Child Welfare

England 1872-1989

Harry d Hendrick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN:
  9780415007733
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134985562
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Child Welfare 1872-1989 is the first comprehensive book on the history of social policy and child welfare from the 1870s to the present. It offers a full narrative of the development of social services for children, covering a range of topics including infant life protection and welfare, sexuality, child guidance, medical treatment, war time evacuation, and child poverty. Equally importantly the book studies the attitudes to policy-makers towards children. It reveals the way in which children have been viewed both as victims of and threats to the society in which they lived.

Part I: THE EMERGENCE OF THE CHILD c. 1800–94

INTRODUCTION

The purpose here is to survey some of the most important social constructions of British childhood since the end of the eighteenth century, in order to illustrate the historical variability of the concept, and to show that by the 1890s the emergence of a clear notion of ‘the child’ was beginning to be formulated. Such a brief account is unable to do more than suggest the principal identities and the attributable ‘prime movers of social change’.¹ The hope is that a familiarity with these perceptions, as held in the first instance by dominant interests, professional, religious and political, will both help to explain the tenacity and the self-confidence of our ‘modern’ interpretations of ‘childhood’, and unravel those understandings of childhood held by reformers, politicians and administrators throughout our period.

The focus is on four related themes: First, the gradual shift away from an idea of childhood fragmented by geography—urban/rural—and by class life-experiences, to one that was much more uniform and coherent; second, the rise and development of what historians refer to as the ‘domestic ideal’ among the early nineteenth-century middle class, which helped to present the family as the principal institutional influence; third, the evolution of the compulsory relationship between the State, the family and welfare services; and, fourth, the political and cultural struggle to extend the developing concept of childhood through all social classes, to universalise it.

But what is the meaning of ‘social construction’? The term has nothing to do with ‘the cultures which children construct for and between themselves’.² During our period, ‘childhood’ was composed by adults, usually those of the professional middle class. This is not meant to sound conspiratorial. No attempt is made here to suggest that children’s condition is entirely devoid of a biological dimension, nor to deny the effects of physical being, though the nature of the consanguinity between the social, the psychological and the biological is extraordinarily problematic. All the same, ‘ideas like parenthood and childhood are socially constructed and thus can be put together in [a] diverse set of ways’.³ We know also that, whatever its historical mutability, there is always a relationship between conceptual thought and social action and the process of category construction and, therefore, definitions of childhood to some extent must of necessity be dependent upon the society from which they emerge.

Consequently, the supporting premiss of what follows is that the numerous perceptions of childhood, which have been produced over the last two hundred years or so, can only be fully comprehended within the context of how different generations (and, no less significant, social classes) responded to the social, economic, religious and political challenges of their respective eras. Throughout the nineteenth century, the influence of evangelicalism, the impact of the Industrial Revolution, and the combined effects of urban growth, class politics, and the ‘rediscovery’ of poverty, all made necessary new understandings, together with new procedures, intentions and ambitions. Since these changes involved no less than the building of an industrial state and, later on, a liberal industrial democracy, no part of the societal fabric was left unattended, unreconstructed. Similarly, since the early 1900s, war, welfare, a changing social fabric and psycho-analysis and medicine, have profoundly affected the ways in which childhood has been ‘put together’.

1: IDENTITIES AND DEFINITIONS

PRELIMINARY DEFINITIONS OF CHILDHOOD: THE ‘NATURAL’, THE ROMANTIC AND THE EVANGELICAL

Although the history of the family and parent-child relations is shrouded in controversy, there is general agreement that from the late seventeenth century a new attitude towards children began to manifest itself, so much so that the eighteenth century has been claimed as a ‘new world’ for them.¹ The extent to which the treatment of children prior to this time had been either ‘autocratic’ or even ‘ferocious’ is disputed, but there is no doubt that they were held to be the inheritors of Original Sin, which justified a near-universal corporal punishment. However, in some respects, this was probably countered by the more benign influence of the humanists, who believed in ‘the child’s capacity for good and the moral neutrality of its impulses’. Here was an optimism which acted as a corrective against the more dour Protestantism.²

