Abstract
The campaign for legalised adoption after the First World War and during the 1920s emerged against a background of considerable change in the shape of the family and in public and private attitudes towards children and their upbringing and protection. This chapter looks at these changes and also offers a brief historical account of the legal position of children prior to the Adoption of Children Act 1926. Finally the legal and social position of illegitimate children and their mothers at the beginning of the twentieth century is considered.
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Notes
Richard Soloway, Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Declining Birthrate in Twentieth-Century Britain (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), p. 9.
Simon Szreter, Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain, 1860–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). See also Wally Seccombe, ‘Starting to Stop: Working-Class Fertility Decline in Britain’, Past and Present, no. 126 (1990) and Weathering the Storm: Working-Class Families from the Industrial Revolution to the Fertility Decline (London: Verso, 1993).
Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1962, translated from the French by Robert Baldick).
Jane Lewis, Women in England 1870–1950: Sexual Divisions and Social Change (Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1984), p. 10.
Ellen Ross, ‘Labour and Love: Rediscovering London’s Working-Class Mothers 1870–1918’, in Jane Lewis (ed.), Labour and Love: Women’s Experience of Home and Family, 1850–1940 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), p. 79.
Census for England and Wales, 1901 and 1931, quoted in Diana Gittins, Fair Sex: Family Size and Structure 1900–39 (London: Hutchinson, 1982), p. 34.
For discussion about the emphasis on domesticity during the interwar years see, for example, Carol Dyhouse, Feminism and the Family in England 1880–1939 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); Gittins, op. cit.; Lewis (ed.), Labour and Love, op. cit.; Lewis, Women in England, op. cit.;
Deirdre Beddoe, Back to Home and Duty: Women between the Wars 1918–1939 (London: Pandora, 1989);
Judy Giles, Women, Identity and Private Life in Britain, 1900–50 (London: Macmillan, 1995);
Martin Pugh, Women and the Women’s Movement in Britain 1914–1959 (London: Macmillan, 1992).
Cynthia L. White, Women’s Magazines 1693–1968 (London: Michael Joseph, 1970), pp. 96, 100.
Michael Anderson, ‘The Social Implications of Demographic Change’ in F. M. L. Thompson, (ed.), The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750–1950, Vol. 2: People and their Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 66–7.
Between 1919 and 1939 almost four million new houses were built. In the building boom years 1933–8, an average 334,000 houses were produced each year. John Burnett, A Social History of Housing 1815–1985 (London: Methuen, 1986), p. 249.
Alan A. Jackson, The Middle Classes 1900–1950 (Nairn, UK: David St John Thomas, 1991), p. 36.
Naomi Mitchison, ‘The Reluctant Feminists’, Left Review, vol. 1, no. 3 (1934), pp. 93–4, quoted in Dyhouse, op. cit., pp. 186–7.
Joanna Bourke, Working-Class Cultures in Britain 1890–1960: Gender, Class and Ethnicity (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 84.
Geoffrey Crossick, ‘The Emergence of the Lower Middle Class in Britain: A Discussion’, in Crossick (ed.), The Lower Middle Class in Britain 1870–1914 (London: Croom Helm, 1977).
Lucinda McCray Beier, ‘We Were Green as Grass: Learning about Sex and Reproduction in Three Working-Class Lancashire Communities, 1900–1970’, Social History of Medicine, vol. 16, no. 3 (2003), p. 474.
Leonore Davidoff, Megan Doolittle, Janet Fink and Katherine Holden, The Family Story: Blood, Contract and Intimacy, 1830–1960 (London: Longman, 1999).
Katherine Holden, ‘The Shadow of Marriage: Single Women in England 1919–1939’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Essex, 1996).
Christina Hardyment, Dream Babies: Child Care from Locke to Spock (London: Jonathan Cape, 1983), p. 123.
Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985; 2nd ed, 1994), p. 11.
Harry Hendrick, Child Welfare: England 1872–1989 (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 37.
George K. Behlmer, Child Abuse and Moral Reform in England, 1870–1908 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982), p. 194.
Jean S. Heywood, Children in Care: The Development of the Service for the Deprived Child (London: Routledge, 3rd ed, 1978), p. 100.
Deborah Dwork, War Is Good for Babies and Other Young Children: A History of the Infant and Child Welfare Movement in England 1898–1918 (London: Tavistock, 1987), p. 19.
For example, in 1914, 600 health visitors were employed by local authorities; by 1918 there were 2577 (this included 1044 district nurses acting as part-time visitors but excluded 320 employed by voluntary organisations). There were 650 maternal and child welfare centres in 1915, 1,278 in 1918 (although 578 of these were run by voluntary agencies). See G. F. McCleary, The Maternity and Child Welfare Movement (London: P. S. King & Son, 1935), pp. 16–17.
Pat Thane, ‘Infant Welfare in England and Wales, 1870s to 1930s’, in Michael B. Katz and Christoph Sachße (eds), The Mixed Economy of Social Welfare: Public/Private Relations in England, Germany and the United States (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1996), p. 258.
For a detailed account of baby farming and infanticide see Lionel Rose, The Massacre of the Innocents: Infanticide in Britain 1800–1939 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986).
Also see Behlmer, Child Abuse, op. cit.; Margaret L. Amot, ‘Infant Death, Child Care and the State: The Baby-Farming Scandal and the First Infant Life Protection Legislation of 1872’, Continuity and Change, vol. 9, part 2 (1994), pp. 271–311.
Ivy Pinchbeck and Margaret Hewitt, Children in English Society, Vol. 2, From the Eighteenth Century to the Children Act 1948 (London: Routledge, 1973), p. 613.
