In 1934, George Morris of Canton, Ohio, abandoned his wife and four young children. Mrs. Morris tried to apply for a mother’s pension in order to sustain her family but was told she was ineligible, presumably because her husband was still legally responsible. She therefore had to find employment. But her job as a housekeeper left Mrs. Morris unable, in the eyes of the court, to provide for her children.Footnote ¹

That same year, Frederick Collins and his wife were living in Washington, D.C., with their four-year-old child. Collins’s annual income of $1,100 was meager, but the family was making ends meet. Then his wife “suddenly became insane” and was hospitalized. Mr. Collins was forced to stay home from work indefinitely in order to care for his child.Footnote ²

Nine years later, Mrs. John Lane of Fulton, New York, had had enough of her abusive husband, who earned little income. Planning to leave him, she hoped to secure a job at a defense plant in Syracuse. But she needed someone to care for her young sons in order to do so.Footnote ³

These distressed families each turned to local child welfare agencies for help. Given the inadequacy (or absence altogether) of public assistance, homemaker services, day care, and battered women’s shelters, temporary out-of-home placement of the children—what came to be known as foster care—was the only service available.

In the late 1930s, the network of child welfare professionals located in private agencies, public departments, advocacy organizations, and the U.S. Children’s Bureau, had grown optimistic that federal New Deal programs—such as Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), survivor’s insurance, and unemployment insurance—would eliminate (or at least sharply reduce) the role poverty played in separating children (like those of Morris, Collins, and Lane) from their families.Footnote ⁴ Although these professionals did not always speak with one voice on all matters, they developed a general consensus around a number of issues. Foster care, they envisioned, would develop into a small but important, efficiently administered service that would reach children from difficult families whose problems were more complex than those of mere poverty, thus requiring the casework and child-placing skills offered by specialized professional social workers. Foster care belonged to this network’s broad vision of publicly provided family security.

But foster care was the last resort. Child welfare reformers believed that the 1935 Social Security Act would be a godsend for children in general, keeping families together and enabling more children to be raised in their own homes by their own parents. Children would be protected through programs designed to provide family security. Ideally, the welfare state would support the male breadwinner; when no male breadwinner was present, it would grudgingly support single mothers who met certain standards of need and propriety. Only when there was no mother or a mother deemed inadequate or unworthy, would state, local, and private funds support a substitute mother in the form of foster family care.

When the Social Security Act passed, a broader vision of child welfare services was conceivable. Indeed, the Children’s Bureau and the Child Welfare League tried to promote public homemaker services to help families where the primary caregiver was incapacitated, or casework services to help families manage budgets, obtain special services for a disabled child, or deal with marital conflict, as well as other services to enable children in vulnerable circumstances to reside with their parents. Yet these programs remained underdeveloped. In the decades that followed, the practical focus of child welfare services was “largely on care of children away from their own homes.”Footnote ⁵ By the 1950s, foster care had become, in the words of one scholar, “the heart of the child welfare system.”Footnote ⁶ Foster care would become a disparaged form of “welfare” that stigmatized the women who provided it, the children who received it, and their families. Today, poverty and poverty-related neglect play a critical role in determining which children are removed from families and placed in foster homes.Footnote ⁷ But child welfare reforms had hoped for something better.

Policy historians now recognize that gender and racial assumptions shaped the development of the American welfare state, particularly social insurance and ADC.Footnote ⁸ Foster care developed in tandem with those systems; thus reformers’ normative notions about male breadwinning, female dependency, and female caregiving also helped shape the system of foster care. But the shifting fortunes of foster care illuminate more: they show how the professionalizing agenda of social workers and their vision of child welfare meshed with a still uneasy relationship between public funding of services and private (often sectarian) implementation of them, as well as the corrosive erosion of services when they come to be funded as “welfare.”Footnote ⁹

