Child Care in Black and White

Working Parents and the History of Orphanages

Jessie B. Ramey

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780252094422
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This innovative study examines the development of institutional childcare from 1878 to 1929, based on a comparison of two "sister" orphanages in Pittsburgh: the all-white United Presbyterian Orphan's Home and the all-black Home for Colored Children. Drawing on quantitative analysis of the records of more than 1, 500 children living at the two orphanages, as well as census data, city logs, and contemporary social science surveys, this study raises new questions about the role of childcare in constructing and perpetrating social inequality in the United States.

CHAPTER ONE

INSTITUTIONALIZING ORPHANS

The Founding and Managing Women

In his essay on Self Reliance Emerson says, “An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.” If that be true the three institutions under the care of the United Presbyterian Women’s Association are the lengthened shadow of Rev. James M. Fulton, D.D.

—W. H. Vincent, “The United Presbyterian Women’s Association of North America, A Retrospect.”

Nearly every historical account of the founding of the United Presbyterian Orphans Home begins by paying homage to Rev. James Fulton, the young pastor of the Fourth United Presbyterian Church of Allegheny. A dying widow appealed to Fulton to find homes for her five soon-to-be-orphaned children. Moved by their plight, Fulton called together the United Presbyterian women of Pittsburgh and Allegheny on October 9, 1878, launching the United Presbyterian Women’s Association of North America (UPWANA), which immediately undertook the organization of an orphan’s home. When Fulton died in 1896, the managers commissioned a portrait of the minister and hung it in the home. They prominently displayed the portrait in the orphanage and at anniversary celebrations, and the painting hangs today at the top of the grand staircase in the main building, welcoming visitors to the Mars Home for Youth.¹ In words and image, the organization consistently presented, and continues to present, Fulton as the “founding father” of both the women’s association and its first project, the orphanage.

While Fulton was indeed a central figure in the founding of UPWANA and its United Presbyterian Orphan’s Home (UPOH), he was by no means alone. Dozens of women attended that first association meeting and then set to work establishing the orphanage. The organization’s official histories frequently reference the enormous efforts of these founding women, but they are invariably an anonymous bunch. By contrast, Fulton is almost always named and honored with a label, such as “The Man of Vision.”² When he died in 1896, the UPWANA directors memorialized him, saying, “In his kind heart originated the thought of our United Presbyterian Women’s Association,” and he “inspired the women to do something” for orphaned children.³

Figure 1.1. The Rev. James M. Fulton near the time of his death in 1896 at the age of forty-six. Source: 18th Annual Report United Presbyterian Women’s Association, UPWANA, MHY.

Some evidence, however, suggests that the vision may not have been his alone. When founding manager Jessie White McNaugher died in 1907, her fellow managers looked up her record of service in order to write her obituary and discovered that “we had to go back to the conference she held with her pastor, Rev. J. M. Fulton, D.D. . . . when [he] was a member of her household. [T]he plans for . . . the work . . . were the product of their counsels.”⁴ Mother of nine children still at home in the late 1870s when Fulton was apparently living with her family, McNaugher certainly knew about the needs of children. As the woman who fomented plans for the orphanage in conversations with Fulton while he stayed in her own home, and as one of the four witnesses who appeared before state officials to sign the original charter, McNaugher might rightfully be considered a “founding mother” of UPOH. Indeed, if Fulton is the founding father, the orphanage has many founding mothers.

Similarly, founding stories often credit Rev. Fulton with inspiring another group of religious women, the Women’s Christian Association (WCA), with starting the Home for Colored Children (HCC) in 1880. A newspaper reporter later summarized the tale, saying, “Rev. M. Fulton of the Fourth United Presbyterian Church, Northside, one dreary, rainy morning found a little Afro-American girl of 4 or 5 years of age wandering in the streets of Lower Allegheny.” Fulton sought “admission, in vain, for this little outcast in the various institutions.”⁵ Yet it was the women of the WCA who took the girl in and ultimately launched the orphanage that would shelter her. What’s more, Fulton’s wife, Mary Fulton, became intimately involved with both the Home for Colored Children and the United Presbyterian Orphan’s Home, serving on the board in both organizations. Later in the twentieth century, managers’ use of historical memory in writing their founding stories served to dim the lights on women like Mary Fulton and Jessie White McNaugher.

