‘Children of fate’, according to Nara Milanich, were not just products of chance, as indicated in a Chilean treatise denouncing illegitimacy, but rather the consequence of relations involving questions of class and family that perpetuated social inequality during the liberal republican period, despite formal equality before the law. The relationship between legal status, family and childhood reveals forms of exclusion replicated by social hierarchies. The regulatory intervention of the liberal state in the private sphere, contradicting the orthodox view that has regarded that intervention as a progressive process, is, she maintains, more ambiguous. At the same time the state consolidated its authority by taking on functions previously delegated to the Church, ‘privatising’ the private sphere through the regulation of issues of parentage by giving fathers the freedom to acknowledge children born outside marriage, so reproducing the colonial tenet of family honour in the language of personal freedom and privacy. Charity towards poor children was left unregulated and in private hands. This encouraged practices that saw the handing around of these children and a consequent growth in the supply of domestic servants. The domestic space fostered the dominance of masters over servants, adults over minors and elites over plebeians. The household exploited poor children who had no relatives. In consequence, these children highlight the relations across class, gender and generational power exercised not only between state and society, but also within the domestic sphere and between each other.
This approach engages with different domains and relations through the category of illegitimacy. Children of Fate tells the story of illegitimate children, initially from a legal viewpoint, in both normative and practical terms. The Civil Code abolished paternity investigations, and the courts, when it came to retroactive paternity suits, found in favour of ‘social coherence’, opting for the social sector in which the child had been brought up. The second part of the book tells the story of children stigmatised by both civil and religious bureaucracy on account of their status at birth, and excluded in consequence from their kinship networks. The third part is a study of the roles of public welfare and private charity in looking after poor children termed orphans, though this was not literally the case, without any regulation whatsoever. This saw poor children fostered to humble families or inducted into the swelling the ranks of child workers as domestic servants in both the city and the countryside, largely becoming day labourers in adulthood. These children were both protected and exploited within the hierarchical relations of the domestic space. The book's epilogue looks at the transformations which, in the face of considerable difficulties, brought about the reform of the law and the protection of rights relating to illegitimate children over the course of the twentieth century. Only towards the end of the century was discrimination between children born within and outside marriage abolished.
Milanich has written a fascinating and historically dramatic work that elegantly blends narrative and analysis. She places her study in a welcome comparative context that encompasses Latin America and the North Atlantic; she argues from the conceptual frameworks of a school of history writing that incorporates questions relating to power and dominance in state construction, gender, sexuality, popular culture and subaltern sectors in general; and she magisterially and imaginatively deploys a myriad of sources (detailed in the appendix). She broaches a series of questions that go beyond her own conclusions and her theoretical framework. She herself signals that the most powerful questions are those of who these ‘children of fate’ were, and why they matter. Her book, she concludes, engages with the ambitions of the elite, the actions of the state, the legal interpretation of parentage and the political meaning of childhood for the mass of people, but above all it tells the story of the children themselves and the adults that they became. These questions and stories take the reader off in multiple directions. One can agree or not with the arguments, but what one cannot dispute is the way in which these childhoods, of which this society speaks little, tell us so much about that society.
The question of the construction of the liberal state, an underlying theme running through the study, is treated, from this reviewer's perspective, in piecemeal fashion. While I agree with her thesis that the liberal state reproduces relations of dependency in terms of the family, women and the domestic space, that same dependency needs to be placed in context as regards the other side of that coin, namely the formation of the public sphere, citizenship, individual liberties and equality before the law. It is hard to understand one aspect without reference to the other. Relations of dependency within the family and the withholding of political rights are the reverse side of equality before the law. This does not entail dismissing this issue of equality and the relevant freedoms as purely academic, as these do affect political and social relations. Freedom of religion, of expression and of association have an impact on these bonds of dependency. In fact, Milanich identifies change as occurring around 1920 due to the emergence of the anti-oligarchic middling classes, feminism and the labour movement as democratic social actors that spoke out against hierarchical relations. It is worth wondering whether these sectors did not emerge from a liberal male public sphere that was demanding the extension of rights and imbuing the struggle for civil and political liberties with an egalitarian social dimension, that eternal tension between freedom and equality in modern democracies. This reviewer is merely suggesting the possible interdependence of both spheres in the construction of the liberal state.
More specifically, it is noticeable that no reference is made to the Civil Code's definition of marriage, inheritance and filiation; some consideration of the omission of any definition of the family would have been interesting. This could also be said of the rights from which illegitimate children were not excluded, as they were with inheritance. For example, legitimacy was never a requirement for the right to vote, though there were literacy and, until 1874, income requirements. Finally, the absence of the state from the protection of children without kinship networks is supported by solid research, but here too there is another side to the question: public education. Milanich mentions schooling as a disciplinary space studied by other specialists, but her argument is interesting as a key reference in the context of the relationship between the state and childhood. These questions are relevant to the argument pursued by Milanich dealing with the ambiguities of the liberal state in terms of its regulatory options.
Children of Fate is an indispensable and original work that opens up a fundamental problem relating to the relationship between the family, class and the state in the liberal era. Its very originality drives forward a debate in which it will be an obligatory reference.
