In 1890, Jessie B. Ramey's great-great grandfather, a young Scottish immigrant named James Caldwell who worked in one of Andrew Carnegie's steel mills in Pittsburgh, experienced a pair of devastating losses. Within a few months, Caldwell's infant son and wife died, leaving him solely responsible for the couple's six other children. In his plight, Caldwell sought assistance from the United Presbyterian Orphan's Home (UPOH), which provided care for four of the Caldwell children over the next nine years. Caldwell kept in close contact with his children throughout their tenure at the orphanage, paying for their board, visiting them often, and assisting with their indenture arrangements. Caldwell's story aptly illustrates several of the innovative arguments Ramey makes in her prizewinning book, most notably that working families at the turn of the twentieth century frequently used orphanages as a “family survival strategy” and that working-class fathers played “significant roles” in child care, particularly in the wake of family misfortune (1, 130).Footnote ¹ And yet, Ramey contends, despite her ancestor's somewhat successful ability to shape his family's experiences within the UPOH, the system of institutional child care on which he and other working parents relied at the turn of the last century was “rife with gender, race, and class inequities,” which have had dire consequences for the development of social welfare into our own time (2).

Ramey's study examines the development of institutional child care from 1878 to 1929 through a comparison of the UPOH and the Home for Colored Children (HCC), “sister” agencies founded in Pittsburgh in 1878 and 1880, respectively (1). Building on the limited work of scholars who have explored the history of day nurseries and orphanages, Ramey offers the first comparative examination of the institutional care of African American and white children in the United States (3). She makes use of a cache of new sources from the archival collections of the Mars Home for Youth in Butler County, Pennsylvania (formerly the UPOH) and Three Rivers Youth (formerly the HCC), including some 1,600 original admissions and dismissal records, meeting minutes, and notes kept by the homes' managers, supplemented by census records, city directories, and social reformers' reports. Ramey identifies multiple stakeholders—orphanage managers, working parents and their children, progressive reformers, staff members, and the broader community—who were engaged with one another in myriad negotiations over the care provided to children in the two homes. She shows that while orphanage managers “maintained the balance of power” in these negotiations, both African American and white working parents managed to resist managers' total control over their children's lives and exercised considerable agency in using the orphanages “for their own purposes as a form of child care” (9, 67). Indeed, the most important characteristic that the children in both institutions shared was that they were not actually “orphans,” as that term was constructed by the homes' managers and in the popular culture. In institutional and common parlance, “orphans” referred to “homeless waifs” and “fatherless children” (33, 21). In reality, although both institutions attempted to garner sympathy for their charges by erasing parents from their origin stories and promotional materials, “most residents had active, involved parents who were integral to the very founding and functioning of the orphanages” (33).

In constructing and responding to the early twentieth-century child-care crisis, orphanage managers—the majority of whom were middle-class white women—drew on an intertwined set of assumptions about gender, class, and race, which ultimately served to reinforce existing social hierarchies. Ramey confirms the findings of previous historians who have argued that turn-of-the-century child welfare reformers buttressed the ideal of the family wage, which expected mothers to be the primary caretakers of children and fathers to be breadwinners for dependent wives and children. Such a model failed to acknowledge the economic challenges working-class families faced that forced women (and children) into wage labor. As Ramey demonstrates in an illuminating chapter on the fathers of orphans, the family wage ideal also ignored working-class men's attention to the range of physical, emotional, and educational, as well as economic, needs of their children.

The central contribution of Ramey's work lies in its comparative approach and its probing attention to the category of race. Multivariable analysis of her statistical data reveals an intriguing set of similarities and differences between the experiences of the white parents and children served by the UPOH and the African American parents and children served by the HCC. African American and white parents faced similar kinds of challenges that led them to seek temporary institutional care for their children: the loss of a spouse, unemployment, disrupted support networks due to migration and immigration, and inadequate housing. Both groups also deployed similar strategies in order to remain active in their institutionalized children's lives, including making deliberate choices about the placement and retrieval of their children, negotiating over the meaning and amount of board payments, and claiming a voice in their children's medical care. In addition, both groups of parents placed their children in orphanages with the intent of reunifying with them once the family crisis had abated.

Still, there were important differences in the treatment and experiences of the two groups. For example, African American families had far fewer options for institutional care and had to accept the fact that such care would be segregated. In addition, the HCC managers refused to apply the family wage ideal to African American families. Thus, they accepted more children with two living parents because they assumed that African American men were, by definition, absent fathers and inadequate providers, an assumption that Ramey's findings dispute. They also expected African American mothers to “carry the double burden of motherhood and wage labor,” whereas the white mothers served by the UPOH were deemed to be dependent on male breadwinners (198). Furthermore, African American children remained in the HCC longer than white children in the UPOH because it was harder for African American parents—and fathers in particular—to maintain family stability in the event of undue hardship. Overall, Ramey finds that the HCC both “reinforced and resisted” racial discrimination (161). On the one hand, the HCC challenged racism by deeming African American children worthy of quality care and educational opportunity. It also led the way in Pittsburgh in pursuing some degree of interracial cooperation in the field of social welfare, as three out of the original thirty-five managers were African American women. Nevertheless, the HCC remained a “culturally white institution” during the first fifty years of its existence (162). Whites predominated on the board and held all key staff positions. In addition, white managers were reluctant to pursue closer connections with the African American community or to solicit private donations from white donors. Instead, HCC managers turned to the state for support and construed the services they provided as charity for dependent children, rather than as the right of working parents of color to have their child-care needs met by the public sector.

Ramey's conclusion compellingly traces the implications of the entrenchment of gender, race, and class inequalities in and by orphanages at the turn of the twentieth century for the evolution of child care since 1929. She argues that despite a few moments of national crisis when it seemed that the vision of child care as “temporary, unfortunate, and charitable” might be subject to change, the United States has remained overwhelmingly wedded to a racially biased family wage ideal, as well as to the expectation that child care is a private problem to be solved by individual families, rather than a legitimate public responsibility worthy of support by the state (199). As a result, “poor families, in particular, find themselves not far from the conditions of the 1880s, with few choices, long waiting lists, sometimes frightening conditions for their children, largely segregated care, and little public funding” (203). The latest round of cultural conversations about work-family “balance,” with its focus on privileged white women's “leaning in” and “having it all” would benefit from a reckoning with the history Ramey recounts, if economic opportunity and access to high-quality, affordable child care are ever to be available for all working families.Footnote ²