A History of Child Welfare

Lisa Merkel-Holguin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138518254
• eBook ISBN: 9781351315906
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

As we approach the year 2000, infant mortality rates, child placement dilemmas, and appropriate socialization of children continue to challenge the field of child welfare. It is thus especially significant to reflect on the history of child welfare. The carefully selected topics explored in this volume underscore the importance of recovering past events and themes still relevant. It is the aim of this volume to illumine current issues by a review of past struggles and problems. A History of Child Welfare offers many examples of practices that have direct import for those who struggle to support children. Who is not bothered by what seem to be increasing acts of violence by children against children? The role of hidden cruelty to children in perpetuating violence is illuminated by studying the past. Historians and social researchers have gone far in examining the family, and by implication, their revelations greatly increase society's complex responses to children over time from early assumptions that children were little more than miniature adults to the discovery of childhood as a special developmental period. At the start of this century women still did not have universal suffrage and brutal child labor was not unusual. Harsh legal codes separating the races were widespread, and those bent on improving the lot of children knew that reform meant commitment to an uphill struggle. By the end of the century, much has changed: child labor, while still present, has been outlawed in most industries, women vote and hold many high offices; and de jure racial segregation is largely a memory. Yet the state of children remains precarious, with poverty a persistent theme throughout the century. The fifteen articles in this volume cover a wide range of social conditions, public policies, and approaches to problem solving. Though history does not repeat itself precisely, problems, controversies about solutions, and certain themes do. A History of Child Welfare takes up social and economic conditions that correlate with increasing rates of child abuse and neglect, and an increasing number of children in out-of-home care. This volume distinguishes approaches that have been useful from those that have failed. In this way, these serious reflections help build on past successes and avoid previous errors.

1

CHILD WELFARE IN FICTION AND FACT

Robert H. Bremner

This article deals with the treatment of the welfare of children in fiction, particularly in nineteenth century English and American literature. Novels and stories depicting the social condition of children and exploring their psychological problems played an important role in arousing concern for children at a time when childhood was virtually without rights or protection. The works discussed are worth recalling because they reflected prevailing attitudes and practices in child care, inspired sympathy for and understanding of children, and contributed to a hostile stereotype of adult child welfare workers. The authors’ favorite remedy for children’s problems—keeping them with or getting them back to their own parents or, if that was impossible, placing them in a loving family—accords with current policy objectives that are easier to attain in fiction than in real life.

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Robert H. Bremner, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus of History, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH.

Most of the children who are the principal characters in the novels under consideration are foundlings, orphans, or half-orphans. Except in rare instances, as in Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke [1850], the surviving parent is away or too weak to exert positive influence. Dandy Mick, a 16-year-old factory worker in Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil [1845] has a bedfast mother; her friends say she is dying; he says she is only drunk. The mother of one of Mick’s friends went back to work two weeks after the boy was bom. She put him out to nurse with an old woman who provided day care and a diet of treacle (molasses syrup) and laudanum (an opium-based sedative) for three pence a week. When the mother disappeared and the money stopped coming, the nurse thrust the two-year-old boy into the streets “to ’ play’ in order to be run over.” He did not exactly thrive but of all his barefoot and half-naked playmates, he was the only one to survive. He slept on mouldering straw in a damp cellar, “a dung heap at his head, and a cesspool at his feet.” Nameless in infancy, he was christened Devildust when at age five he went to work in a textile mill [Disraeli 1845].

In Sybil, subtitled The Two Nations—the rich and the poor— Disraeli presents imaginary characters against a factual depiction of English social and industrial conditions in the 1830s and 1840s. In a passage about girls and infants working in the mines, Disraeli incorporates materials from an official Report of the Commissioner on the Employment of Young Persons and Children issued in 1842 [quoted in Coveney 1967],

Naked to the waist, an iron chain fastened to a belt of leather runs between their legs clad in canvas trousers, while on hands and feet an English girl, for twelve, sometimes for sixteen hours a day, hauls and hurries tubs of coals up subterranean roads, dark, precipitous, and plashy. [Disraeli]

“Trappers,” boys and girls four and five years old, were the first workers to enter the mines and the last to leave. Their work— opening gallery doors for coal wagons and keeping the doors closed after each wagon’s passage—was not arduous but it was performed in darkness and solitude, and was a highly responsible task because the safety of the mine and all those working in it depended on the trappers’ constancy in tending the doors.

