Choosing to Care: A Century of Childcare and Social Reform in San Diego, 1850–1950 by Kyle E. Ciani (review)

Kyle E. Ciani's aptly named book, Choosing to Care, takes a sweeping view of child welfare efforts in San Diego, California, over the course of a century characterized by tremendous change that wreaked havoc on families' ability to care for their children. The city grew exponentially, severely outpacing housing and other infrastructure needs. Labor patterns shifted as entire sectors of the economy—such as traditional ranching, and the fishing and canning industries—dried up while others, including the military complex, exploded. Immigration and urbanization left new arrivals without kin networks to help with child care needs, especially when facing tragedies such as the death of a spouse, desertion, and illness.

Ciani examines the range of people and organizations who "chose to care" about the orphaned, sick, "dependent," and "delinquent" children in the burgeoning city. While many historians have focused more narrowly on a particular type of child-welfare institution (orphanages, foster care, the juvenile justice system), Ciani takes a broader view of child care that incorporates reform organizations, efforts aimed at rescuing young women potentially vulnerable to sexual exploitation, and government-sponsored programs. Her wider lens takes in more of the city's social welfare web that evolved in this period, largely operated by middle-class white women, that included day nurseries, settlement houses, the Traveler's Aid Society, school-based programs, the new San Diego County Welfare Commission, and even campaigns by the Women's Christian Temperance Union to shutter the red light district and raise the age of consent for girls from ten to eighteen. Ciani demonstrates the interactions between these social welfare reformers, organizational managers, employers, and political leaders. Parents and children appear, too, though their agency is more muted, as their voices and actions are less present in these institutional records.

The approach in Choosing to Care is squarely in line with histories of child-serving institutions of the period and other organizations built by women throughout the United States. Ciani frames the benevolent work of San Diego women within the long tradition of maternalism and illustrates the simultaneous ways in which their efforts served as charity and social control. She also argues that these women—along with the city's business and political leaders—developed an understanding of child care as a private responsibility and not an employer's obligation to workers as a benefit (other scholars have made the distinction between child care as a private versus public responsibility, leaving out employers). The reformers and city leaders also viewed the problem of child care as a women's issue, a challenge for working mothers, not working fathers; though, ironically, Ciani explains that the Children's Home and Day Nursery was founded in 1888 as a solution to the problem of men's absenteeism from work.

Where Choosing to Care breaks new ground is in its geographical specificity. West Coast histories often focus on Los Angeles and overlook San Diego, which grew to the nation's eighth largest city in the period. Ciani's crucial opening chapter sets the scene for San Diego's unique multicultural and transnational context by examining the nefarious roots of child welfare in the indentured labor system. While California joined the nation as a "free" state opposed to the enslavement of human beings, its 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians legitimized indentured labor as an acceptable form of care for Native American children. The law had dire consequences for thousands of children, who were victims of apprentice kidnappings, leading to the separation of families, school segregation, and cultural erasure in the name of "protecting" children. Ciani pays careful attention to the nuances of race, ethnicity, and place, looking at differences between specific Native American nations and clan networks; Californios, who were descendants of Spanish colonizers; those from Mexico and those moving back and forth across the...