Children of the Patria: Representations of Childhood and Welfare State Ideologies at the 1922 Rio de Janeiro International Centennial Exposition

The child does not only belong to the family . . . . Child rearing is no longer purely a question of family order, it embraces a multitude of interests for the social order . . . . The problem of childhood is the greatest national dilemma. ¹

Brazilian hygienist Dr. Alfredo Ferreira de Magalhães proclaimed his view of child welfare to an elite audience of medical, legal, political, military, and business leaders during the opening ceremonies at the 1922 First Brazilian Congress for the Protection of Childhood held in Rio de Janeiro. For the first time in Brazil, children had become a distinct focus of teachers, lawyers, military leaders, politicians, police, priests, judges, journalists, and novelists who struggled to incorporate liberal and positivistic ideas into public policies and institutions. Members of all classes of Brazilian society had cared for children and had lamented high rates of infant mortality well before the turn of the century. The 1920s movement, however, differed significantly from previous approaches to child welfare in Brazil. This was the first time that elites from such a wide variety of professions and positions of power insisted that the state assume responsibility for funding, implementing, and enforcing child welfare legislation and institutions.

Children were no longer seen as simply the offspring of individual families--they were seen as representing the nation's future and were therefore the nation's children. Child welfare, particularly for the poor, had a new political, economic, and social context. Late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century child welfare concerns were, at least in part, a response to the high number of children dying in Rio de Janeiro's streets, orphanages, hospitals, and homes from inadequate nutrition and hygiene, endemic disease, and frequent epidemics. ² This number only increased with the rapid urbanization, industrialization, and demographic expansion, which overwhelmed the infrastructural capacities of Rio, Brazil's capital city. ³

The representations of childhood at three events associated with the International Centennial Exposition in Rio de Janeiro in 1922--the Children's Museum, the First National Brazilian Congress, and the patriotic performance of 600 Patronatos Agrícolas students--demonstrate how elite conceptions of childhood, intertwined with notions of nationalism, modernity, and hygiene, formed the foundation of welfare state ideologies in Rio de Janeiro in the 1920s. ⁴ Thus, in Brazil, the conceptions of childhood and conceptions of a welfare state were (and still are) inextricably linked. These representations of childhood are important not only because they formed the basis for initial welfare legislation in Brazil, but also because they incorporated upper-class constructions of childhood that attempted to legitimize unprecedented institutional and state reach into public and private life, especially into the lives of lower class families. These events reveal that the child welfare projects of the 1920s, which, in time, dramatically changed relations between family and state and between mother and child, also helped preserve structures of power based on race, class and gender.

The development of welfare state ideology in Brazil began with institutional pressure on the state to implement child welfare policies in the 1870s, fifty years before literature on the social history of childhood and traditional historiography about the rise of welfare states usually suggests. These new conceptions of state responsibility for child welfare also mark the beginning of a shift from a 400-year-old tradition of child welfare being almost solely the concern of religious charity. Using several of the representations of childhood at the centennial events of 1922, we explore the complex set of concerns that motivated particular conceptions and practices of child welfare: economic interest in preserving a labor force, a concern with promoting an international image of a "modern" and "progressive" nation, fear of the criminal potential of poor children, and anxiety about the possibility of social...