Faith in Fostering: Catholic Adoption and Boarding-Out in Depression-Era New York

Catholic adoption and foster care practices have historically been shaped by the emphasis agencies placed upon the religiosity of substitute mothers. During the Great Depression, when fewer suitable women were available and more children were in need, the cultural and spiritual agendas of Catholic child-saving competed with the obligation to uphold professional standards of dependent child care. At the New York Foundling Hospital, the staff compromised to some extent on secular aspects of substitute-mother fitness in order to sustain the agency's religious mission of raising children within the faith. Devout Catholic women who wished to foster or adopt children enjoyed unprecedented opportunities during these years, able as they were to negotiate placement terms from a position of strength and resist some of the agency's dictates. Case records from the late 1920s through the early 1940s reveal how the pressures of faith-based child-saving under dire economic conditions allowed for improvisation between substitute mothers and the staff who assessed their worthiness, challenging narrow notions of proper motherhood and adoptability in children. Sources also show the resourcefulness of caseworkers in coping with a chronic foster home shortage.