Longing to "Belong": Foster Children in Mid-Century Philadelphia (1946–1963)

In 1956, W, a 15 year-old foster child residing at the Philadelphia Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children's temporary shelter, met with her case worker to discuss her future placement plans. After a failed attempt to return home to her natural mother, W expressed her deep disappointment and con fessed to suicidal thoughts. In a subsequent meeting with her worker, W said she wanted try another foster home and longed to "belong to just one person," despite a long history of failed placements. The worker, while sympathetic, ques tioned the girl's logic. Echoing the expert literature's depiction of biological ties as intractable, the worker attributed W's failed placement to her deep emotional attachment to her natural parents. The caseworker explained to W "that both she [W] and J [W's brother] had a close attachment to their mother both posi tive and negative and that it would be very difficult, if not impossible, for them to take on another mother." The 15 year-old client, like others, appeared to accept the worker's narrative: "W seemed amazed at what I said and certainly seemed to understand what I was explaining to her."1 The worker's account of her meetings with W provides a rare glimpse into the world of mid-century foster care and reveals how foster children used the casework relationship to articu late and organize their inner worlds. It also exposes social workers' veneration of biological bonds, and the paradoxical tendency for professional narratives to simultaneously elicit and marginalize children's voices. This essay investigates the experience of children in foster care at mid-century against the larger backdrop of shifting professional discourse on foster care, in cluding revisions in social work's family preservation ideology, the prominence of psychodynamic thought in the postwar social sciences and social work, and the strength of nuclear family ideology. Existing historical scholarship regarding foster care is largely focused on Gilded Age and Progressive Era reforms, the "re discovery" of child abuse in 1960s, and related policy initiatives in the 1970s. Given the absence of large-scale federal child welfare policy efforts, historical discussions of foster care provision often ignore the period of the 1940s through the 1950s altogether.2 This paper, in contrast, builds on my recent work that posits mid-century as a significant historical juncture in foster care provision. Moreover, as little scholarship on foster care examines the experiences or per spectives of children, this paper responds to calls from historians of childhood and considers the history of foster care from the perspective of foster children.3 The story of children's experience in foster care can be gleaned from three interrelated and mutually dependent vantage points: 1) the expert literature; 2) foster care caseworkers, and; 3) foster children. Historians interested in child voice inevitably confront the issue of scant source material. Case records from foster care agencies provide unique documentation of children's experience and, although translated by agency caseworkers, child voice. Increasingly used by so