A foster care “system” can hardly be said to have been in place in the early 1930s, although in practice foster home care did exist. We can find it in informal placements between families (without involvement of any agency), a type of arrangement that had occurred for decades and that might best be characterized as temporary exchanges of children between one group of poor, often single-parent, families who could not care for their children and another group of poor families, often female-headed, who desperately needed the added income that boarding mothers received.Footnote ¹⁰ And foster home care existed in a newer form—as a loose network of public and private boarding home placements arranged by agencies, whose staff had not always received training in the emerging “art” of child placement. Agency placements were inevitably uneven in their availability and of uneven quality.Footnote ¹¹ Most agencies were private, often sectarian, subject to the governance of voluntary boards and reliant on private donations. Services were scant in rural areas, and were rarely available to black families; when agencies relied on untrained staff, they placed children in any available home, without regard to the individual needs of the child.

There were other methods in circulation for addressing the needs of dependent children. Adoption, which formally placed children in permanent, new homes, had its advocates, at least for a time.Footnote ¹² In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some had presented adoption as a form of child rescue, but by the 1910s child welfare reformers had reached a general consensus that poor children were best cared for by their own parents, namely, their mothers. To permanently deprive children of their biological families was anathema. Adoption became a means of addressing a private need (family formation, coping with infertility) rather than a public one (meeting the needs of poor children). Orphanages continued to be an alternative for children whose parents could not or would not care for them, and had the advantage of allowing parents to retain legal and emotional ties to their children.Footnote ¹³ Yet by the 1930s, orphanages were falling out of favor—and out of money. Their role would diminish as the argument that most children were best cared for in a family setting gained credence. Work homes for dependent children were now considered exploitive. Increasing urbanization also had sharply reduced the supply of so-called free homes, in which children were incorporated into rural household economies without payment from any agency.Footnote ¹⁴

With these developments, boarding homes—in which an agency paid foster parents a nominal board rate to cover some of the costs of providing for children—seemed the best solution for children needing out-of-home placement because they offered some assurance that children would be cared for in a family that did not value them merely for their labor and because, unlike adoption, they did not require parents to permanently sever their ties to their children.Footnote ¹⁵ In 1933, 27 percent of dependent children in out-of-home care were in boarding homes, up from 10 percent in 1923.Footnote ¹⁶

Although paying board to foster mothers had been established practice in some agencies for decades, other child welfare professionals found the shift to boarding homes troubling for both philosophical and practical reasons. On the one hand, they were suspicious of women who received money to care for children.Footnote ¹⁷ On the other hand, agencies simply did not have the funds to pay adequate board, relying on a child’s own parents to partially meet the costs of boarding (which many could not), private donations, and local, or occasionally state, appropriations. In 1936, only twenty-nine states were funding foster home care. A few used government monies to subsidize private agencies that placed children in foster homes, although the U.S. Children’s Bureau took a dim view of this practice, reflecting the widespread belief among social workers that public monies should be administered by public entities.Footnote ¹⁸

The lack of stable public funding for child welfare services became particularly problematic during the Depression. In December 1934, 8 million children under the age of sixteen were living in families receiving emergency relief.Footnote ¹⁹ Relief undoubtedly kept many families together. But relief was inadequate and other families collapsed under financial strain, turning to child welfare agencies for help or coming under the scrutiny of courts that then removed children they considered to be neglected. The prevalence of both scenarios meant the need for boarding homes for dependent children greatly surpassed the availability of free homes. And the funds to pay for boarding homes were scarce, leading to decisions that professionals felt were not always in the best interest of children.

We see the dimensions of the problem through the case of a Connecticut man who—perhaps because his wife had died, perhaps because she had left him, the record does not say—placed his two children in a boarding home in October 1935. He made regular payments (of around $4.50 per week) to the boarding “mother” until, as with so many wage-earning men, his employment became irregular. With the father no longer able to pay board consistently, no public funds earmarked for such cases, and no private funds to bridge the gap, the children had to be placed in institutional care, not because such a shift was considered best for them but simply because of the “financial aspect.” Connecticut’s child welfare agency had money allotted for institutionalization of children, but not for boarding homes. Not only were the needs great and the resources scarce, but inadequate child welfare staffing resulted in poor options for children and their families. In Connecticut, many districts had not a single staff member assigned to the work of “rehabilitating,” as social workers put it, families whose children had been removed, rendering the return of children to their relatives “practically impossible.”Footnote ²⁰

