Believe it is all of the 21st century. Literally. [laughter] the greatest tribute i can give to her is were still not only talking, that actively cooperating and collaborating after all these years. Forerine earned her b. A. The university of indiana. She ended up here at the university of missouri. She was a fulbright lecturer in germany. Shes a nice for it in the social and political history of american women. Not just the womens movement, if that is even the term anymore, but the women who try to counter it. Her first book, republican 2006 bypublished in university of North Carolina press features one of the most was the first critics vociferous critics, phyllis schlafly. She published articles, gave presentations around the world, and kept our department going. That is why we are pleased to give her one of our distinct was Faculty Service awards. Distinguished Faculty Service awards. Moved on to a completely different form of political history, the intersection of social history and the details of government policy. Most always without tackle that on its own, much less a conjunction with social history in an area that almost no one had ever worked on. It took years of painstaking research and she produces absolutely breathtaking work. That we are so glad to help her wash today. Raising government children take history of foster children in the american welfare state. [applause] catherine thanks, jeff. That was lovely. I think it is a chirpy tribute to professor padley that we still collaborate. Thank you all for being here. I see some of you are sitting on the floor and i am sorry about that, but i am glad you were here anyway. I want to thank the kindred institute. I imagine a number of you are here for the first time. I am glad you had a chance to come in and see the space and i hope that you will seek out more information about the lectures and events at the tender institute. Its a wonderful addition to our campus. Seking around this room, i e many people who have been with the project for a long time. That includes colleagues, but also family and people from the community. That is exciting to see. I want to point out that among the members of the audience are people who have served as Foster Parents, birthparents, former foster children, people who work in the Child Welfare system, and i think that is really exciting to have that audience, along with colleagues from the university of missouri. Some of those people are the same people. Foster care is an imperfect system, and the adults who are a part of it, including judges, lawyers, social workers, Foster Parents, birthparents, the adults that are part of foster care off to get blamed unfairly for its many problems. Meanwhile the burden of our societys dislike of foster care falls heaviest on foster children themselves who are stigmatized simply for being a part of this system. It has been one of my goals in writing this book to treat everyones story with the dignity and complexity it deserves. This is a work of history. I have tried to tell some big, macro stories about historical change and systems and structures. I have always tried to remain mindful of the individual experiences of people who lived day today in the world of foster care. In the world of foster care. It affects a relatively small portion of the population, around 400,000 children in 2014. I think foster care is a kind of canary in the coal mine. It puts a spotlight on what is not working in our system of support for families. Here i want to offer you a quote says, historian who without an understanding of how poor children having cared for by welfare, no study of politics or Economic Development can fully explain what the american welfare state does not do very well. Of all the failures, none is more glaring than its inability to provide for poor children. My book is historical. Period from the 1930s, because the Great Depression and the new deal are so important to the story, going to roughly the 1970s which is when the ideals of the modern welfare state or the ideals that reformers thought they were creating, the mid70s is where they had clearly not come to fruition. Historical, but im assuming a lot of people are here because they have an interest in the foster care system today. Telling you an by few aspects of the 20th century foster care that are really profoundly different from the system today. Just so you are not confused. One of thet things that is very different is cpr was extremely rare in the mid20th century. Gary really happened there is rarely happen unless parents relinquished rights to their children. When children did become available for adoption, Foster Parents are almost never considered as potential Foster Parents as potential adoptive parents, which is also very different from the way the system works today. The majority of foster placements as late as the late 1950s were done on a voluntary basis. Parents went and asked for the service of foster placement. That is very different from today. Imfor most of the period looking at, children of color were not overrepresented in the system what they are today. Mid20th care is really different from the system you might be familiar with today. And i can talk more in the queue and day about why some of us changes happened. I want to focus on a couple of themes of my book. First of all, i will take a broad look at the origins and development of foster care, mid20th century foster care, and how he created as part of our modern system of welfare provision. Secondly i will focus on one aspect of that system, welfare provision, which is what i think of as the tricking us of a system trickiness of a system are provided by private families. Public Services Provided by private families. One of the central premises of my book is that even though foster cares early