We see the children through Disraeli’s eyes and hear them through his ears. He tells us of their long hours, rough appearance, and foul language. We share Disraeli’s alarm that the older girls are to be—and some of them already are—the mothers of England, and his wonderment at the interest mine owners take in the abolition of slavery and their obliviousness to the state of their own employees. We sympathize with the children but have to rely on the author’s comments or our own imagination to know how the children feel about their treatment and condition.

The difference between Sybil, a social novel, and autobiographical ones such as Jane Eyre [1847] and David Copperfield [1849-50] is that the latter are primarily concerned with expressing how the heroine and hero feel about the hardships and misfortunes they encounter. The books are based on Charlotte Bronte’s and Charles Dickens’ childhood experiences so that the authors and protagonists speak as one and we see the children as they see themselves. What Jane Eyre and David Copperfield feel is self-pity. They resent the injustices, not of impersonal social forces, but of specific acts of meanness, neglect, and indifference of adults who should love and care for them.

Jane Eyre, a ten-year-old orphan, is made to feel unwelcome unwanted, and unappreciated in the home of her aunt. At Lowood School, which is very much like the Clergy Daughters’ School that Charlotte Bronte attended when she was eight or nine, Jane is unfairly and undeservedly humiliated by the headmaster, Mr. Brockelhurst. Another girl tells Jane, “You and I and the rest of us are charity children”; the fees their guardians pay do not cover their expenses and have to be supplemented by charitable subscriptions. Mr. Brockelhurst, whose piety is as harsh as that of Charlotte Bronte’s clergyman father, objects to the worldliness of girls wearing braids and curls in an evangelical charitable establishment. Either out of principle or economy or out of both, food is scanty, clothing ugly, and heating minimal. “My plan in bringing up these girls,” Brockelhurst tells the matron, “is not to accustom them to habits of luxury and indulgence, but to render them hardy, patient, self-denying.” He believes that missing occasional meals will do charity girls more good than harm. “Oh madam, when you put bread and cheese, instead of burnt porridge, into these children’s mouths, you may indeed feed their vile bodies, but you little think how you starve their immortal souls” [Bronte].

“I become neglected” was the way Dickens’ favorite child, David Copperfield, describes his situation when his mother died. His stepfather and stepfather’s sister did not beat or starve him but “they disliked me; and they sullenly, sternly, steadily overlooked me . . . Day after day, week after week, month after month, I was coldly neglected.” For some children, being sent to London to work and live on their own would have seemed a welcome escape from a stepfather’s hostile indifference, but David didn’t like it. His job was to paste labels on bottles in a wine-trader’s warehouse. The warehouse was dark and dirty, the work dull, the hours long, and the pay poor, but what galled David Copperfield—as it had once galled Charles Dickens when sent to work at the same age as David—was the disregard of his worth and bright promise. In words similar to those Dickens used in an autobiographical sketch, Copperfield tells us that what had happened to him seemed incomprehensible:

A child of excellent abilities, and with strong powers of observation, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt bodily or mentally, it seems wonderful to me that nobody should have made any sign in my behalf. But none was made; and I became, at ten years old, a little labouring hind in the service of Murdstone and Grinby. [Dickens 1849-50]

Although miserably unhappy, the boy suffers in silence and does his work. He really begins life on his own when he runs away, makes his way to Dover, and finds refuge with a kindly aunt.

Aunt Betsey Trottwood’s willingness to take David into her household is an example of Dickens’ customary way of solving his heroes’ problems. After treachery and countless hardships, they meet a person with a good heart and modest fortune who adopts or befriends them and makes them a virtual part of his or her own family. Although Dickens was active in charitable enterprises and gave generously of his time and money to philanthropic institutions, his fiction celebrated individual rather than organized benevolence. Because he revered charity as the highest of virtues, he was quick to spot and condemn instances of selfinterest, hypocrisy, harshness, and officiousness in its practice, whether by private individuals or public officials. With the single exception of the Hospital for Sick Children in London, whose work he praised in Our Mutual Friend [1864-65], he could not believe that a child could be as happy and well cared for in an institution as in a good family.