The critical need for foster-care funding in the early years of the Depression led to requests that funds given to nascent federal programs be made available to state and local providers of child welfare services. Local agencies, despairing at their inability to provide foster home care for all needy children, pleaded to the Children’s Bureau and other federal agencies to see if there was “any possibility whatsoever of federal aid?”Footnote ²¹ With its assets frozen, the (private) Louisiana Children’s Home Society had to close its doors in March 1933. “Men get releif [sic] from the employment releif [sic],” the society’s supervisor wrote to the Children’s Bureau. “Why cannot the helpless and dying children get Releif [sic] from the R.F.C [Reconstruction Finance Corporation]?”Footnote ²² President Roosevelt had just taken office, suggesting the possibility of a change in policy. But Federal Relief administrator Harry Hopkins would rule in June that federal relief funds could not be used for foster care, thus continuing the policies of the Hoover administration.Footnote ²³

President Roosevelt did pursue sweeping measures to help families that some in the child welfare field hoped might directly support foster care. In 1934, he established the Committee on Economic Security to draft plans for what would eventually become the 1935 Social Security Act. A year later, B. H. Robinson of Utah’s Juvenile Court Commission urged the committee’s assistant director that the child welfare grants-in-aid of the proposed legislation be made available to pay the board costs for foster children. In Utah, Robinson explained, after several years of “crippled public revenues,” juvenile courts were becoming reluctant to assume custody of children living in deplorable conditions because the counties and states had “no financial ability to provide for boarding home charges.” With the county unable to pay for foster care, an estimated 150 children remained in “home conditions which offer no advantages.”Footnote ²⁴ What was needed, Robinson believed, was legislative authorization to use federal money for foster care.

Robinson’s plea went unheeded. The Social Security Act allocated very little federal money for foster home care and none at all for board payments. Instead, New Deal reformers, including those with ties to the child welfare field, planned to develop programs that would systematically provide security to families and thereby make foster care unnecessary. Security for families, they argued, would mean security for children. That vision of family security, rooted in Progressive Era thought, rested on firmly held notions of male breadwinning and female dependence and caregiving that reinscribed a family wage ideal increasingly unobtainable by so many families.Footnote ²⁵

Strengthening the earning power of fathers and providing aid to mothers when fathers died or deserted would enable children to be raised by their birth families. The National Labor Relations Act (1935), Unemployment Insurance (1935), and the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938) would shore up male breadwinning. To bypass the deficiencies of state mother’s pensions, ever financially strapped and uneven in coverage, child welfare advocates supported the creation of Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), Title IV of the Social Security Act. This title would provide federal grants on a matching basis to states that established ADC programs that met federal guidelines. The hope was to make ADC more widely available than were mothers’ pensions, the state-level approach begun during the Progressive Era.Footnote ²⁶ Substitutes for male breadwinning would be available not only through ADC but also through the more generous Old Age Survivor’s Insurance (Title II of the Social Security Act as amended in 1939), which provided support for the minor children of a worker (in covered occupations) if he died, as well as for his widow.

The kind of government benefits a child received depended on the kind of family she lived in. But some children stood outside this vision of family security altogether.Footnote ²⁷ ADC, although a federal program, allowed states to pass individual criteria for eligibility that continued to prevent many poor children from receiving assistance because local administrators considered their mothers to be unworthy. In the 1940s and 1950s, several southern and western states passed laws restricting ADC eligibility to homes considered “suitable.”Footnote ²⁸ Especially in the South, such rules were used to keep African American female-headed families out of the ADC program. Those married couples, in which the father worked in an occupation not covered by social insurance, minimum-wage laws, or the National Labor Relations Act, lacked protection for their breadwinning ability, a problem that also disproportionately affected black families. But it was not only children of color who found themselves outside the circle of the welfare state. A widower with young children could not collect survivor’s benefits, even if his wife had worked in an occupation covered by survivor’s insurance.Footnote ²⁹ And he was unlikely to receive ADC. Men could not be both worthy and dependent.