Nevertheless, the eighteenth-century social construction of childhood emerged fragmented and ambiguous, torn as it was between the notion of ‘innocence’ and a pessimism born of evangelical and political anxieties. In the 1680s the Cambridge Neoplatonist philosophers asserted an innate goodness in the child, and in 1693 Locke published Some Thoughts Concerning Education (the first of twenty-six British editions alone before 1800). This attacked the idea of infant depravity, and portrayed children as tabula rasa. In effect the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries heard a debate on the child’s nature. At one extreme stood the famous statement of John Wesley, the Methodist leader, which urged parents to ‘break the will of your child’, to ‘bring his will into subjection to yours that it may be afterward subject to the will of God’. At the other extreme stood Rousseau, author of the seminal Émile (1762), and all those who, under his influence, invested their children with a new affection.

In Émile Rousseau captured the imagination of Europe with his validation of Nature, which espoused the notion of the natural goodness of children and the corrupting effects of certain kinds of education: ‘Let us lay it down as an incontestable maxim that the first promptings of nature are always right.’ In Rousseau’s thought, which drew on ideas from the Renaissance, Comenius and Locke, the natural growth of children was of paramount importance. He was not alone in his attachment, for the age was one of a wider change in social beliefs, many of which manifested themselves in more ‘sensitive’ responses to the natural world, animals, women and slaves.³ Rousseau’s view of childhood was Pelagian, that is, he denied the doctrine of Original Sin. Childhood was important for him because it represented the human potential for fulfilment. The originality of the educational theory found in Émile lay partly in the claim that from both the physiological and the psychological perspectives the educator was to treat the child as ‘a little human animal destined for the spiritual and moral life’ who developed ‘according to certain laws whose natural progression must be respected above all’.⁴ No less significant in inspiring a new outlook was the book’s philosophical emphasis on the child as child: ‘Nature wants children to be children before they are men.’ This is why the focus of Émile lay in the assertion that the primary objective of education should be ‘the identity and peculiar nature of the child itself’, and that the ‘original nature’ of the child was ‘innocence’. Rousseau can be credited with two seminal accomplishments with respect to childhood: he made it important for itself, not merely as a diminutive adulthood and, in rejecting the Christian ‘fallen state’ and emphasising natural goodness, he freed it from the burden of Original Sin. Rousseau took children from the gates of damnation to the doorway of trust in human capacity.⁵

The construction of childhood propagated by Rousseau hardly had an independent existence before it met up with the influences of the Romantic and evangelical revivals. In the works of Blake, Coleridge and Wordsworth, which were at the heart of the ‘Romantic revival’, the child stood centrally in the search of poets and novelists to investigate ‘the Self ’ and to express their romantic protest against ‘the Experience of Society’. The Wordsworthian child (though varying between Wordsworth’s early and late writing) endorsed Rousseau in its original innocence except unlike Rousseau’s childhood, which human beings pass through towards a rich adulthood, it is a state that is lost as soon as it is completed. In the ode ‘Intimations of Immortality’ (1807), Wordsworth is closest to Rousseau, for here childhood is not only good in itself but, if properly cared for, yields up useful and fulfilled adults. It is ‘the seed-time of the soul’. In this poem the child figure shuns the lost Eden, and looks forward to the future. Whatever the differences between Wordsworth and Rousseau over the concept of ‘original virtue’, the former adopted the latter’s tone of reverence towards the child.⁶

While Wordsworth and Blake had different understandings of the child, they used the child figure to make their readers feel a truth, rather than simply to understand it. For Blake, the symbol of the innocent child stood at the centre of his testimony against the tradition of English rationalism of Bacon, Newton and Locke. In his Songs of Innocence, he affirmed the joy of human life in children, and throughout his writings he constantly attacked the inhumanity of society, especially with respect to children. Coleridge shared much of this outlook, seeing in children what has been called an ‘intuitive, imaginative quality of the soul’. The ‘feelings’ of childhood, he wrote, should be carried into ‘the powers of manhood’. In Coleridge, the emphasis on the child derives not so much from its capacity for joy, as from its integrity.⁷

