“Cultivating Children as You Would Valuable Plants:” The Gardening Governmentality of Child Saving, Toronto, Canada, 1880s–1920s¹

Abstract

Abstract Gardening metaphors with English middle‐class overtones were widely used in the late nineteenth‐century child saving writings in Toronto, Canada to explain and promote the ideal mode of parenting and the objective of child saving. An analysis of gardening metaphors contributes to understanding mechanisms of bio‐power on the site of child saving. This paper argues that the child saving movement attempted to install a mode of proper parental control that can be described as “the gardening governmentality”– it was primarily positive/productive (yet without excluding repressive elements), individualized, intelligent, and localized.