Bookends Friday: Second Home

What institutions affected poor children the most in the 1800s and early 1900s? Churches? Check. Public schools? Check. And number three? According to Timothy Hacsi, it was orphanages, then better known as "orphan asylums." {1}

As it turns out, in his fascinating book Second Home: Orphan Asylums and Poor Families in America, we learn that your ancestors don't need to have been orphaned to have spent time in such places. They served to help poor families hold themselves together and reunite by offering what was in effect temporary child care for a few weeks, months, or years: "By the 1870s and 1880s...the vast majority of asylum children had at least one living parent, and many had two living parents." {94} (Note: this book isn't easy to find, so enjoy the GoogleBooks partial preview. There's also an insightful review in the October 1999 issue of the American Historical Review if you can gain access to the right sort of library.)

Unlike other institutions created early in the 1800s (prisons, insane asylums, reformatories), orphan asylums didn't usually aim to "fix" their clients, only to help them. If anything those who ran the orphanages, after close acquaintance and frequent interaction with poor parents and their children, came to reject the widespread American notion that anyone who is poor must be lazy, drunk, or otherwise deficient in character. With some exceptions (like Michigan's state school), they did not undertake the utopian project of removing poor children permanently from their families in order to "save" them. Because their goals were usually more humble, they succeeded where their more ambitious institutional cousins failed.