architects did not see it as white, foster care became a critical part of our modern welfare state. Its development was deeply connected to the fortunes and assumptions of other programs that are better known, like aid to dependent children and old age insurance. Foster care was also linked the ms of other provisions welfare provisions that did not become part of her social safety nets such as federally provided day care. 1930s and the new deal, foster care was not really a system at all. It was a kind of spotty hodgepodge of practices with roots in much older systems of caring for dependent children. This is not a new or modern problem that societies have children whose parents either cannot take care of them or the community believes are doing such a poor job of caring for them that somebody else needs to do it. This is not a new problem. What a society or community is responsibility to these children are . Early systems date back to the 17th century, can include indentured, under which poor children could be bound to an adult. Some states still have Indenture Laws on the books into the 20th century, which is pretty surprising. Not that it was used much. In the early 19th century, four children for sometimes put into adult prisons because there were no institutions specifically for children. That practice of placing for children in prisons is what i continued to be used with black children well into the midst 20th century because there were no other resources for them. Developed that they are meant to be a more humane alternative to placing children into adult prisons. They are developed over the course of the 19th century, first as private institutions that are usually affiliated with a religious group. By the second half of the 19th century some states are establishing public orphanages. Most orphanages served only white children, although some separate black orphanages or established by the late 19th century. It is important to remember that children in orphanages were usually not actually orphans, for full orphans. They sometimes had one parent living, or even both parents living but because those parents were poor perhaps the father had lost work or the mother had died or a key adult was ill, whatever reason families cannot care for their children on their own and the returned orphanages as a place to put their children and keep them safe with the expectation that they would come oneen the family fortunes improved. Fortunes improved. By the mid19th century were plenty of critiques of orphanages from those who thought that children did not belong in institutions, that they belonged in families. This was part of the impetus behind the famous orphan train system you mightve heard of before. That is a term created in the 1970s. It was not used in the 19 century. It was often called leasing out or placing children in free homes. Free homes because the families who took the children were not paid any money to do so. Placing out to free homes. Poorwas a system by which immigrant catholic children were sent from eastern cities to rural areas to live with farm families in the midwest, the west. Usually the idea was they are going to her to live permanently, although most were not formally adopted. These children who went on the orphan trains were very often not orphans. They had parents, for at least one parent. They were three children a lot of the time. Sometimes they had families. The organizations sending children west, like the Childrens Aid Society of new york city, they were private organizations but they often received some public subsidy. The orphan trains, like a lot of other protosystems are combinations of private and public efforts. Another precursor to 20th century foster care were boarding homes. In boarding homes, unlike free homes, the parents caring for payment received some to cover the care of the child. These arrangements were sometimes made by orphanages who wanted to put children into families so they would pay a family to board the children. These arrangements also happened between families. The family where the father is unemployed, the mother had died, they might go to another family in the community and say would you care for my child while i find a job and then pay that woman to do so. What i have of here is an example of advertisement for the boarding of children or the taking in a children. This was from a later period, 1939. This is how these arrangements were made. Eventually states and cities began making it illegal to advertise for the boarding of children like this. But it is a practice that continues for quite a while. Out of home care for children work steadily from state to state. It was more common in urban areas than rural areas. It was a mixture of public and private. The Child Welfare profession was emerging in the early 20th century and it was increasingly anderned about children families being separated by whatever means. Orphanages, orphan trains, boarding homes. They thought children should be living with her families of origin. In 1909, some of the leaders of the Child Welfare reformers persuaded president roosevelt to hold a white house conference on the care of dependent children. This event, this conference is very important for people who study the progressive era, history of american state building, the history of female reform. What is important about it to me today is that it is out of this conference that we get one of the key tenets of 20th century Child Welfare. The idea that no child should be separated from parents for reasons of poverty alone. That was one of the key principles. Do not separate for reasons of poverty alone. Instead, performers at the conference who agreed on this principle supported the creation of state level mothers pensions, whereby single mothers would receive some minimal