Quoted in George K. Behlmer, Friends of the Family: The English Home and Its Guardians 1850–1940 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 278; Behlmer, Child Abuse, p. 28; Rose, Massacre, p. 98. Rose shows that even in this ostensibly clear-cut case there was considerable disquiet about the verdict and the execution among the press, the public and even some of the jurors. The case was seen as an unsuccessful example to frighten off others.
See Lionel Rose, The Erosion of Childhood: Child Oppression in Britain 1860–1918 (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 98–100; Behlmer, Fbriends of the Family, op. cit., p. 286. In fact there appears to have been a longer history of adoption of children in the care of Boards of Guardians as the London Metropolitan Archive has a bundle of legal agreements from the 1860s to 1918 which relate to children who were ‘adopted’ by people (presumably wealthy) who gave the St Marylebone Parish Guardians a bond which would be voided if they fulfilled the conditions of feeding, clothing and educating the children adequately and producing them for inspection when required. The bonds were originally for £300 but in the later years went down to £100. See LMA — STMBG/182/01–20.
HO 45/11540. Minutes of Evidence to Committee on Child Adoption, Mr A. P. Stanwell Smith, 19 October 1920, p. 29. The apparent lack of supervision and ‘red tape’ is illustrated by the ease with which the charity worker and writer Miss Edith Sichel ‘adopted’ a whole series of babies and little girls from the Whitechapel Board of Guardians from 1890 onwards and took them to Surrey. This was not ‘adoption’ as we know it — the children lived in a separate house from Miss Sichel, had a matron and helpers to look after them and were raised to become servants themselves. Alison Light, Mrs Woolf and the Servants: The Hidden Heart of Domestic Service (London: Penguin, 2007), pp. 97–108.
Nigel Middleton, When Family Failed: The Treatment of Children in the Care of the Community during the First Hal f of the Twentieth Century (London: Victor Gollancz, 1971), pp. 224–36.
For example, William Woodruff describes how his mother was sent to friends when her mother was widowed and fell on hard times. Later she is described as ‘adopted’. It was not a good example of informal adoption. Neglected and possibly abused she eventually fled home. William Woodruff, The Road to Nab End: An Extraordinary Northern Childhood (London: Abacus, 2002), p. 272.
P. H. Pettit, ‘Parental Control and Guardianship’, in R. H. Graveson and F. R. Crane (eds), A Century Of Family Law (London: Sweet & Maxwell, 1957), p. 67.
For more detail of the earlier history of the illegitimate child see Pinchbeck and Hewitt, op. cit., Chapter XIX; Mary Hopkirk, Nobody Wanted Sam: The Story of the Unwelcomed Child, 1530–1948 (London: John Murray, 1949).
For the Foundling Hospital see Ruth K. McClure, Coram’s Children: The London Foundling Hospital in the Eighteenth Century (London: Yale University Press, 1981).
C. Oliver and P. Aggleton, Coram’s Children: Growing Up in the Care of the Foundling Hospital 1900–1955 (London: Thomas Coram Research Unit, 2000);
Val Molloy, ‘Identity, Past and Present, in an Historical Child-Care Setting’, Psychodynamic Practice, vol. 8, no. 2 (2002); Tanya Evans, Unfortunate Objects: Lone Mothers in Eighteenth-Century London (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
Kathleen Kiernan, Hilary Land and Lewis, Lone Motherhood in Twentieth-Century Britain: From Footnote to Front Page (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 74. See Chapter 2 for more about attitudes to unmarried mothers during the First World War.
Ginger Frost, ‘“The Black Lamb of the Black Sheep”: Illegitimacy in the English Working Class, 1850–1939’, Journal of Social History, vol. 37, no. 2 (Winter 2003), p. 295.
Carl Chinn, They Worked All Their Lives: Women of the Urban Poor in England, 1880–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 31.
Ada Haskins, one of the interviewees in Steve Humphries, A Secret World of Sex: Forbidden Fruit: The British Experience 1900–1950 (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1988), describes exactly this situation. Her illegitimate baby was brought up by her mother who pretended it was hers. Her son always knew her as his sister. He was by then 57 years old; she longed to tell him the truth but feared that she would never be able to.
B. R. Mitchell, in collaboration with Phyllis Deane, British Historical Statistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 42–4. Figures have been rounded to nearest thousand.
Matthew Thomson, The Problem of Mental Deficiency: Eugenics, Democracy, and Social Policy in Britain 1870–1959 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 20.
Deborah Derrick (ed.), Illegitimate: The Experience of People Born outside Marriage (London: NCOPF, 1986), pp. 37–40.
Jane Marcus, (selected and introduced), The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West 1911–17 (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 140–1; 146–7.
Constance Rover, Love, Morals and the Feminists (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 136.
Patricia W. Romero, E. Sylvia Pankhurst: Portrait of a Radical (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 164–77.
Sheila Ferguson and Hilda Fitzgerald, Studies in the Social Services: History of the Second World War, UK Civil Series (London: Longmans and HMSO, 1954), pp. 85–6. Despite the lack of detailed information the authors manage to provide a useful survey of the accommodation and treatment available to unmarried mothers who kept their babies in this period.
M. M. Geikie Cobb, ‘Parent and Child’, in G. Evelyn Gates (ed.), The Woman’s Year Book 1923–24 (London: Women Publishers, 1923), p. 182.
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© 2009 Jenny Keating
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Keating, J. (2009). Setting the Scene: The Historical and Legal Background. In: A Child for Keeps. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230582842_2
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