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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| Xiaobei Chen, Tending the Gardens of Citizenship: Child Saving in Toronto 1880s–1920s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2005)
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| XIAOBEI CHEN provides a "Foucauldian historical sociology of child protection" (7) during a 50-year period in Toronto ending with the Great Depression. But her concern is as much to compare child protection ideas as they emerged from that period with child protection ideas today as to trace the history of that earlier period. Following in Foucault's footsteps, Chen provides a detailed discursive analysis of a relatively small number of issues and "texts" to construct a meta-narrative about a particular phenomenon. Such efforts often lead to claustrophobic conclusions, which the consideration of a broader set of documents and perspectives might suggest were simply ahistorical. Happily that is not the case here. Chen adds a great deal to our understanding of the evolution of child protection in Canada. Unfortunately, however, her commitment to a particular methodology blinds her to insights that other historians in this area, some of whom she cites, some of whom she does not, have provided, somewhat diminishing the explanatory power of her book overall. |
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Chen's focus is on the Toronto Children's Aid Society [TCAS]. The story of the Children's Aid Societies in Ontario has been much explored by scholars, sometimes with a positive spin on J.J. Kelso and other middle-class founders, as in works by Leonard Rutman and Neil Sutherland, and more critically in works by P.T. Rooke and R.L. Schnell, and Katherine Arnup. Chen is especially interested in the hegemonic ideas about children that governed the thinking of TCAS leaders and the ways in which these ideas differ from today's notions of "children's rights." She also zeroes in on the concepts of cruelty and neglect that the TCAS embodied, and how their versions of these concepts diverged from earlier understandings as well as today's consensus. |
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Chen's evaluation of the rhetoric of the child-savers of the turn of the century leads her to conclude that their favourite metaphor about their work was the garden. Like gardeners, they were tending to finicky plants which, given too much of the right sort of attention or too little, would fail to thrive. Cruelty, which meant acts that were dangerous to children, or neglect, which was usually conflated with alcoholism or poverty, would result in a child growing up in society's garden as a defective adult, a criminal, or a wastrel. Society, from this perspective, had a right and an obligation to interfere when its little flowers were not being given the right quantities of water and sunlight. Though this often meant removing children from their homes and placing them in foster care, it also encouraged "supportive measures, such as playground facilities and Mother's Allowances." (147) By contrast, in recent years, an exclusive emphasis on personal safety for children has resulted in notions of individual responsibility and a diminished emphasis on collective responsibility. |
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Yet, as Chen recognizes, the child-savers mostly relied on home visits by a growing cadre of self-styled social experts, who produced case records that in turn became the basis for overall social policies sanctioned by charities and the state for dealing with children whose parents' child-raising styles did not seem to make them ideal "gardeners." This socially constructed expertise reinforced emerging bourgeois notions of correct behaviour by parents and children, and specific gender norms, serving in short as an institutional form of moral regulation. |
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But the intended victims of Children's Aid, parents of modest means and/or behaviours of which middle-class moralists disapproved, proved able in part to turn the TCAS to their own advantage. The TCAS operated a shelter for neglected children, meant to shield unfortunate children from abusive parents. But, in practice, ill parents, mothers with drunken husbands, among other instances of families needing temporary help with their children, came to use the shelter as a short-term respite facility. This enraged Kelso, who panicked that gender roles were being upset when a woman, rather than being submissive to her husband, could contrive to leave her husband temporarily in order to force him to change his behaviour, secure in the knowledge that she could temporarily place her children in the care of the TCAS. (85–6) The shelter became a political hot potato for the TCAS and a source of internal, gender-based divisions. Female board members, who composed all the members of the shelter committee, called for the building of a larger shelter that would offer more privacy for the children and offer training in domestic science for girls. But the all-male finance committee rejected their request as too costly. (98–9) In the 1930s the shelter was scaled back considerably and the move to community homes and foster homes began, threatening parents who faced short-term difficulties with the complete loss of their children. The antipathy to collective residential care, which is now so entrenched that no organized movement for child shelters exists, removed "for families who were not able to care for their children for various reasons ... a facility that could be made to work for them." (100) |
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By contrast, the closing of the detention room at the TCAS in 1920 demonstrated the separation that was occurring between notions of deterring criminal behaviour and protecting children from cruelty and neglect. The idea of a child-raising garden in which the right quantities of reward and punishment had to be applied was giving way to notions of protecting innocent children from harm by adults. As Chen suggests, notions that the child was innocent, as opposed to potentially being a criminal, were modern ideas rather than eternal notions about childhood. |
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While Chen's comparisons of current notions about children and turn-of-the-last-century notions are interesting, they are not especially persuasive. This is particularly the case in terms of her argument that we have moved away from collective notions of responsibility towards more individualist notions. The children's shelter and mother's allowances aside, much of what her book reveals about the child-savers is that they focused almost exclusively on the shortcomings of parents, especially mothers, who were not middle class. But she tends to downplay the issue of class. Both her bibliography and her account suggest an unawareness of Katherine Arnup's work on child-saver advice to mothers. Arnup suggests that the well-off men and women who tried to re-educate working-class and poor mothers underestimated the knowledge of their targets. Lack of resources, rather than lack of knowledge, made them unable to fulfill the standards that the child-savers expected from all mothers. Veronica Strong-Boag's work, cited in passing but not fully appreciated by Chen, makes a similar point, noting, for example, that women who ignored advice to have indoor plumbing, to take two week's bed rest after giving birth, and to give each child their own room were hardly motivated by ignorance of experts' notions of best practices. Chen also pointedly ignores studies of the experiences of children in the courts in this period, particularly Joan Sangster's work, which emphasizes the militant refusal of authorities to recognize any need to place more financial resources in the hands of parents as a way of deterring crime. Despite the gardening metaphors of the child-savers, they were as unwilling as more conservative elements of their social class to contemplate a real redistribution of wealth in favour of poor families. |
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If Chen is a touch too positive about the collectivist implications of child-saving work a century ago, she is also a touch too negative about the current state of collectivist impulses on behalf of children. Surely, the feminist campaigns for publicly subsidized childcare with the poor receiving the service free are more than a match for the earlier campaigns for mothers' allowances. Women's shelters, while as under-funded as children's shelters were in their time, may not serve all the same needs as children's shelters but do reflect a notion of collective residential care. If one limits oneself to discourse, there have been immense improvements in the position of both women and children, and Chen's pessimism based on analysis of one thread of today's discourse about children's rights seems unjustified. Yet, on the whole, she is right to be pessimistic about how much has actually been achieved to give either parents or children equal chances. But such pessimism might be better grounded in a political economy than a discursive framework. Looked at in terms of discourse, for example, the 2005 federal election discussion of childcare reflected a real debate between supporters and opponents of women's right to work. Looked at in political economy terms, it was a tokenistic debate between these two groups in which one group offered a negligible salary to mothers that might be a bonus to stay-at-home mothers while the other offered a token aid to parents requiring quality public daycare. |
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Alvin Finkel
Athabasca Univerity |
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