thatrt from the state so she would not need to leave her children unattended while she went to work in a factory or she would have to place her child in orphanages or boarding home or whatever. That is the idea of mothers pensions. One of the men who attended the conference, max mitchell, it was affiliated with Jewish Charities of boston, he put it this way. Instead of breaking up a home and paying for the board of her children and a private family while the mother is taught a trade under the impression she will develop an earning capacity, rather than doing that, let the amount involved be paid to the mother in the exercise of her own trade, the bringing up of her children, her highest calling. I think we can look at those ideas today and this might look like a family fairly limited vision. Thinking ofce to women as needy economic independents. That is clearly there. Also when you dont quite see in the quote but which is really part of this as well is the focus, almost exclusive focus on nativeborn children and european immigrant children. This vision of who was going to be helped by mothers pensions is not include africanamerican families, mexicanamerican families. There is a lot of limits to the vision, but there are other ways in which the concept of mothers pensions was very forwardlooking. On the one hand the acknowledgment that immigrant mothers, even unmarried mothers, even very poor mothers could form families that were worthy of preserving. That is a new idea, not an idea everybody agrees with one they articulate this. Also significant is the assumption behind mothers pensions that family ties are worth preserving. That children have ties to their biological families that are very powerful, very significant and should be preserved if possible. 1930s almost every state had passed some form of mothers pensions, although it should be always remembered the amount these mothers pensions paid for almost never enough to actually enable a single mother to devote her life to caring for her children without having to get some other kind of payment. Mothers pensions are growing in ns and the 20s. Placement varies a lot from state to state. In some places child worker work was being conducted almost entirely by private, usually religious organizations. This can also be set of welfare provision in the United States more generally in this period. States were beginning to get involved in providing Public Programs in the early 20th century, but there was no federal unemployment insurance, no federal widows pensions, no federal oldage pension, no federal minimum wage. Some state for setting up their own systems, but not all. Had formedexperts two organizations i look at a lot in this book and will be really important for the development of the profession, the u. S. Childrens bureau and the Child Welfare league of america. Those organizations are wanting to professionalize Child Welfare work. They want to rationalize Child Welfare services. Not just foster care. They are going to get real opportunities to do that in the 1930s. Depression was devastating for many, many families. But in some ways we can seek the depression as providing new opportunities to build this Child Welfare system. Toause the depression leads the new deal and the development of the Social Security act. Other new deal programs as well. I have to look up every now and then imager it is the right slide. The Child Welfare advocates, some of them are able to be involved creating these programs like the Social Security act. They see an opportunity in being able to help craft the Social Security act. They see an opportunity on the one hand to reduce the number of children who are getting placed in foster care because their parents are too poor to care for them. On the other hand they see an opportunity to modernize child placement and to begin to create a more stable system of public Child Welfare. A more stable system of Child Welfare services that would meet new professional standards that the Childrens Bureau and the Child Welfare league are trying to develop. These reformers, if you know the world of female reform, people from the Childrens Bureau really believe in the promise of this nascent new deal state to provide what they thought of as that would make it no longer necessary to place children outside their homes. Was ial security act it is a big piece of legislation. Today it is best known for title ii, old age insurance. When people say Social Security, they mean old age insurance. It is actually a much bigger system than that. Foster care never received the prominence of old age pension or Survivors Insurance or age dependent children, but the 1935 three didtitle v part allow some federal money to be spent on something called other Child Welfare services. That was a category that included foster care. Know theyot could not be used for board payment. Federal money could not be used to pay foster families to care for foster children at all. Up title v did help set statewide agencies where there were not any already. That is an kind of thing the money could be used for, to create infrastructure in rural areas because rural areas where the most lacking in any kind of Child Welfare infrastructure. In 1935, it were 11 states that had no statewide Child Welfare department at all. By the end of 1939, all the states did. That is being done with that federal money. That was important to Child Welfare reformers, developing the infrastructure. Even more important was all of the rest of that. The other things the Social Security act it. Grace abbott, a wellknown Progressive Social worker was chief of the Childrens Bureau for a while. She expressed her enthusiasm for what would become the Social Security act this way. Provision for the unemployed is a Child Welfare program. If we get the a