Child Care in Black and White: Working Parents and the History of Orphanages

Chapter 3. Boarding Orphans: Working Parents' Use of Orphanages as Child Care

chapter three Boarding Orphans Working Parents’ Use of Orphanages as Child Care In looking back over the years since the opening of the Orphan’s Home, we can see a long line of children, numbering into the thousands, going on, and on. All of these children have tarried with us for a while and received the protection and care and Christian training that loving hands and kind hearts alone can give. . . . Beside this line, we see another line of good and faithful women, who have given of their best to comfort and cheer these little ones, who, in some way, have lost the support of their natural protectors. —50th Annual Report United Presbyterian Women’s Association, 1928 In their fiftieth anniversary report, the United Presbyterian Orphan’s Home proudly reflected on the thousands of children they had helped and pictured them stretching back in time in a long procession next to a line of dedicated orphanage managers. Parents are not only missing from this imagined scene but are literally portrayed as absent from their children’s lives, the “little ones”having“lost the support of their natural protectors.”What’s more, the “protection and care and Christian training”required by children came not from their own families but from the “loving hands and kind hearts” of the managers, acting as substitute mothers to provide “comfort and cheer.” In their self-representations, the Home for Colored Children often painted an even more dismal picture of parents, pointing to not only their absence but their alleged abuse and neglect of children. For instance, managers described the institution as “A Home for those who are orphans, friendless, destitute, neglected, or ill treated.” They emphasized that they were authorized by their founding charter “[t]o bind out all children committed to its charge Ramey_Child text.indd 66 2/15/12 10:12 AM where maintenance is unprovided for by their parents or guardians.”1 Yet, as the previous chapter argued, most HCC and UPOH children had at least one living parent, and while a few were undoubtedly victims of abuse and neglect, the vast majority hailed from families struggling through crises to combine wage labor and child rearing. Indeed, the vast majority also had parents providing“maintenance”through board payments, and only a fraction were ever bound out through formal indentures. Beneath the surface of orphanage rhetoric and managers’ historical memory , parents were very much present and played a crucial role in the institutions . Parents initiated the admissions and dismissal processes, negotiating terms with the managers, and asserted control during their children’s stay. They viewed their children’s institutionalization as a temporary necessity and often a service for which they were paying, a deliberate parenting choice and not an abandonment of their parenting responsibilities. Families, including the children themselves, also helped to mold the nascent foster care system as it evolved in this period from formal indenture practices coordinated by the orphanages. While they were not always successful in getting what they wanted, families used the orphanages for their own purposes as a form of child care. “I will pay you every cent and work hard”: Parents in the Admission and Negotiation Process From their very first contact with the orphanages during the admissions process through their final decision to retrieve children, parents remained active in their children’s care. While managers liked to think of themselves as “child rescuers,” saving innocent children from the ravages of poverty— and by extension, saving them from their own poor parents—client families viewed their use of orphanage care quite differently.The UPWANA (UPOH’s umbrella association) characterized its orphanage work as a “Life Saving Station . . . to rescue the endangered lives stranded by poverty and misfortune ” and “a noble Christian endeavor to assist helpless humanity.”2 The WCA (HCC’s umbrella association) spoke of their work as “one of rescue, reconstruction and upbuilding.”3 Their rhetoric effectively erased parents, as the managers both literally and figuratively separated children from their families. While the orphanages’ public rhetoric disguised the presence of parents, this was more a matter of emphasis than conscious attempt to perpetuate an illusion: the managers chose to emphasize the plight of poor children over that of their struggling parents. In part, this reflected their deep ambivalence about women’s wage work, but it also promoted their boarding orphans 67 Ramey_Child text.indd 67 2/15/12 10:12 AM own role as...