In Oliver Twist [1838], Dickens tells how churchwardens and overseers of the poor raise a boy unfortunate enough to be bom in a parish workhouse. Oliver comes into the world in the late 1820s, his mother dying at his birth. Since no inmate of the house is available to nurse him, he is sent to a branch of the workhouse where a woman receives a few pence a week for each of the 20 or 30 babies farmed out to her. Her care consists of systematically starving and neglecting the children so that (Dickens estimates) in eight and a half cases out of ten, the infants sicken and die or succumb to injuries suffered in accidents that a little attention could have prevented. Oliver, like Devildust, is a survivor, and when he returns to the workhouse, it is operating under the rules of the New Poor Law of 1834. According to Dickens, one of the cardinal principles of that law, which he continued to denounce in later novels, was that “all poor people should have the altemafive (for they would compel no one, not they!) of being starved by a gradual process in the house, or by a quick one, out of it” [Dickens 1838].

A parish child like Oliver is a burden to be gotten rid of by apprenticing him or her to an employer on the best terms available to the parish without consulting or considering the child’s interest. Oliver, like David Copperfield, runs away from his master; he falls into bad company but is rescued from the clutches of the law and is eventually adopted by the kindly Mr. Brownlow.

Jo, a crossing-sweeper in Bleak House [1852-53], is less fortunate than Oliver. Although known to and harassed by the police, Jo is too dirty, scab-covered, vermin-infested—too much a native product—to be interesting to philanthropists, charitable societies, or even kind-hearted individuals until it is too late to help him. When he dies, Dickens reminds his readers that unfortunate, unlovable children like Jo are “dying thus around us everyday” [Dickens 1852-53].

Ginx’s Baby, His Birth and Other Misfortunes [1870], a novel issued anonymously in the year of Dickens’ death, records the history of another victim of social neglect. The author, Edward Jenkins, a missionary’s son who was educated in Canada and the United States, was a lawyer in London and later a member of Parliament. The baby of the title, a boy, is the thirteenth child of a poor workingman who resolves to dispose of him at birth by throwing him in the Thames. The baby is rescued, or preserved for further misfortunes, by a nun who offers to raise him in the Sisters’ Home. This solution to the boy’s fate proves impracticable because his parents are Protestant and neither they nor church officials are willing to make the necessary concessions.

After satirizing sectarian rivalries more concerned with the baby’s soul than his mortal welfare, Jenkins attacks, in turn philanthropic organizations who collect money in the baby’s behalf and spend nearly all of it on administration (including legal expenses) and fund-raising, foster parents whose interest in the baby is confined to the money they receive for his care and can obtain by selling his clothes, Poor Law officials who are willing to devote large sums to litigation to establish that they are not responsible for the baby but who are chary of spending parish funds to feed or clothe him, and politicians who expound and rebut plans for social and educational reform while allowing the child to grow up ignorant and unskilled. In the last paragraph of the book, Jenkins exclaims:

Philosophers, Philanthropists, Politicians, Papists and Protestants, Poor-Law Ministers and Parish Officers— while you have been theorizing and discussing, debating, wrangling, legislating and administering—Good God! gentlemen, between you all, where has Ginx’s Baby gone to?

He has gone off Vauxhall Bridge and into the Thames where his father had intended to throw him “at a time when he was alike unconscious of life and death.”

Neither Jenkins nor Ginx acknowledge Ginx’s responsibility for bringing the baby into the world. Jenkins’s language and logic seem to condone infanticide—a practice not unknown in Victorian England, especially as regards out-of-wedlock children [Pinchbeck & Hewitt 1973]. In fact, Jenkins advocated emigration for families burdened with more children than they could support. Ginx, his wife, and other children departed for Canada as soon as possible after getting rid of the baby.

By 1876, Ginx’s Baby had gone through 36 editions. Its satire of sectarian rivalries influenced the religious compromise included in the Education Act of 1870, which made education a national rather than a parish duty. Operation of that act made clear the connection between undernourishment and poor learning ability and made feeding “the necessitous school child” a popular philanthropic cause.

