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9780252084362 Academic Inspection Copy

Fostering on the Farm

Child Placement in the Rural Midwest
  • ISBN-13: 9780252084362
  • Publisher: UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
    Imprint: UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
  • By Megan Birk
  • Price: AUD $54.99
  • Stock: 0 in stock
  • Availability: This book is temporarily out of stock, order will be despatched as soon as fresh stock is received.
  • Local release date: 16/04/2019
  • Format: Paperback 256 pages Weight: 0g
  • Categories: History of the Americas [HBJK]
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From 1870 until after World War I, reformers led an effort to place children from orphanages, asylums, and children's homes with farming families. The farmers received free labor in return for providing room and board. Reformers, meanwhile, believed children learned lessons in family life, citizenry, and work habits that institutions simply could not provide. Drawing on institution records, correspondence from children and placement families, and state reports, Megan Birk scrutinizes how the farm system developed--and how the children involved may have become some of America's last indentured laborers. Between 1850 and 1900, up to one-third of farm homes contained children from outside the family. Birk reveals how the nostalgia attached to misplaced perceptions about healthy, family-based labor masked the realities of abuse, overwork, and loveless upbringings endemic in the system. She also considers how rural people cared for their own children while being bombarded with dependents from elsewhere. Finally, Birk traces how the ills associated with rural placement eventually forced reformers to transition to a system of paid foster care, adoptions, and family preservation.
"A richly detailed picture of child welfare in the period from 1870 to the Great Depression. The study's timeframe captures a significant period in the history of child welfare policy, while its geographical boundaries allow the author to examine the ground-level practices that resulted from those policies… An informative, interesting, and well-researched book that merits attention from historians in a broad range of fields."--Michigan Historical Review

"Fostering on the Farm is particularly strong in its study of the rise of state agencies, state laws dealing with dependent children, the role of judges, and the influence of Progressive-era reformers at the federal level. . . . What it says about the Midwest is applicable to Kansas and other states west of the Mississippi where farm placement of children was common, child indenture was acceptable, and welfare practices came under greater scrutiny during the early 1900s."--Kansas History
 
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