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In Need of Friends: Children and Reformers in the Progressive Era
Erica B. Simmons, York University, Chapman University
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MARTEN, JAMES. Childhood and Child Welfare in the Progressive Era: A Brief History with Documents. Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2005. xiv + 192 pp. Introduction, illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $10.50 (paper), ISBN 0-312-40421-2.
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Some of the Progressive movement's greatest achievements were in the area of child welfare reform, such as the establishment of the United States Children's Bureau in 1912. Childhood and Child Welfare in the Progressive Era focuses on the plight of poor children and on "child-saving" efforts by reformers during the Progressive Era. The Bedford Series in History and Culture aims to let readers "study the past as historians do" through analyzing historical documents, and here succeeds admirably. Marten provides a wealth of primary source material representing an impressive range of perspectives. An excellent introductory essay is supplemented by contextual information introducing each section as well as each individual document or excerpt. A chronology of Progressive-era child welfare reforms, along with a list of "questions for consideration" and a bibliography, also make this an ideal text for high school or university classrooms.
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The major themes of child welfare in the Progressive Era are laid out in the introduction: the Progressive movement and its proponents, the changing view of childhood, the pitiable condition of child laborers, alarm over juvenile delinquency, and the host of Progressive efforts to improve the lives of children.
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The thirty documents which follow explore these themes and are culled from a wide variety of sources including reports, studies and memoirs. Familiar figures like Jane Addams, Jacob Riis, and Lewis Hine appear here alongside less familiar voices, especially those of children themselves—Milwaukee newsboys, a teenage prostitute, a delinquent boy in Chicago, and others. Surprise appearances are made by Golda Meir, Josephine Baker, Langston Hughes, and Harpo Marx, and they all offer moving accounts of their Progressive-era childhoods in America's urban slums and ghettoes.
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Marten explains that the rise of the urban middle class—from which most reformers came—led to new philosophies of child nurture emphasizing comfort, safety and security. But poor and immigrant families, crowded into tenements and struggling to survive, were unable to provide such an "ideal" childhood. Many of their children lived in conditions of almost unimaginable deprivation and suffering. As a result, says Riis, their "human instincts and cravings, forever unsatisfied, turned into a haunting curse; with appetite ground to keenest edge by a hunger that is never fed, the children of the poor grow up in joyless homes to lives of wearisome toil that claims them at an age when the play of their happier fellows has but just begun" (36).
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Progressives saw social scientific studies, surveys, and reports as the key to understanding social problems and promoting reform. Excerpts from some of these studies are included in this collection, and give the reader a grasp of the scope of the issues addressed. The 1911 Chicago Vice Commission, for example, looked at why young girls became prostitutes. Finding that most of the city's houses of prostitution were located in African American neighborhoods, the Commission asserted that this "is unjust, and abhorrent to all fair minded people. Colored children should receive the same moral protection that white children receive" (47).
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