New Deal reforms to promote family security, in other words, supported male breadwinning and female dependency. Such provisions assumed that dependency and caregiving was normative and desirable for white women, but never for men. The point was not to enable women’s economic self-sufficiency or to allow men’s caregiving, but to make it possible for women deemed deserving to care adequately for their children and for men to financially support their wives, children, and survivors. The boundaries of family security, then, did not encircle all families or all children. Yet reformers were optimistic that most would be reached, ending the pitiful scenarios of earlier decades in which children were separated from their families simply because their parents were too poor to provide for them adequately.Footnote ³⁰

By the mid-1930s, the passage of a number of New Deal measures convinced child welfare reformers that conditions for America’s most vulnerable children would improve. The New Deal would separate children who needed substitute homes because their families were poor but productive and upstanding from those children who were permanently dependent, orphaned, or chronically ill-treated. Only the latter children would then need foster care. Certainly, foster care required better funding and wider availability than in the past; yet children should only be removed after all the new possibilities for “maintaining the child in his own home under proper conditions” had been explored.Footnote ³¹

Thanks to the New Deal, foster care would now be reserved for “difficult” families like the Youngs of Michigan, whose seven minor children entered foster care in 1940. The Youngs appeared to have lost custody of their children because of poverty and the related stress suffered by the parents. Mrs. Young had borne thirteen children, three of whom died in infancy. According to local officials, the Youngs used various aliases and moved more than forty-three times in an attempt to avoid creditors. Landlords and neighbors complained that the parents “constantly quarrel[ed],” used profane language, committed vandalism, and neglected their children. The schools reported that the children were frequently absent, performed poorly, and were “dirty and unkempt.” On the visit that prompted the children’s removal, the mother and the seven youngest children were “all living and sleeping in one room.”Footnote ³²

Mr. Young, who wanted his children returned, certainly believed that their removal occurred for reasons of poverty. Local officials saw the situation differently. Undoubtedly the Youngs were poor. Indeed, the family had received public relief and charitable assistance off and on over the previous fifteen years. But this family had “always been extremely difficult to handle,” according to a representative of the local juvenile court. The Youngs, it seems, were not suffering merely from poverty but from broader kinds of dysfunction, including the parents’ unwillingness to perform their conventional duties within the family. The Public Welfare Department had found wage work for George Young, but he turned the position down. He was referred for a WPA job but failed to report. Mrs. Young repeatedly kicked her husband out of the house.Footnote ³³ In other words, he was a failed provider, she a failed dependent and caregiver.

Foster family care became not only a remedy deployed by child protective services but also a solution voluntarily sought out by troubled families. In July 1941, Mrs. Andrews of Minneapolis left her husband and five children without word. Her twenty-nine-year-old husband, by his own admission, occasionally had struck her and struggled with alcohol abuse. Nonetheless, he was bewildered by her departure and overwhelmed by the responsibility of caring for his children. By the end of July, he had been laid off from his job. Both sets of grandparents were in the area but preferred that the children be committed to an institution. In September, Mr. Andrews requested boarding home placements. Children’s Services agents were reluctant to board the children because they believed the family could remain together if the father would accept a homemaker to help with the children, meals, and housework, but he refused the aid. To the agency, Mr. Andrews’s unemployment seemed only part of the problem. Depressed about his wife’s absence, inclined to drink, having only dysfunctional relationships with relatives who might have helped, Mr. Andrews would not accept the services that might prevent the breakup of his family, and thus appeared unwilling to assume his own responsibilities. In September, two of the children were placed in a boarding home, two in an institution, and one with a relative.Footnote ³⁴

