Ohio History Journal

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Book Reviews

Book Reviews

 

 

Saving the Waifs: Reformers and Dependent Children, 1890-1917. By LeRoy

Ashby. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984. xiii + 336p.; notes,

bibliographical notes, index. $37.95.)

 

This fine book reflects the current interest in dependent children, private

philanthropy, and public policy and shares the hypothesis of other recent

works that since child welfare is somehow at the heart of Progressive reform-

ism, understanding the "child savers" is key to understanding Progressiv-

ism.

In these respects, Saving the Waifs resembles Susan Tiffin, In Whose Best

Interest: Child Welfare Reform in the Progressive Era; Steven Schlossman,

Love and the American Delinquent: The Theory and Practice of "Progressive"

Juvenile Justice; Ellen Ryerson, The Best Laid Plans: America's Juvenile

Court Experiment; and David J. Rothman, Conscience and Convenience: The

Asylum and Its Alternatives in Progressive America. Although all of these

other historians concede the genuine humanitarianism of the "child savers,

in general they agree with Rothman that conscience often took a back seat to

convenience, as that was determined by the middle-class and socially con-

servative perspectives of the reformers.

Ashby offers us a more intimate, more sympathetic, and more complex

portrait of the men and women who sought to save the waifs, based on five

case studies of the agencies and institutions which they founded and admin-

istered. According to Ashby, the complexity of their motives and the uncer-

tainties of their goals and strategies stemmed from their being caught be-

tween the village values of voluntarism, family, and religion of the nineteenth

century and the modernization of the twentieth, with its attendant profes-

sionalization, impersonality, and commercialization. Child-saving became a

way, although an uncertain one, of managing the present.

Each case study illustrates this conflict and ambiguity. For example, the

directors of the Children's Home Society of Minnesota, a child-placing agen-

cy, found themselves torn between the desire to punish or control the illicit

sexuality of unwed mothers and the humanitarian impulse to shelter their il-

legitimate children. The women who established the orphanages of the Na-

tional Benevolent Association of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)

were in conflict not only with the personalist theology of the Church itself

(and its male hierarchy) but with the anti-institutional trends in child care of

the early-twentieth century. The success of the Ford Republic, an institution

for homeless and delinquent boys, owed much of its success to the period's

confusion of dependency and delinquency.

John Gunckel and his Toledo Newsboys' Association were praised for en-

couraging industry and self-reliance among the "newsies," on the one hand,

and criticized for perpetuating child labor, on the other. G. W. Hinckley,

founder of Good Will Farm, a home for dependent children, best personi-

fied the difficulties of teaching his charges "the values of an older, idealized

America that emphasized the work ethic, moral restraint, love, religious

faith, and service to others" in an organizational, commercial world.