Nevertheless, it was women who played the crucial role in founding and managing these “sister” orphanages, both apparently spawned by Rev. Fulton. Significantly, the women’s religious and social motivations shaped the institutions as they developed during their first fifty years. Similarly, the managers’ traditional gender ideology and understanding of dependency placed them within the volunteer tradition of nineteenth-century maternalism and also deeply influenced the ways in which they structured their organizations. Yet, these women also formed surprisingly early, if somewhat tentative, experiments in cross-class and interracial cooperation through their managing boards.

“My visits to the Home were numerous”: A Demographic Profile of the Founding Managers

The HCC and UPOH managers are critical to understanding how the two institutions functioned and developed over their first half century. Because the women tended to serve lengthy terms on the boards—some for decades—and brought in similar colleagues to join them when seats opened, board composition changed very little over these years. The women who served as managers in the 1920s looked remarkably similar to the women who had founded the institutions fifty years earlier. Their management style—hands-on, labor intensive—also changed very little during this period. Like many women in the tradition of nineteenth-century benevolence, these managers were a hard-working, committed lot who typically dedicated a large portion of their adult lives to volunteering.⁶ After a particularly busy month, one HCC board manager noted, “During the month my visits to the Home were numerous, on an average once every day, sometimes spending the day.”⁷ The orphanages demanded an enormous amount of attention that approximated full-time work for at least a few of the women: they were intimately involved in nearly every facet of the homes, from major financial planning and construction projects, down to deciding what kind of butter the children would eat and whether it would be spread on the bread for them or not.⁸

A song from the 1890s about life in UPOH reveals the role of the managing women in the day-to-day life of the orphanage as well as their view of their own work. Written from the children’s supposed vantage point, one stanza humorously states, “Anxious Managers drop in merely to inquire / What in the world are we doing, we use too much fire!” The song pokes fun at the “anxious managers” who seem to do nothing but worry about the cost of running the orphanage. One can imagine the managers chuckling in recognition as the children would sing, “Gas bills are enormous, meat bills make them groan,” but then nodding approvingly to the final verse, “Eighty little orphans on the road to fame / If they fail to reach it, who would be to blame? / Not the managers surely, for all the world you roam / You’ll never find another like the U. P. Orphan’s Home.”⁹ The song’s tongue-in-cheek humor implies that the managers did spend considerable time worrying about institutional finances, but that they did more than merely “drop in to inquire” about things. Indeed, the managers receive the final credit for setting eighty children “on the road to fame,” and the song suggests that they could not be blamed if the children failed, as they had established a world-class orphanage. From the managers’ perspective, as revealed in the song, they had worked hard and done everything possible for the “little orphans.”

Each managing board met at least monthly, sometimes more often when needed, and every member served on multiple committees. For instance, the admissions committee (called by any number of names over time at the organizations) was a powerful group that met with families, investigated their home situations, interviewed neighbors and clergy, collected the necessary application materials, and made recommendations to the full board for acceptance or rejection. In a given month, this committee typically handled dozens of applications and sometimes also acted as the placing committee, reviewing applications from potential foster families and investigating those homes as well. The managers also took turns being on the visiting committee, which supervised the daily operation of the orphanages. These women generally visited once or twice a week, though sometimes every day, and stayed anywhere from a few hours to the full day, taking inventory of supplies, handling disciplinary issues with the children and conflicts with the staff, prioritizing maintenance needs, supervising the kitchen, and sewing an endless stream of clothing. Through these two committees, and others, the managers wielded a great deal of authority, which, while not uncontested, allowed them to craft institutional policy and practice.

