In late Victorian America few issues held the public's attention more closely than the allegedly unnatural family life of the urban poor. In Tramps, Unfit Mothers, and Neglected Children, Sherri Broder brings new insight to the powerful depictions of the urban poor that circulated in newspapers and novels, public debate and private correspondence, including the irresponsible tramp, the "fallen" single mother, and the neglected child. Broder considers how these representations contributed to debates over the nature of family life and focuses on the ways different historical actors—social reformers, labor activists, and ordinary laboring people—made use of the available cultural narratives about family, gender, and sexuality to comprehend changes in turn-of-the-century America. In the decades after the Civil War, Philadelphia was an important center of charity, child protection, and labor reform. Drawing on the rich records of the Pennsylvania Society to Protect Children from Cruelty, Broder assesses the intentions and consequences of reform efforts devoted to women and children at the turn of the century. Her research provides an eloquent study of how the terms used by social workers and their clients to discuss the condition of poverty continue to have a profound influence on social policies and develops a complex historical perspective on how social policy and representations of poor families have been and remain mutually influential.

In Choosing to Care, Kyle E. Ciani examines the long history of interactions between parents and social reformers from diverse backgrounds in the development of social welfare programs, particularly childcare, in San Diego, California. Ciani explores how a variety of people--from destitute parents and tired guardians to benevolent advocates and professional social workers--connected over childcare concerns in a city that experienced tremendous demographic changes caused by urbanization, immigration, and the growth of a local U.S. military infrastructure from 1850 to 1950. Choosing to Care examines four significant areas where San Diego's programs were distinct from, and contributed to, the national childcare agenda: the importance of the transnational U.S.-Mexico border relationship in creating effective childcare programs; the development of vocational education to curtail juvenile delinquency; the promotion of nursery school education; and the advancement of an emergency daycare program during the Great Depression and World War II. Ciani shows how children from families in unstable situations, especially children from Native American, Asian, Mexican-descent, African American, and impoverished Anglo families, challenged a social reform system that defined care as both social control and behavioral regulation. Choosing to Care incorporates a broader definition of childcare to include efforts by governmental and organizational bodies and persons to maintain and nurture the physical, mental, and social health and development of minors when parents and guardians cannot do so. It offers a more complex understanding of how multiple avenues and resources established social welfare in San Diego and other West Coast cities.

Between 1902 and 1934, the United States confined hundreds of adults and children from dozens of Native nations at the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians, a federal psychiatric hospital in South Dakota. But detention at the Indian Asylum, as families experienced it, was not the beginning or end of the story. For them, Canton Asylum was one of many places of imposed removal and confinement, including reservations, boarding schools, orphanages, and prison-hospitals. Despite the long reach of institutionalization for those forcibly held at the Asylum, the tenacity of relationships extended within and beyond institutional walls. In this accessible and innovative work, Susan Burch tells the story of the Indigenous people—families, communities, and nations, across generations to the present day—who have experienced the impact of this history.

Elizabeth Pleck's Domestic Tyranny chronicles the rise and demise of legal, political, and medical campaigns against domestic violence from colonial times to the present. Based on in-depth research into court records, newspaper accounts, and autobiographies, this book argues that the single most consistent barrier to reform against domestic violence has been the Family Ideal--that is, ideas about family privacy, conjugal and parental rights, and family stability. This edition features a new introduction surveying the multinational and cultural themes now present in recent historical writing about family violence.

This collection of original essays examines the history of American education as it has developed as a field since the 1970s and moves into a post-revisionist era and looks forward to possible new directions for the future. Contributors take a comprehensive approach, beginning with colonial education and spanning to modern day, while also looking at various aspects of education, from higher education, to curriculum, to the manifestation of social inequality in education. The essays speak to historians, educational researchers, policy makers and others seeking fresh perspectives on questions related to the historical development of schooling in the United States.

Reveals how babies shaped modern American life, including the rise of the medical authority, consumerism, social welfare, and popular psychology.

This book marks a critical contribution in assessing and extending the evidence base on the causes and consequences of women’s homelessness. Drawing together work from Europe’s leading homelessness scholars, it presents a multidisciplinary and comparative analysis of this acute social problem, including its relationship with domestic violence, lone parenthood, motherhood, health and well-being and women’s experience of sustained and recurrent homelessness. Working from diverse perspectives, the authors look at the responses to women’s homelessness in differing cultures and regions, and within various forms of welfare states. They focus in particular on relating the gender dimensions of welfare and social policy to women’s experiences when they become homeless. This innovative and timely edited volume will appeal to students and scholars of sociology, social policy, anthropology, and gender and women’s studies, along with international policy-makers.

"Every year, more than 2.5 million children are left homeless in the United States and the number of such families continues to rise annually. In every state, children are living in small quarters packed in with relatives-- in cars, in motel rooms, or in emergency shelters. In this vividly-written narrative, experienced journalist Richard Schweid takes us on a spirited journey through this "invisible nation,' giving us front-row dispatches of suffering families on the edge. Based on in-depth reporting from five major cities, Invisible Nation looks backward at the historical context of family homelessness as well as forward at what needs to be done to alleviate this widespread, although often hidden, poverty. Invisible Nation is a riveting must-read for everyone who cares about inequality, poverty and family life"--Provided by publishe

Fostering Nation? Canada Confronts Its History of Childhood Disadvantage explores the missteps and the promise of a century and more of child protection efforts by Canadians and their governments. It is the first volume to offer a comprehensive history of what life has meant for North America’s most disadvantaged Aboriginal and newcomer girls and boys. Gender, class, race, and (dis)ability are always important factors that bear on youngsters’ access to resources. State fostering initiatives occur as part of a broad continuum of arrangements, from social assistance for original families to kin care and institutions. Birth and foster parents of disadvantaged youngsters are rarely in full control. Children most distant from the mainstream ideals of their day suffer, and that suffering is likely to continue into their own experience of parenthood. That trajectory is never inevitable, however. Both resilience and resistance have shaped Canadians’ engagement with foster children in a society dominated by capitalist, colonial, and patriarchal power. Fostering Nation? breaks much new ground for those interested in social welfare, history, and the family. It offers the first comprehensive perspective on Canada’s provision for marginalized youngsters from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. Its examination of kin care, institutions, state policies, birth parents, foster parents, and foster youngsters provides ample reminder that children’s welfare cannot be divorced from that of their parents and communities, and reinforces what it means when women bear disproportionate responsibility for caregiving.

Prior to World War II, international adoption was virtually unknown, but in the twenty-first century, it has become a common practice, touching almost every American. How did the adoption of foreign children by U.S. families become an essential part of American culture in such a short period of time? Rachel Rains Winslow investigates this question, following the trail from Europe to South Korea and then to Vietnam. Drawing on a wide range of political and cultural sources, The Best Possible Immigrants shows how a combination of domestic trends, foreign policies, and international instabilities created an environment in which adoption flourished. Winslow contends that international adoption succeeded as a long-term solution to child welfare not because it was in the interest of one group but because it was in the interest of many. Focusing on the three decades after World War II, she argues that the system came about through the work of governments, social welfare professionals, volunteers, national and local media, adoptive parents, and prospective adoptive parents. In her chronicle, Winslow not only reveals the diversity of interests at play but also shows the underlying character of the U.S. social welfare state and international humanitarianism. In so doing, she sheds light on the shifting ideologies of family in the postwar era, underscoring the important cultural work at the center of policy efforts and state projects. The Best Possible Immigrants is a fascinating story about the role private citizens and organizations played in adoption history as well as their impact on state-formation, lawmaking, and U.S. foreign policy.