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The Farm, Foster Care, and Dependent Children in the Midwest, 1880–19201

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2013

Megan Birk
Megan Birk*
Affiliation:
University of Texas, Pan American
*
birkme@utpa.edu
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Abstract

Between the Civil War and World War I, the midwestern farm played an important role in the care of dependent children. Instead of paying families to take in children, welfare workers relied on farmers to take children in for free. However, the situation for dependent children and farmers changed during the Progressive Era. Movements to improve farming methods and standards of living in the hopes of keeping rural people on the land highlighted the difficulties of farm life. For the children placed in free homes with farmers, reformers sought to improve record keeping and supervision. Such reforms had unforeseen consequences. The bureaucracy needed to supervise children placed on farms increased costs, while farmers resented the intrusion. Children who labored for free on farms no longer learned skills useful in the modern, industrializing nation. As more systematic supervision became standard across the Midwest, farm placement lost its appeal. By examining the motivations for better supervision of placed-out children and how those plans became policy, this article reveals complexities, underestimated by previous scholars, in the commonly told story of the transition of child-welfare practices from an emphasis on free farm placement to paid foster care in suburban and urban settings.

Type
Essays
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 12 , Issue 3 , July 2013 , pp. 320 - 342
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2013 

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Footnotes

1

I would like to thank the UTPA faculty research council for providing summer financial support for this article. I would also thank the journal's readers for their constructive feedback, along with Brent M.S. Campney and the UTPA Women's Writing across the Curriculum group, who read early drafts.

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68 In 1917, an estimated 200 home-finding agencies worked inside the United States, a number that did not include institutions placing children independently. Annually, these agencies placed approximately 50,000 children. Slingerland, Child Placing in Families, 39.

69 Social Service Review 66 (Spring 1992).