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Introduction Constructing Orphans I don’t know too much about [Mama’s] early life except that her Mother . . . died in 1891 when Mama was five years old. I don’t know why Grandpa . . . didn’t keep the family together, but I suspect it was a matter of where he worked and people available to keep the children. . . . For a while they were all in a Methodist Orphanage on the North Side in Pittsburgh. —“Roberta Caldwell Snyder,” in Gertrude Geisler’s unpublished book, “Getting to Know Grandma” The idea for this book began with these words, written by my grandmother about her own mother’s childhood in an orphanage. In thinking about her experience one day, it occurred to me that my great-grandmother was not an orphan at all—her mother had died, but her father was living—and it suddenly seemed strange to me that she and her siblings had been placed in an institution for parentless children. But it turns out that the vast majority of “orphans” in orphanages at the turn of the last century actually had one or even two living parents, often struggling through a family and financial crisis. Some historians have characterized the decision to institutionalize children as a family survival strategy, which resonated with my great grandmother ’s story: the orphanage allowed her to stay together with her siblings and eventually to be reunited with her father. But as I thought about this story some more, it seemed to me that my great-great grandfather had been using the orphanage as a form of child care. He had lost the mothering and housekeeping labor his wife contributed to the family economy and was not able to perform her work on top of his own wage-earning work. This book reconceptualizes orphanages as child care, exploring the development of institutional child care from 1878 to 1929 through a comparison of the United Presbyterian Orphan’s Home and the Home for Colored Children. Founded in Pittsburgh by the same person, these “sister” agencies permit the first full-length comparative study of black and white child Ramey_Child text.indd 1 2/15/12 10:12 AM care in the United States. I am particularly interested in the ways in which working families shaped the institutions through their use of them as child care: this study emphasizes the historical agency of parents and even the children themselves in that process. That is, it demonstrates the ways in which families were active participants in the history of institutional child care, making decisions and choices that affected the development of early social welfare. Working parents and their children continually negotiated and cooperated with orphanage managers, who also had to bargain with progressive reformers, staff members, and the broader community over the future of their organizations. Indeed, these actors constantly negotiated over child care practice and policy, and the choices they made together ultimately rested on deeply held assumptions of gender, race, and class. For instance, who should be caring for children (mothers but not fathers?), which parents should perform wage labor and which were deserving of assistance (should white women work? should black women receive support?), would children work or go to school (should poor children attend nursery schools or high schools?), and what would they grow up to become (manual or skilled laborers? domestic workers or wives and mothers?). I argue that the development of institutional child care at the turn of the last century was premised upon and rife with gender, race, and class inequities. Further, I suggest these persistent ideologies had consequences for the evolution of social welfare and modern child care. Finally, this book raises questions about the role of child care itself in constructing and perpetuating these social inequalities. In modern usage, the term“child care”brings to mind“day care,”perhaps provided at centers where parents drop off their children each day while they are at work. But throughout this study, I use the term “child care” more broadly to mean assistance with the daily labor of caring for children; and specifically in the case of orphanages, parents’ tactic of placing their children temporarily in institutions with the intention of retrieving them after a relatively short time. The comparison to modern day care is useful, however, as parents did not necessarily give up custody of their children and often maintained a degree of control over them while they were in the institutions. Some parents used orphanages interchangeably with day nurseries, a similar type...

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