November 4, 2024
Religious indoctrination, capitalist exploitation, and racial oppression motivated 19th- and early-20th-century America’s methods of dealing with orphans, an attitude that still has ramifications today, argues PW contributor Martin in this powerful debut study. Martin, who is herself a “full orphan”—someone who had both parents die as a child—draws on a deep well of research to show that, despite popular culture’s “fixation” on orphans as avatars of can-do bootstrap-ism, most American orphans were—and continue to be—forcibly separated from at least one living parent. Indeed, Martin paints popular orphan stories like Little Orphan Annie and the Boxcar Children as a pernicious form of propaganda to justify America’s penchant for family separation—a legacy that she argues has been repressed via a kind of “historical amnesia.” To make her case, Martin recaps numerous examples of family separation—from the forced removal of Indigenous children from their homes to the turn-of-the-20th-century practice of transporting poor white children west as frontier laborers. She also traces the federal government’s long-term (and ongoing) resistance to providing financial support for poor families with children, despite a robust history of advocacy from reformists (even the New Deal’s welfare program was so loaded with caveats that it didn’t do much to keep families together, Martin writes). It’s a damning assessment of America as a society built on the exploitation of children.
November 1, 2024
In her first book, journalist Martin examines the history of orphanhood in America. As the Industrial Revolution and waves of immigration brought more people of European descent into cities and away from extended family, religious institutions stepped in to care for impoverished, white, dependent children. Meanwhile, after the Civil War, Black orphans were often placed into indentured servitude to their former enslavers. Native American orphans were sent to boarding schools for forced assimilation. Orphanages and boarding schools often housed more children whose parents were alive but couldn't afford to care for them than children without living parents. Martin explains the genesis of orphan trains, the ingrained racism of orphanhood in America, the gradual change from institutional orphanages to foster care, and the ongoing lack of social policies like universal childcare and basic income that would help families stay together rather than enter "the system." Her critiques of how orphans are portrayed in popular culture, from The Boxcar Children to Annie and beyond, are scathing. A thought-provoking look at a system that has always been dysfunctional.
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