“The history of childcare shines a light on the people of San Diego who chose to care about the health and well-being of strangers, and the parents who chose to trust that care” (xxviii). This statement at the end of Kyle Ciani's introduction to Choosing to Care suggests her resolutely sunny view of childcare reform efforts during San Diego's first century of Anglo-American settlement and raises thorny questions of agency that often arise in studies of reform efforts directed at vulnerable populations, particularly children. Ciani tends to see interactions between empathetic reformers, parents, and children as mutually beneficial, even while simultaneously showing how childcare efforts were rooted in power relations shaped by prevailing ideas of class, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. As Ciani explains candidly when discussing the rise of the city's day nurseries, “finding the balance between assisting and controlling families would be a constant struggle for childcare advocates” (126).
Ciani explores the conflicted nature of childcare reform in San Diego from the community's beginnings as a military outpost and ranching area in the decades following California statehood to its rapid suburbanization in the wake of World War II mobilization. She does this rather deftly, making the various childcare scenarios come to life through rich contextualization and creative speculation to fill the silences found in institutional sources, even if this same innovative approach heightens questions about ascribing agency to the “voiceless.” Her central intervention is an expansive definition of “childcare” that encompasses familiar efforts, such as orphanages and social settlement programs, as well as developments that historians may be loath to see as “care,” including the juvenile justice system and vocational education programs aimed at shaping the future workforce. Choosing to Care is structured both chronologically and thematically with each chapter addressing a different “care” regime that emerged to meet key challenges in the city's development.
Ciani opens her book with the provocatively titled chapter, “Indentured Care.” With a creative reading of the sparse historical record, she recovers a system of indenturing Native American children to Anglo “guardians” that received full legal sanction for decades after California entered the union as a “free” state. Ciani defends the uncomfortable notion that indentured servitude constituted a “care” regime by pointing out the depth of Anglo settlers’ paternalism and the sad reality that disruptions to native life wrought by Anglo settlement led native parents to such extreme financial hardship that their children's indenture meant their survival. Finally, she shows how local Catholic boarding schools emerged to shield native children from servitude. Of course, these institutions, like the indenture system they sought to mitigate, separated Native American children from their families and culture, calling into question whether such alternatives can qualify as nurturing young indigenous people.
Unsurprisingly, Ciani's definition of childcare, expansive though it is, better fits the actions undertaken by female reformers working through San Diego's benevolent societies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Chapter Two, “Maternal Care,” Ciani focuses heavily on the San Diego branch of the Women's Home Association (WHA), a spinoff of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. The WHA opened the Children's Home and Day Nursery (CHDN) at the peak of San Diego's first population boom to deal with the influx of thousands of people, severed from family and neighborhood networks, streaming into an unknown city. By her account, such programs were popular with working-class parents, an assertion that again requires some speculation from terse organizational records. More convincing are her arguments about how the work transformed female reformers’ role in society. “Like many benevolent minded women of the nineteenth century, CHDN organizers moved into the public sphere through their childcare work … [using] their economic stability, social connections, and honored positions as respectable mothers,” Ciani observes, charting a pattern already familiar to historians (22). San Diego's first boom years also gave rise to an active vice district, the “Stingaree,” which reformers condemned in zealous and often racially charged tones. Women's involvement in policing morality coincided with the gradual institutionalization of philanthropic efforts like the CHDN. In Chapter Three, “Court-Appointed Care,” Ciani demonstrates how maternalist reform efforts eventually overlapped with California's emerging juvenile justice system, further aligning female-led reform with local government. Progressive women leveraged their newfound clout to shape the city's responses to myriad social ills as the city sought to clean up its image before the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition.
Training her narrative on emerging childcare “experts,” Ciani traces social workers’ role in professionalizing San Diego's childcare regime in the early twentieth century. Chapter Four, “Professional Care,” documents the consolidation of public and private care programs under a series of partnerships that standardized care for young wards of the county. Ciani explains that San Diego's staunch republicanism led male civic leaders to embrace progressive politics, but they largely deferred to “the city's women who tackled the difficult work of social reform” (94). Never neglecting the social context while relating the details of care, she points out how sensational charges of “white slavery” and immigration concerns during the Mexican Revolution shaped white social workers’ outlook, resulting in their disparate care of minority and white children even while “standardizing” protocols. In Chapter Five, “Neighborhood Care,” Ciani shows how a number of mostly well-to-do, female social workers overcame “preconceived notions about Mexican culture” and “developed a deep respect and affection for their Mexican neighbors” while living and working at Neighborhood House (NH), the city's first social settlement founded in 1914 (128). NH organizers created innovative and popular programs for residents of San Diego's barrio, attracted the first federal funding for childcare in the city through the Children's Bureau, and eventually became a Works Progress Administration day nursery in the 1930s.
The final two chapters focus on government-assisted programs to address the pressing childcare problems wrought by the Great Depression and mobilization for World War II. Though beyond the temporal scope of this journal, these latter chapters may still be of interest to its readers in revealing how government-sponsored programs of the mid-twentieth century relied on the professionalization of reform during the Progressive Era. Questions of agency and “expert” authority in the narrative aside, Choosing to Care is both an engaging community study of San Diego and a useful model for how to analyze the history of childcare reforms elsewhere.
