Civilizing the Child
Discourses of Race, Nation, and Child Welfare in America
By (author) Katharine S. Bullard
Publication date:
26 November 2013Length of book:
158 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksDimensions:
237x159mm6x9"
ISBN-13: 9780739178980
In Civilizing the Child: Discourses of Race, Nation, and Child Welfare in America, Katherine S. Bullard analyzes the discourse of child welfare advocates who argued for the notion of a racialized ideal child. This ideal child, limited to white, often native-born children, was at the center of arguments for material support to children and education for their parents. This book illuminates important limitations in the Progressive approach to social welfare and helps to explain the current dearth of support for poor children.
Civilizing the Child tracks the growing social concern with children in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The author uses seminal figures and institutions to look at the origins of the welfare state. Chapters focus on Charles Loring Brace, Jacob Riis, residents of the Hull House Settlement, and the staff of U.S. Children’s Bureau, analyzing their work to unpack the assumptions about American identity that made certain children belong and others remain outsiders. Bullard traces the ways in which child welfare advocates used racialized language and emphasized the “civilizing mission” to argue for support of white native-born children. This language focused on the future citizenship of some children as an argument for their support and protection.
Civilizing the Child tracks the growing social concern with children in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The author uses seminal figures and institutions to look at the origins of the welfare state. Chapters focus on Charles Loring Brace, Jacob Riis, residents of the Hull House Settlement, and the staff of U.S. Children’s Bureau, analyzing their work to unpack the assumptions about American identity that made certain children belong and others remain outsiders. Bullard traces the ways in which child welfare advocates used racialized language and emphasized the “civilizing mission” to argue for support of white native-born children. This language focused on the future citizenship of some children as an argument for their support and protection.
Bullard’s most interesting contribution is her linkage of race, children, and social welfare. Concerned with the nation’s racial composition, reformers turned to poor white children and children of immigrants, attempting to civilize and mold them for citizenship…. The final chapter, on the Children’s Bureau, is the book’s strongest, with compelling sources and a clearer narrative. Bullard brings together the threads of race, nation, and childhood to demonstrate that the Children’s Bureau helped to ‘establish a nominal social citizenship’ for white American children. Here, too, Bullard clearly shows the role of social science in building racial distinctions into the mechanisms of the modern state…. [T]he book [is] approachable. Precisely because reformers like Riis and Addams are likely to be familiar names for students, individual chapters could stand alone in undergraduate courses. Bullard’s evenhanded insights enrich our understanding of social reform, particularly reformers’ motivations…. Scholars of race, childhood, and welfare will find interesting new insights into child welfare policy’s links with developments in social citizenship and the racialization of the modern American state.