What was happening here was the construction of a particular childhood, narrowly confined to an élite, as a literary, social and educational theme in order to combat much of the century’s materialism and rationalism or what Mill described as ‘the revolt of the human mind against the philosophy of the eighteenth century’. The new child was a figure in the ‘Cult of Sensibility’ associated with Rousseau; it was a feature of the ‘reinstatement of Feeling’. The Romantics turned to children because they were in search of new awareness and psychological insights.⁸ All in all this was a search which helped to assign a new importance to childhood, and one that saw the condition as optimistic and life-enhancing. At the most basic level, therefore, this construction related to the contest for a particular kind of society—for a particular set of beliefs—which was to stand between eighteenth-century rationalism and nineteenth-century industrialism.

In many respects the ‘Romantic Child’ was short-lived; the assertion of the Romantics never rose far above a protest, albeit one of great influence and longevity. But poets are no match for political economy. Both the reaction to the French Revolution—the suppression of liberties—and the impact of the Industrial Revolution—the demand for free labour—pushed adult-child relations in the opposite direction to that promised by Romantic aspirations. But the idea—at least, certain versions of it—was not so easily displaced, and continued to assert itself until at least the end of the nineteenth century. However, between 1789 and 1848 various insurrectionary threats in Britain brought forth a programme of coercion from the State. Notions of freedom were barely tolerated as democrats, trade unionists, labourers, women, reformers and others fought for food, work, political representation, and the right to free opinion.

Besides the reactionary political climate of the period, optimistic notions of childhood had to struggle against the influence of religious evangelicalism with its belief in Original Sin and the need for redemption. In evangelical hands, human nature, having been tarnished in the fall from grace, was no longer ‘pleasing to the author of our Being’. It goes without saying that evangelicals rejected Rousseauism. The Evangelical Magazine advised parents to teach their children that ‘they are sinful polluted creatures’.⁹ There was no more typical counter-revolutionary than Hannah More, a leading evangelical intellectual and pamphleteer, who denounced ‘the rights of man’ and of women, and warned that in future society would be subject to ‘grave descants on the rights of youth, the rights of children, the rights of babies’.¹⁰ By the 1820s More had overtaken Maria Edgeworth, a disciple of Rousseau, and author of Practical Education (1801) in popularity, which suggests the drowning-out of the optimistic view of childhood with its faith in natural goodness. More’s message, convenient for the age, was written in its fears. ‘Is it not’, she wrote, ‘a fundamental error to consider children as innocent beings, whose little weaknesses may, perhaps, want some correction, rather than as beings who bring into the world a corrupt nature and evil dispositions, which it should be the great end of education to rectify?’¹¹ This found a ready audience among evangelicals and the upper classes who were unsettled by the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and by domestic political and social unrest. More was popular because she articulated their desire for a settled society, characterised by religious observation, order, obedience and authority.

While More opposed both Rousseau and the Romantics, along with other evangelicals, she never underestimated the importance of educating and rearing children. In part her conviction was rooted in a tradition born during the Reformation, which sought to register childhood as the age in which it was appropriate for adults to invest time, concern, thought and money. Nevertheless, the nineteenth-century discussion on the meaning of childhood in an industrialising and urbanising nation was very much the work of evangelicals who produced their own agenda for reform, largely through the promulgation of a Domestic Ideal which emphasised home, family, duty, love and respect.¹² During the course of the debate, the purity of the Romantic view of the child gave way to the alarmism and pessimism of counter-revolutionaries. The loss occurred despite the continued (though limited) influence of the Romantic idea in portraying childhood as fundamentally different from adulthood; different, that is, in the sense of having its own nature, and not simply being an immature condition, apprenticed to adulthood. More and her followers grasped this difference, and used it for their own purposes.

