Fragile Families. Naomi Glenn-Levin Rodriguez
(Collins 1998). Although the idealized family form may shift over time, what remains constant is the way the privileged form of family is linked up with economic, legal, and social privileges in relation to the nation-state (Coontz 2000). Families who do not fit this idealized form have historically been vulnerable to a variety of interventions. As such, the formation and dissolution of families enacted primarily through child removal, adoption, and residential schooling have constituted a central ground for contestations about citizenship, racial hierarchy, and belonging throughout U.S. history.4
In considering practices and policies surrounding the history of family intervention and forms of child removal in the U.S. context I address two overlapping periods—the moral reform era, constituting the majority of the nineteenth century, and the progressive era, lasting roughly from 1890 to 1920.5 I focus on the treatment of dependent children throughout these periods and the accompanying anxieties about morality and the general “health” of the nation in which these efforts were enmeshed. This time frame foregrounds widespread efforts to explicitly shape parenting practices and marks a shift in the role of children from wage-earners to innocents in need of care, love, and protection (Zelizer 1985). As I examine below, ideas about hygiene, child labor, nutrition, supervision, and religious values became grounds for determining whether parents were acting, or were capable of acting, in their child’s “best interest.” These sorts of criteria resonate with the focus of contemporary child welfare interventions that disproportionately intervene in working-class and impoverished families of color. Although the contours of “best interest” have shifted over time, the framing of custody determinations around a focus on “best interest” has remained strikingly stable.
Family Interventions and the Construction of the Dependent Child
During the early 1800s, in the United States, children who were destitute or orphaned were often taken into almshouses and housed alongside adults who were categorized as indigent or mentally ill (Platt 2009[1969]:108). Due to poor sanitary conditions, children faced high death rates in almshouses, and concern with this problem eventually contributed to the development of orphanages and boarding schools initially run by philanthropic organizations, most of which were associated with religious organizations. The 1830s saw a proliferation of these institutions, and by 1910 more than 110,000 children were housed in 1,151 institutions across the United States (Tiffin 1982:64). These practices were developed out of a sense of community responsibility for impoverished individuals, rooted in the British Poor Laws that influenced practices for approaching the “problem” of the poor during the colonial era. Although U.S. policy and practices developed out of this foundation, conceptions of and approaches to the poor, and particularly impoverished children, gradually adapted and responded to the specific circumstances that arose in relation to westward expansion, substantial waves of immigration, and, later, industrialization and urbanization processes in large U.S. cities.
During this era, the primary focus of intervention was on the children of new European immigrant families, primarily Irish and Italian Catholic families, living in urban settings. Some parents and relatives sought care for their children in an institutional setting themselves, while other children were placed in such institutions through the intervention of charity workers or the authority of a local court. The majority of family interventions were initially enacted not by the state or federal government but by religious, philanthropic efforts spearheaded primarily by upper-class white women.6 The normative values these women promoted were enmeshed with their own class positions and the patriarchal authority of their religious institutions.7 And while they were largely focused on child-rearing practices, they were intimately bound up with concerns about the shape of what the future U.S. population would look like.
Awareness of child abuse as a social problem gradually arose in the 1870s, marked by the founding of Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (Gordon 1989).8 While earlier interventions had focused on homelessness, abandonment, or starvation, these later efforts placed an increased emphasis on neglect and cruelty toward children. This reorientation considered the child specifically within the context of the family. With a shift toward concern over the treatment of children, rather than only their poverty, the question of the category of maternal “neglect” became a salient issue as it was necessarily constructed against a norm of “proper” care (Gordon 1989:7). As such, concerns about mothers’ knowledge and conduct in relation to norms of hygiene, nutrition, and care of infants, among other topics, were central to the production of a healthy and proper citizenry.9 In this way, concern about the “neglected” child was a site for concern about the health of the nation itself.
The questions of who constituted a child in need of saving and what characteristics defined a dependent or neglected child are issues that continue to plague agents and agencies charged with the goal of child protection. Mapping these shifts sheds light on changing norms and anxieties. An 1899 definition of the “dependent” or “neglected” child, for example, included homelessness, neglect, cruelty, and depravity on the part of the parents, but also included any child “found living in any house of ill-fame” and “any child under the age of eight who is found peddling or selling any article or singing or playing any musical instrument upon the street or giving any public entertainment,” highlighting anxieties about child labor and the presence of children on urban streets acting as wage earners for their families (Tiffin 1982:38). The vagueness of the definition, which left open interpretation of such terms as “proper care” or “ill-fame,” positioned a wide range of families as potentially vulnerable to intervention.
In the context of the pre-industrial English language, as Fraser and Gordon (1994) argue, the term “dependency” was synonymous with subordination. Dependency encapsulated not so much the trait of an individual, as with the specter of the welfare dependent mother in the contemporary U.S. context, but a positive social relation between master and apprentice, employer and laborer. It is in this sense, Fraser and Gordon note, that phrases like “independently wealthy” indicate an individual free of the obligation to labor. It was thus only with the rise of industrial labor that wage labor became understood as symbolic of independence based on the idea that individuals were free to sell their labor as they chose. Wage labor was no longer understood primarily as a social relationship of dependence between employer and employee. Because independence was positively equated with wage labor, dependency became reframed as a dysfunctional relationship, a “psychological/moral register” (Fraser and Gordon 1994). Dependency became a problematic characteristic rather than an indication of a productive social relation. With this shift dependency was no longer suitable for white working men and became the terrain of women, encapsulated by the figure of the “housewife,” as well as by both men and women of color.
This pejorative reading of dependency was heightened in a U.S. social context where the “absence of a hierarchical social tradition in which subordination was understood to be structural, not characterological, facilitated hostility to public support of the poor” (Fraser and Gordon 1994:320). It is in relation to these historical conditions that we might understand the framing of “welfare dependency” more broadly. However, children constitute a category that perpetuates the concept of dependency as a productive social relationship. As senator Daniel Moynihan (1973) stated, “[Dependency] is an incomplete state in life: normal in a child, abnormal in the adult.”10 Dependency, in this sense, is naturalized as a characteristic embedded in the term “child.” Healthy children are, by definition, dependent. Yet the notion of a dependent child departs from this normative, positive sense of dependency. That is, children marked as dependent are not dependent on their parents, as is deemed natural, but rather are problematically dependent on the intervention of the state or the kindness of strangers. In this sense, a dependent child is reworked as a potential burden and a social problem, one who lacks properly reliable parents to depend upon.
From Child Savers to Professional Social Work
Child saving efforts were driven by concerns about the morality of, and care for, children and were deeply enmeshed in efforts to preserve white Protestant values against rising concerns about immigration and the “moral depravity” of the urban poor.11 Child saving efforts were primarily promoted by wealthy philanthropists concerned about the influence of new European immigrant communities,