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Old Town Folks [1869] takes place in rural New England between 1790 and 1820. The story involves two sets of orphans, and touches upon social class, foster care, informal adoption, child labor, and child abuse in the name of discipline. Horace, about 12 years old, and his slightly older brother, Bill, become half-orphans when their father dies. Bill, a normal, healthy boy, disappears from the story when an uncle takes him to live and work on his farm. Horace—bookish and not very strong—and his mother find a home with the boy’s grandparents.

The other orphans, Harry, age nine, and Tina, age seven, are left alone in the world when their mother dies while trying to get the children to Boston. Their father, an English army officer, had abandoned the family and returned to England at the end of the Revolutionary War. In the country parish of Needmore there is no difficulty in placing the children. A demanding, hard-fisted farmer takes the boy for what work he can get out of him; the farmer’s sister, equally stem and hardworking, agrees to “fetch up” the girl. Stowe says of the sister that she was not the sort of woman a widower would choose to bring up his motherless children, but in Needmore she “would get all the votes as just the proper person to take charge of an orphan asylum” [Stowe 1869].

Stowe makes clear that Harry and Tina, although impoverished, come from a higher social class than their would-be masters, and attributes the children’s repugnance and refusal to accept their lot to social superiority. Harry defies the farmer’s brutal demands; Tina fights back when her mistress tries to give her “a good spanking” to improve her character. They run away, are found and befriended by Horace, who takes them to his grandparents’ house. A spinster, sensing Tina’s gentle birth, adopts her; a clergyman and his aristocratic wife are attracted to Harry and arrange for him to board at the grandparents’ home.

Little Men [1871], by Louisa May Alcott, is unusual in that the dozen children dealt with in it are happy and well cared for in an institutional setting. The institution is a progressive boarding school conducted by Mr. Bhaer and his wife Jo, one of the sisters in Alcott’s earlier book Little Women [1868-69]. The boys range in age from eight to 14; most of them have been sent to the school by their parents, but one, who arrives as a “ragged urchin,” has his expenses paid by a local philanthropist, and is not discriminated against. Billy, “a feeble idiot,” and Dick, a hunchback, are treated considerately by Jo and Mr. Bhaer; the other boys, under threat of punishment by Mr. Bhaer, refrain from teasing them [Alcott 1871].

At the start of Jo’s Boys [1886] Alcott presents glimpses of the boys ten years after the end of Little Men. They are scattered and have turned out well, or as well as can be expected. “Poor little Dick was dead and so was Billy,” Alcott tells us, “and no one could mourn for them since life would never be happy, afflicted as they were in mind and body” [Alcott 1886].

In 1871, at the age of six, Rudyard Kipling, bom in India, was brought to England to attend school, and for the next five years he was separated from his parents and li...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Child Welfare in Fiction and Fact
• 2 The Dilemma in Saving Children from Child Labor: Reform and Casework at Odds with Families’ Needs (1900-1938)
• 3 The Child Welfare Response to Youth Violence and Homelessness in the Nineteenth Century
• 4 An Outrage to Common Decency: Historical Perspectives on Child Neglect
• 5 Rosie the Riveter and Her Latchkey Children: What Americans Can Learn About Child Day Care from the Second World War
• 6 Bring Back the Orphanages? What Policymakers of Today Can Learn from the Past
• 7 Janie Porter Barrett and the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls: Community Response to the Needs of African American Children
• 8 From Indenture to Family Foster Care: A Brief History of Child Placing
• 9 A History of Placing-Out: The Orphan Trains
• 10 From Family Duty to Family Policy: The Evolution of Kinship Care
• 11 Adoption and Disclosure of Family Information: A Historical Perspective
• 12 From “Operation Brown Baby” to “Opportunity”: The Placement of Children of Color at the Boys and Girls Aid Society of Oregon
• 13 Factors and Events Leading to the Passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act
• 14 The Citizens’ Committee for Children of New York and the Evolution of Child Advocacy (1945-1972)
• 15 Information Sources on Child Welfare Archives: Howto Identify, Locate, and Use Them for Research