family endowment committee published Equal Pay and the Family: a proposal for the national endowment of motherhood. It argued for the introduction of family allowances to give mothers financial independence and a route to pay equity. Men, considered the head of the household, were entitled to a family wage. The wife’s dependence justified lower pay for any woman who went out to work. Once mothers had money of their own, the committee argued, all women’s status and power would rise, both within the family and outside.

In 1924, Rathbone made the full case for the endowment of motherhood in The Disinherited Family: “Nothing can justify the subordination of one group of producers – the mothers – to the rest, and their deprivation of all share of their own in the wealth of a community which depends on them for its very existence.”

Some prominent women in the Labour party and the unions, with the exception of the miners’ union, were opposed, while Labour’s women’s sections and the Co-operative Women’s Guild – working-class housewives, some of whom also had waged jobs – were passionately in favour.

Rathbone’s ally Maude Royden, of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, said: “Our object will not be to enable mothers to earn their living, but to ensure that, since they have earned it, they should get it … The one really fundamental difference between men and women is (again) a ‘difference’, it is certainly not an inferiority. For women to try to reduce it to a trifle when it is really so great a thing is an acceptance of masculine standards too dishonouring and too artificial to endure.”

In 1929 Rathbone, now an independent MP, took her campaign to parliament. She convinced Lord Beveridge, on whose 1942 report the postwar welfare state was based, to recognise the work of the housewife with “family allowances in cash”. He later commented that it was “a new idea” that “part of the total national income … should be assigned to those individual citizens who were undertaking the rearing of the citizens of the future”. It became the first measure of the welfare state. Rathbone was disappointed. The small amount, paid only for the second and subsequent children, denied mothers the independence they’d earned.

When Edward Heath, in 1972, tried to incorporate family allowance into the father’s wage, the Wages for Housework campaign pulled a national network together to prevent it happening. Women everywhere referred to it as “the only money I can call my own”. It was sometimes the frontline against rape in marriage and husbands who spent housekeeping money in the pub – women could take the children to their mother’s once they had a family allowance book to feed them so they weren’t such a drain on her slender resources. It also fed the children when the father was on strike.

We don’t know how many women keep their dignity intact with what is now called child benefit, but the principle remains: if you are a carer (of children or others) you are entitled to financial recognition by society for that fundamental work and it is the height of sexism to be rewarded with poverty and dependence.

Unwaged carers alone save the state £132bn a year – the cost of a second NHS in England. A basic income is now widely discussed. If we can consider paying people who are not working, surely we can pay mothers and other carers, women and men, a living wage for the work they do.

Rathbone has been neglected since, and much of feminism has been reduced to breaking the glass ceiling. But caring and carers have not gone away, and Eleanor is an inspiration for all of us campaigning for a more humane society.