eight who is found peddling or selling any article or singing or playing any musical instrument upon the street or giving any public entertainment,” highlighting anxieties about child labor and the presence of children on urban streets acting as wage earners for their families (Tiffin 1982:38). The vagueness of the definition, which left open interpretation of such terms as “proper care” or “ill-fame,” positioned a wide range of families as potentially vulnerable to intervention.
In the context of the pre-industrial English language, as Fraser and Gordon (1994) argue, the term “dependency” was synonymous with subordination. Dependency encapsulated not so much the trait of an individual, as with the specter of the welfare dependent mother in the contemporary U.S. context, but a positive social relation between master and apprentice, employer and laborer. It is in this sense, Fraser and Gordon note, that phrases like “independently wealthy” indicate an individual free of the obligation to labor. It was thus only with the rise of industrial labor that wage labor became understood as symbolic of independence based on the idea that individuals were free to sell their labor as they chose. Wage labor was no longer understood primarily as a social relationship of dependence between employer and employee. Because independence was positively equated with wage labor, dependency became reframed as a dysfunctional relationship, a “psychological/moral register” (Fraser and Gordon 1994). Dependency became a problematic characteristic rather than an indication of a productive social relation. With this shift dependency was no longer suitable for white working men and became the terrain of women, encapsulated by the figure of the “housewife,” as well as by both men and women of color.
This pejorative reading of dependency was heightened in a U.S. social context where the “absence of a hierarchical social tradition in which subordination was understood to be structural, not characterological, facilitated hostility to public support of the poor” (Fraser and Gordon 1994:320). It is in relation to these historical conditions that we might understand the framing of “welfare dependency” more broadly. However, children constitute a category that perpetuates the concept of dependency as a productive social relationship. As senator Daniel Moynihan (1973) stated, “[Dependency] is an incomplete state in life: normal in a child, abnormal in the adult.”10 Dependency, in this sense, is naturalized as a characteristic embedded in the term “child.” Healthy children are, by definition, dependent. Yet the notion of a dependent child departs from this normative, positive sense of dependency. That is, children marked as dependent are not dependent on their parents, as is deemed natural, but rather are problematically dependent on the intervention of the state or the kindness of strangers. In this sense, a dependent child is reworked as a potential burden and a social problem, one who lacks properly reliable parents to depend upon.
From Child Savers to Professional Social Work
Child saving efforts were driven by concerns about the morality of, and care for, children and were deeply enmeshed in efforts to preserve white Protestant values against rising concerns about immigration and the “moral depravity” of the urban poor.11 Child saving efforts were primarily promoted by wealthy philanthropists concerned about the influence of new European immigrant communities, whom they categorized as nonwhite, and by anxieties about the sanitation, immorality, criminality, and disease associated with urban communities during the industrialization era in the United States. These efforts were pursued by a variety of organizations and individuals, and were not regulated by state or federal government. Thus they took a variety of forms, from teaching parenting skills and distributing informational pamphlets to scouring the streets for “neglected” children who were placed in orphanages or other charitable institutions. The majority of these efforts were focused on large urban cities such as Boston, New York, and Chicago.
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