The states of Michigan and Minnesota only indirectly received federal money to cover the costs of placing the Young and Andrews children in foster family care. The Social Security Act did not supply any funds specifically for foster care. But Title V, Part III did give grants to the States “for the purpose of promoting child-welfare services for dependent, neglected children, and children in danger of becoming delinquent, particularly in rural areas.”Footnote ³⁵ As the Children’s Bureau envisioned, such services would be available for children in cases of “extreme neglect . . . , feeblemindedness in parents and children, cruel and abusive parents . . . children who are delinquent . . . , or who suffer from mental disturbances.” These situations required “skilled investigation of the individual needs of the child” in order to determine and provide the appropriate services that were available.Footnote ³⁶ What these services entailed was not spelled out in the act (and would not be until revisions in 1962), but they could include homemaker, casework, child protective and disabled children services, and other programs for children in their own homes—along with foster home care. Early visions of “child welfare services” omitted day care, still considered controversial among child welfare experts. Although foster care was certainly understood to be part of child welfare services, Mary Irene Atkinson of the U.S. Children’s Bureau spoke for many of her colleagues when she optimistically imagined that foster home placement would develop as only “one tool among many” intended to help solve a child’s problems.Footnote ³⁷

Funding remained an obstacle to achieving this broader vision of child welfare services. The initial appropriation for child welfare services in the Social Security Act was only $1.5 million (compared with nearly $25 million for ADC) and was to be used to provide modest grants to the states.Footnote ³⁸ Title V funds could not be used to pay for foster care itself. The prohibition on using federal funds for board payments stemmed partly from the private and/or sectarian status of so many agencies providing foster placement. The private/public mixture of the foster care “system” meant that reformers and policymakers alike were reluctant to use federal money to pay for care.

Instead, the main purpose of the child welfare provisions of the Social Security Act was to help coordinate the work of local governments, promote standards based on professional understandings of best practices among them, and help local units hire and train social workers who would be qualified to investigate cases of neglect and dependence—in other words to expand services to areas where they did not already exist, and to move toward a time when all those placing children would have the kinds of specialized training in child placement promoted by professional social workers themselves. At the time of Title V’s passage, most states had “few precedents” for professional, public child welfare services. Eleven states had no statewide child welfare agency. By the end of 1939, every state did (although services did not necessarily extend to all counties).Footnote ³⁹ As state agencies expanded with the help of federal Title V funds, they often did so in uneasy relationship with more established private agencies that were deeply invested (both materially and philosophically) in maintaining focus on their own missions, often to particular geographic or sectarian communities.

Over the next twenty years or so after the passage of the Social Security Act, survivor’s benefits, workman’s compensation, and Aid to Dependent Children were repeatedly heralded as benefits of the New Deal welfare state that were helping to keep families intact.Footnote ⁴⁰ The Child Welfare League, in an example typical of many, noted in the late 1950s that, while in the past children had come into foster care because of parental death or poverty, this was no longer the case. “Today,” the league maintained, “economic want and death are no longer major factors.”Footnote ⁴¹ New Deal programs indeed helped many families. In the mid-1950s, more than 60 percent of children with deceased fathers received benefits through social insurance or through veteran’s benefits; around 10 percent of paternal orphans received ADC.Footnote ⁴² These were families that in the past might have collapsed under financial strain, fating their children to become public charges, separated from their own families.

The assumption that poverty was no longer a significant reason children entered out-of-home care became conventional wisdom in the postwar period.Footnote ⁴³ Meanwhile, the population of children in foster family care was growing steadily—reaching about 208,000 in 1965 (about double the number in 1933). Much of that increase had to do with the decline in institutional care over that same period.Footnote ⁴⁴ Yet whether children were going into orphanages or foster family care, the question still remained: If poverty was not the cause of children coming into care, what was? According to child welfare professionals, children gained the attention of placement agencies for very different reasons than in the past. The foster-care caseloads were now allegedly made up of children experiencing “family pathology,” like the Youngs and Andrews. The foster-care population was now, it followed, much more damaged than previously, exhibiting disturbing emotional and behavioral problems that presented serious challenges.Footnote ⁴⁵