THE FACTORY CHILD

This is probably one of the best-known of all historical stories: the struggle to rescue ‘little children’ from long hours and cruel conditions in factories, mines and workshops. The early Factory Acts, those of 1802, 1819 and 1833, prohibited children under the age of nine from employment in a variety of mills. The 1833 Act gave children aged between 9 and 13 an eight-hour day with two hours for schooling. A further Act in 1844 lowered the minimum age to 8 but introduced daily schooling and reduced children’s working hours to six and a half or seven per day. There were additional reductions in hours in the Acts of 1850 and 1853, and those of 1864 and 1867 extended the regulations to non-textile factories and workshops. Where agricultural labour was concerned, two of the most important Acts were those of 1867 and 1873, which forbade employment of children under 8. In 1875 the minimum age for all half-time employment was raised to 10, and for full-timers to 14, unless the child obtained an early school-leaving certificate.

There are at least two important points to note about this legislation. First, it introduced and later confirmed the view that children were not ‘free’ to make contracts—they needed the protection of the State; and, second, it marked a turning point in the perception of children as ‘workers’—which they had always been. We see the emergence of the view that children should not work at all (or do only the minimum necessary for ‘educational’ purposes); that childhood should be quite separate from wage-earning.¹³ This was to have profound repercussions. To all intents and purposes it began to set children aside from wage labour—one of the most important forms of social activity.

There was nothing new about children working in the Industrial Revolution, for it had long been established that they should contribute to the family economy. By the early decades of the nineteenth century they were widely employed in textiles, dress, mining, agriculture, domestic service, docks and navigation, metals, and machinery and tools. However, it was their work in textile mills, mines and as chimney-sweeps which most dramatically captured the imagination of reformers and philanthropists who campaigned against this form of exploitation. Many contemporaries were appalled, not only by the scale and intensity of the exploitation, but also by the brutalisation of the young workers, and the violence which it was felt was being done to the ‘nature’ of childhood itself. Others were equally appalled by the scale and intensity of the industrialisation process, and for these critics the plight of the factory child seemed to symbolise profound and often little-understood changes in British society, changes which appeared to threaten an imagined natural order. In campaigning to restrain this form of child labour, reformers were in effect arguing about the direction of industrialisation, the meaning of progress, and the kind of childhood necessary for a civilised and Christian community.

In opposition to laissez-faire capitalism, there was of course the Romantic image of childhood which opposed the unremitting debasement of children through long hours, unhealthy conditions, corporal punishment, and sexual harassment (of girls by employers, foremen and fellow-workers). Similarly, the evangelical attitude to children, though in conflict with the Romantic, also opposed their economic activity. This attitude emanated from the combined (and often contradictory) influences of evangelical opinion about human nature, the gathering pace of the bourgeois ‘domestic ideal’, and fears about the social and political behaviour of the working class. It saw the brutalisation of children (including alleged precocious sexual awareness) as contributing to the dehumanisation of a social class and, therefore, was to be avoided. Many upper-class commentators felt that Chartism (the first mass working-class movement for parliamentary reform) was a perfect example of the social and moral instabilty which, in common with wide-ranging economic distress during the 1830s and 1840s, turned issues relating to public order into matters of national security.¹⁴

The first Factory Act, 1802, against child labour, proved ineffective with the expansion of industry and the introduction of steam power. But thereafter the reform campaign grew in vociferousness, assisted as it was by government investigative committees and numerous publications. There were several grounds on which reformers attacked child labour, especially where it involved factories. Reformers focused on the moral and physical consequences, with the former often deemed to be the more important. Hugh Cunningham has perceptively argued that these objections led to the ‘utilitarian’ argument that child labour threatened the reproduction of society. This, he continues, implied that ‘there was a prope...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION: BODIES AND MINDS, VICTIMS AND THREATS, AND INVESTMENTS
• PART I: THE EMERGENCE OF THE CHILD C. 1800–94
• PART II: FROM RESCUE AND REFORM TO ‘CHILDREN OF THE NATION’ C.1872– 1918
• PART III: MINDS AND BODIES: CONTRADICTION, TENSION, AND INTEGRATION, 1918–45
• PART IV: CHILDREN OF THE WELFARE STATE 1945–89
• JUSTIFICATIONS AND EXPLANATIONS
• NOTES AND REFERENCES
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY