Families and Foster Care: Philadelphia in the Late Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Philadelphia's Home Missionary and Children's Aid Societies, founded in the late nineteenth century, were two early foster care agencies whose middle-class founders attempted to control socially indigent urban youth by removing them to country homes. There the children, who were largely native-born, white Protestants, worked for their foster parents as servants or farm laborers. Since agency officials moved the youngsters frequently and rarely visited them, they led a disjointed existence and were not much protected from ill treatment. Nevertheless, the charities served a valuable social function. They permitted impoverished mothers and fathers, most of whom were single parents, to place their children temporarily in foster homes and thereby secure for them the basic necessities of life, which the parents themselves could not provide due to illness or unemployment.