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

The parent-child (and especially the mother-child) relationship is almost universally presumed to be natural, characterized by loving care and deemed essential for the survival and well-being of the young. It is also assumed that most if not all societies recognize and value this bond and generally support it. Kyle Ciani's book has the effect of "de-naturalizing" the relationship, revealing that parents' ability—their potential, their opportunity—to care for their children is not to be taken for granted. Rather, it is highly contingent, depending on many factors. On one side are the parents: their marital status; the mother's health; the family's financial stability; their race, ethnicity, religion, and class. On the other side is the society in which they dwell: its institutions and policies (both public and private), laws, ideologies, and beliefs about child-rearing; its political and economic stability. And then, of course, there are the children themselves—their ages, natures, presumed (in- or dis-)abilities. All or most of these factors must be in alignment for parents to have the option of caring for their children, but all too often, Ciani shows, this relationship has been disrupted, and children's care ends up being provided by someone or something other than the parents—or not at all.

Focusing on the city of San Diego and its environs as California became a state, Ciani tells a rich and complex story of how parent-child relationships evolved. One of the great virtues of this book is her broad definition of non-parental child care, which, over the century she covers, embraces not just conventional services such as day nurseries and childcare centers but also practices such as indenture and boarding. Not all of these were benign; some, like reformatories, were deliberately punitive. Some were chosen by parents, others very much not.

In the opening chapter, oxymoronically entitled "Indentured Care," Ciani recounts how dozens—perhaps hundreds—of Indian children were taken from their parents, sometimes in exchange for a nominal payment, and placed in situations with Anglo-Californian families that were euphemistically referred to as apprenticeships but amounted to a form of indenture. For financially straitened parents (many Indians were losing their livelihoods along with their land), these arrangements served as a strategy for family survival, but they had little recourse if the children were overworked or otherwise mistreated. The practice declined somewhat in 1886, when Catholic missionaries opened an industrial boarding school for Indian children, but treatment did not improve as the school sought to "save" them from their own culture, a goal it pursued with harsh intensity.

Around the same time, in-migration swelled the Anglo population, and as San Diego urbanized, class and racial/ethnic divisions sharpened. Many of the newcomers were young single women or working-class couples to whom paid maternal employment was no stranger. But what to do with their children while they worked? The solution—the Children's Home and Day Nursery (CHDN)—came from a group of benevolent women, most of them spouses of the city's successful businessmen. These women made it clear that childcare was to be "understood and defined as a social welfare program rather than as a benefit of employment"—a distinction that would become increasingly important as public support became briefly available and then disappeared (p. 22).

As its name suggests, CHDN cared for children by the day but also acted as an orphanage and child-placement service. At first staffed by volunteers, by the early twentieth century professional teachers and social workers began taking over day-to-day functions, leaving fundraising to the philanthropists. The professionals tended to be highly interventionist, screening applicants to determine whether they were seeking services "out of economic necessity and not because they had rejected motherhood"—a practice that applicants deeply resented (pp...