In the late 1930s and 1940s, representations of dependent children depicted them as “homeless through no fault of their own,” or as children whose “own homes [had] been broken by illness, death or the separation of parents” in wartime.Footnote ⁴⁶ In other words, children in need of foster care were mostly perceived to have been “normal” children whose families had simply hit a rough patch. By the 1950s, the new accepted wisdom seemed to suggest that almost all foster children were in some way damaged. Fading from view was the older notion of the “average” foster child from whom some more difficult children deviated. About the new postwar foster-care population, one agency executive remarked, now “all our children are problem children” in that they all came from “disorganized families.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Although alcoholism and violence plagued some of these families, “disorganized” or “pathological” families usually connoted out-of-wedlock birth, divorce, or mental illness of a parent.Footnote ⁴⁸

Such factors undoubtedly created challenges to raising children. But they also could and did lead to “economic want,” although economic want allegedly no longer could justify placement.Footnote ⁴⁹ Divorced parents were likely to struggle financially, for example, although this fact often remained unacknowledged. There seem to have been legitimate reasons for economic want (for which there were New Deal prevention programs) and less legitimate reasons for economic want tied to notions of immorality, pathology, and depravity (for which there was foster care). These were deeply gendered understandings of pathology—a father who was an unreliable or half-hearted provider, a mother who engaged in premarital sex, parents who failed to remain married. And these understandings stigmatized all foster children simply because they were in foster care. The new “pathological” families were poor. But it was their pathology rather than their poverty that led to family dissolution as New Deal measures supposedly assisted the more worthy poor.

Sunny predictions about the end of children coming into care because of poverty eventually faced the problem of evidence. Once researchers began to actually study the foster-care population, they found that children in foster care came overwhelmingly from families of low income.Footnote ⁵⁰ The first large-scale studies of foster care were not undertaken until the late 1950s. Zelma Felten, under the auspices of the Child Welfare League, conducted much of the research for the most important of these studies, Maas and Engler’s Children in Need of Parents, published in 1959.Footnote ⁵¹

The Maas and Engler study called attention to what came to be known as “foster care drift,” the problem of children languishing indefinitely in foster care with no prospects of being either returned to their families of origin or being adopted. However, the study’s results also found that one-fourth of children were placed in foster care initially “for reasons which should not require placement,” that is, death, illness, and economic hardship. This was of great concern, Felten highlighted, because there “should be resources available that preclude the necessity for such placements.”Footnote ⁵² She explained, “We have said for many years, children are no longer placed because of economic need because we now have the social insurances, good public assistance programs, and so on.” And yet, she continued, the communities with the highest percentages of children placed for such reasons were also “at the bottom in terms of their public assistance grants.”Footnote ⁵³ One study of the Twin Cities found that of children placed due to “neglect” about two-thirds were from families on public assistance or otherwise in “severe financial difficulties.”Footnote ⁵⁴

Many families apparently were not enjoying the family security offered by New Deal programs. Prominent among them were families of color, whose members were overrepresented in occupations exempted from social insurance, such as agriculture and domestic service. Until the late 1950s, foster care was among many social services directed primarily to white families. In the postwar climate of racial liberalism, some agencies began to serve minority families. Although there was a chronic shortage of foster homes for nonwhite children, the numbers of such children in care did increase.

Helen Jeter of the Child Welfare League found in 1963 that black children in foster care less frequently were reported to have emotional and behavioral problems than were white children. Her colleagues speculated that this might be because parent-child relationships among black children in foster care were “less disturbed’ than those of the white foster-care population. They posited that African American children might now be coming into care for the kinds of financial reasons that occurred “among white foster placement cases several decades ago.”Footnote ⁵⁵ In other words, African American families were being excluded from programs designed to provide family security, and thus black children who were otherwise “normal” were entering foster care because services and programs to keep families intact were unavailable.

The 1909 White House Conference on Children famously had established the principle that no child should be separated from his or her family for reasons of poverty alone. Yet by the 1970s, long-term researcher Bernice Boehm of the Child Welfare League concluded that the “thread of poverty, nonetheless [was] woven throughout the foster care system.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Child welfare professionals continued to distinguish between worthy and unworthy poor in ways that reflected the gendered ideal of the family wage. For Children’s Bureau Chief Katherine Oettinger, the Maas and Engler study pointed to a troubling conclusion. While marital breakdown was the “single most important cause of separation . . . much foster placement was still associated with poor parental health, low income, unemployment, and inadequate housing.”Footnote ⁵⁷ It might be unfortunate to have to remove children from divorced families, she suggested, but it was tolerable in a way that removing children for reasons of poverty was not. Divorced or separated parents often had great difficulty both financially supporting and caring for their children, but their economic difficulties were not the kinds that New Deal programs had intended to alleviate.

