Lament

“Lament” focuses on a mother's plight after the death of her husband, following her thought process as she tries to pick up the pieces and move forward as the head of her family. In the years leading up to when the poem was written in 1921, women were making significant progress in the fight for equality, including winning the right to vote in 1920. However, advances were not without difficulty, and a single mother would likely face significant struggles, depending on her economic status. The same year that Millay wrote “Lament,” the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Act became law and marked one of the United States’s first turns into Social Security. The act provided one million dollars every year over five years for state programs that helped women and children. The law was initially introduced in 1918 by Jeannette Rankin, who was the first woman elected to Congress, serving as a Representative for Montana. Women’s groups lobbied on it, and finally Senator Morris Shepherd of Texas and Representative Horace Mann Towner of Iowa designed the law with the intent of helping develop rural facilities and lowering high mortality rates of women and children. When it passed in 1921, it was one of the first federal programs aimed at helping women and children, and it was renewed through 1929.