Founded by largely white middle-class and elite women, the HCC and UPOH managing boards also contained a somewhat surprising element of diversity. Both had a sizable minority of working-class members (18 percent and 27 percent, respectively), and the HCC included several African American women from its inception.¹⁰ (See appendix B for complete biographical comparison of the two boards.) Though the boards remained largely white and middle and upper class, they represent early, if clearly hesitant, efforts at cross-class and interracial cooperation. To be sure, this relationship was lopsided, and the more numerous middle-class and elite women of the boards maintained the balance of power. Yet, the working-class and African American members were more than mere tokens, as they actively participated in board meetings, fund raising, and committee duties: their voices were loud and clear at the institutions, though generally in concert with the other women of the board. The presence of black and working-class women adds new texture to the historiography of child welfare, which has mainly portrayed institutions such as orphanages as one part genuine benevolence toward the poor and one part instrument of social control. The most recent orphanage scholarship has come to agreement somewhere in the middle: managers wanted to both help and control, lift up and reform, their poor clients.¹¹ Indeed, these appear to be the motives of both orphanage boards, including their African American and working-class members.

Even with their limited diversity, the HCC and UPOH boards shared many of the same demographic characteristics, permitting a composite portrait of the early managers to emerge. Eighty percent of the women were married, with the remaining 20 percent either widowed or single. Most were in their thirties and forties, with a median age of forty, and the majority had children still living at home, ranging in age from infancy through late twenties. Two-thirds of the UPOH and just over half of the HCC managers had live-in servants, no doubt assisting in the care of children and household duties, making their volunteer work possible. All were Protestant, and most of the managers at each orphanage were born in Pennsylvania or a handful of other northern states. With many of the managers serving for decades, this composite portrait sustained well into the twentieth century.

Figure 1.2. A typical orphanage manager, Agnes K. Duff served on the UPOH board for over twenty years and was at various times Vice President, Recording Secretary, and the Chair of the Receiving Committee. Source: 35th Annual Report United Presbyterian Women’s Association, UPWANA, MHY.

Both boards were largely middle class, though UPOH had more elites with nearly half the women married to entrepreneurs, such as merchants, dealers, and manufacturers. While fiscally upper class, these women tended to come from the margins of the city’s elite: very few, for instance, appear in the social registers of the time. However, these elite women did bring social connections to the boards of both orphanages, allowing each to quickly start crucial endowments to help the institutions weather difficult financial times. They also performed the regular, time-consuming, and sometimes labor-intensive work of board management: an almost endless cycle of attending meetings, serving on committees, hiring and supervising staff, working in the orphanages, sewing, meeting with poor families, and raising money. Substantially fewer of the HCC women came from entrepreneurial homes, but a fifth were married to professionals such as salesmen, teachers, and insurance agents. Both the HCC and UPOH boards boasted a significant minority of minister’s wives, roughly a fifth of the members.

Many of the women had adult children living at home who were working in professions indicative of the family’s middle-class status, such as clerks in stores and railroad offices.¹² The employment of live-in domestic help by well over half of the members of both boards serves as another marker of the managers’ largely middle- and elite-class status. A few of the working-class managers also employed domestics, though live-in help was largely enjoyed by the middle-class and elite women of the boards. Domestic work such as cleaning, cooking, and washing was labor intensive and time consuming, and even working-class women often hired help as soon as family finances permitted, though their employees were generally part time (and thus far less likely to be living in their employers’ homes where they would have appeared on the census).

Perhaps not surprisingly, those women hailing from the working class belonged to the upper echelons of that class, suggested by their husbands’ (or fathers’) employment in largely skilled labor. Over a quarter of the UPOH managers and 14 percent of the HCC managers were living in homes where the head-of-household performed skilled labor: these men were carpenters, coopers, and tinsmiths. Where the occupation of husbands and fathers provides a useful benchmark of “class” for the white women of the boards, severely curtailed employment opportunities for African Americans in this period means that “status” is often a more useful description of socioeconomic relationships.¹³ Two of the three original African American members of the HCC board were married to men with relatively high-status occupations in...