The historical record does not tell us what became of Mrs. George Morris, Frederick Collins, or Mrs. John Lane. We do not know what means they employed to weather their particular circumstances. We do not know if their children were ever returned to them after placement in foster care, for once children entered foster care it could be difficult to remove them. We can speculate, however, that had the conditions that led them into the child welfare system occurred ten years or so later, the programs of the New Deal welfare state, which were supposedly keeping children out of foster care, might not have had much to offer.

Mrs. Morris, as a deserted wife, could have applied for ADC, although many states required an onerous process of determining an alleged desertion, requiring that a wife had done everything possible to track down her husband and file support complaints against him. In 1952, only 10–20 percent of deserted mothers reportedly received ADC.Footnote ⁵⁸ As a man with an incapacitated wife, it would have been unlikely (although not unheard of) for Mr. Collins to receive ADC. In 1952, a mere 3 percent of ADC families gained assistance because of the status of the mother.Footnote ⁵⁹ Professional homemaker services might have been recommended for Mr. Collins, but those services remained thinly available.Footnote ⁶⁰ Day care would have helped all three families, but it was controversial, only made available during the war in some cities to meet the demands of mothers working in war industries, and the services had ended with the war itself.

Certainly, the New Deal did not eliminate the need for foster care. Foster care became an essential service for agencies trying to assist dependent and neglected children. It remained underdeveloped, however. In 1960, Mildred Arnold of the Children’s Bureau complained that in too many instances public child welfare programs were still “poorly financed,” especially in rural areas. Fewer than half of U.S. counties had one or more workers assigned full time to children. Inadequate financing meant not enough workers, too many staff without appropriate training, high turnover, and “low board rates for children in foster care.”Footnote ⁶¹

When federal money for board payments finally became available under the Public Assistance Amendments of 1962, those payments would be linked to eligibility for ADC (now renamed Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC). Title IV (AFDC) funds could now pay board for children deemed neglected by a judge if they were already receiving AFDC before entering foster care. Yet in the cases of those children who entered foster care under voluntary plans or who were not AFDC-eligible, states could not avail themselves of AFDC resources for the children’s board. Already in 1965, some child welfare professionals noticed that an effect of the 1962 Amendments was to “transfer[] professional personnel from child welfare services to public assistance simply because federal matching was available.”Footnote ⁶² The development of AFDC–Foster Care solidified foster care’s association with “welfare”—and not incidentally—with children of color, whose families were, in the 1960s, increasingly qualifying for AFDC.

The public always had linked foster care to “welfare” (hence the common reference to foster children as “welfare children” or “state children” by the public). This association dates back to Charles Loring Brace and his efforts to find new homes for impoverished urban children in the mid- to late nineteenth century. Child welfare professionals in the mid-twentieth century had envisioned something more holistic—as part of a broader, gendered vision of publicly provided family security. Reformers in the 1930s had hoped that the Social Security Act and other New Deal measures would so drastically reduce poverty among families that foster care would find its place as one of a number of “Other Child Welfare Services,” used temporarily to aid a family in dealing with problems other than poverty. Instead, foster care in coming decades would drift even further from its idealized place as part of a full range of general child welfare services available to any child, regardless of financial need, to become an “auxiliary arm of public assistance.”Footnote ⁶³ Ultimately, the trajectory of foster care showcases the way that economic need never functioned alone as a determent of public assistance. Rather, like other provisions of American welfare, foster care became attached to—and limited by—norms of gender and race that informed concepts of deservingness. Those norms shaped not only the resources available to carry out the mission of child welfare but also the range of possibilities that reformers were able imagine.