Abandoned: Foundlings in Nineteenth-Century New York City (review)

In Abandoned: Foundlings in Nineteenth-Century New York City, Julie Miller shows how New Yorkers' early engagement with foundling children had little to do with charity. Instead, city leaders drew from European concepts of life and morality, seeing the illegitimate as nullus fillius, "beings without kin," and with limited rights of citizens, then imbued this idea with other cultural imperatives unique to the nineteenth-century American imagination. Foundling policy in nineteenth-century New York evolved not primarily out of a need to provide care for abandoned children but out of concerns related to immigration, Catholic-Protestant conflicts, and the dangerous consequences of rapid urban growth.

Miller begins by reviewing the story of foundlings in both history and literature from Rome to the early nineteenth century. This first chapter is perhaps the weakest in a very strong book, as it rapidly moves across centuries and also alternates between historical documents and literary concepts. Miller's strength throughout the book is her meticulous research, her attention to original documents, and her ability to pull important details from the scant recordkeeping. An overview of nineteen hundred years in one chapter simply does not give her sufficient space to work with documents. By the second chapter, however, Miller is able to focus on the specific conditions of a narrow historical period; she illuminates almshouse conditions that gave rise to an awareness of the need for infant houses. These almshouses made no distinctions between different categories of the indigent. For example, one large almshouse that eventually became Bellevue Hospital was simultaneously an almshouse, hospital, and penitentiary, caring for babies, prostitutes, vagrants, and the insane in one large, squalid facility.

Miller moves on to chronicle New York's growing awareness of infants and a changing perception of their importance. She reveals that by mid-century an evolving view of children as innocent victims of female indiscretion prompted politicians to look more closely at the condition of children in a city that saw half of its infant and child population, and almost its entire foundling population, die before they reached their fifth year. Reformers thought they could solve the problem by creating an infant home modeled on the London Foundling Hospital, an institution that emphasized culture and refinement, filling its facility with art and music, and allowing only first-time mothers to relinquish their children. The American plan to build a similar infant home was curtailed by the outbreak of the Civil War. However, the care of foundlings had become intertwined with a commitment to society structured on the sanctity of motherhood, the dangers of autonomous female sexuality, and the importance of the family structure—principles that would persist once the war ended.

The central chapter of Miller's study focuses on the three foundling institutions that opened after the Civil War. All three were based in religious organizations (two Protestant, one Catholic), and all three worked from the premise that female sexual misbehavior, rather than poverty or male conduct, was the cause of abandoned children. As a result, all three required that women who brought their infants to the home prove themselves repentant, industrious, and willing to follow the model of the establishments' matrons. All three were poorly funded, relying on the largesse of capricious and not-always-honest political machineries. They differed, though, in their levels of success. The Catholics, who Miller feels were more inclusive and accepting, were more successful than the Protestants in actually keeping the children alive. None of the institutions, however, enjoyed much success, for foundlings still continued to die.

In the last two sections of the study, Miller analyzes the causes for the demise of the foundling asylums. She ascribes their collapse to the loss of funding from corrupt political parties and the rise of scientific medicine. At the end of the nineteenth century, doctors and many administrators began to advocate that children be moved to rural communities, far from crowded urban conditions. Although survival rates in the new rural foster...