From Economic to Sentimental

1. From Economic to Sentimental
Children’s changing value

2. IF YOU PLAN TO HAVE CHILDREN, WHY
DO YOU PLAN TO HAVE CHILDREN?

3. Between 1870 and 1930,
children shifted from being a
financial benefit to being a
financial drain. As a result,
children’s value shifted from
economic to sentimental.

4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
Hdjal0EMVIU

5. Child Apprenticeship in Indiana
The said overseers . . . do by these presents put place and bind
Margaret J Clark a poor girl aged five years eight months and
twenty two days as an apprentice to the said James Wood to be
taught the art trade and occupation of Houswifery which the
said James Wood and wife now uses and to live with and serve
him the said James Wood as an apprentice for twelve years and
three months from this date.
Delaware County, Indiana, 1856

6. Indiana’s child apprenticeship law
It shall and may be lawful for the overseers of
the poor of the township aforesaid, to put out as
apprentices, all such poor children, whose
parents are dead, or shall be by the said
overseers, found unable to maintain them,
males until the age of twenty-one and females
until the age of eighteen years.
Indiana General Assembly, 1818

7. Revisions to the apprenticeship law
There shall be essential to the validity of any
indenture binding a white apprentice and having
more than three years to serve, an agreement
on the part of the master or mistress, to cause
the apprentice to be taught to read and write,
and the rules of arithmetic, to the double rule of
three, inclusive, if practicable.
Indiana General Assembly, 1852

8. Which children were apprenticed?
First. The child of any pauper supported in whole
or in part by the county. Second. Any child whose
parents abandon, or neglect, or are unable to
support it. Third. Any child having neither father,
mother, or guardian, and having no sufficient
means of support and education. Fourth. Any white
child taken from any asylum in any other State and
brought to this State to be bound.
Indiana General Assembly, 1852

9. Common features of formal
apprenticeship documents:
• The child must have some schooling
• The child must be given basic necessities
• The child must obey his or her master
• The child must learn a trade
• At the end of the apprenticeship, the child
would be given compensation (generally a bed
and bedding for girls, and a horse and saddle
for boys)

10. Under this system, what sort of children
do you think would be most in demand?
Which would not be in demand?

11. Baby Farms
“We charge more for little babies because it is
harder to get homes for them while they are still
young; we have to keep them.”

12. Transition away from
Apprenticeship and Baby Farms
and toward
Foster Care and Adoption

13. “It is time that some active means were taken to
put a stop to the practice of baby farming which
in the vast majority of instances, is only another
term for baby-killing.”
New York Times, 1873

14. “I do not mean apprenticed or bound out like
workhouse children, but adopted into good
homes with all their happy surroundings.”
Sociologist C. D. Randall, “The Michigan System
of Child Saving,” 1896.

15. “Families . . . In need of a servant have gone to
some ‘orphanage,’ . . . And asked for a boy or girl
old enough to serve them. And what have they
secured? Just what they asked for: a servant. . . .
But their soul has not been enriched. . . . We . . .
Urge that such families make a great mistake in
asking for a servant. We come to say that there is
a jewel in that abandoned child.”
Rev. M. T. Lamb, 1905

16. Shifting Value
• In 1870, people were interested in taking in
older children (through apprenticeships) but
not infants or toddlers.
• By 1930, people were interested in taking in
infants and toddlers (through adoption), but
not older children.

17. Primary Sources on Child
Apprenticeship and Foster Care
• Why did Judge Chase throw out a child’s
apprenticeship?
• What does the 1867 New York Times article
suggest about changing apprenticeship
norms?
• What shift does the 1938 New York Times
article discuss?

18. Wrongful Death Cases
And children’s economic value

19. In 1896, courts awarded parents of a two-year-old
killed in a railroad accident only minimal burial
expenses, because the child was “of such tender
years as to be unable to have any earning capacity,
and hence the defendant could not be held liable in
damages.”
In 1979, courts awarded the parents of a three-
year-old who died from a lethal dose of fluoride at
the dental clinic $750,000.
What changed?

20. 19th Century Wrongful Death Suits
• Courts awarded damages for the death of a
child by calculating “the probable value of
services of the deceased from the time of his
death to the time he would have attained his
majority, less the expense of his maintenance
during the same time.”

21. “How much is the life of a child worth? At what price may
a girl or boy be killed? Has a youthful life an actual value
capable of being assessed in dollars and cents?”
“The Price of a Child,” Current Literature, 1902
“Is the baby worth a dollar? . . . For any eye that is not
blind with coarse mammonism and unable to see value in
anything that does not immediately earn net cash the
baby is one of the most valuable and productive assets of
the family . . . as a joy giver [the baby] is an incomparable
success . . . “
“Is the Baby Worth a Dollar?” Ladies’ Home Journal, 1910

22. Economic value  Sentimental value

23. MARY ELLEN AND
THE DISCOVERY OF
CHILD ABUSE
Why does the narrator go to the
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty
to Animals?
In the New York Times article, what
was Mrs. Connolly charged with?
Do you think it matters that Mary Ellen
was abused by a woman who was not
her biological mother, or that
mismanagement by the charity that
placed her played a role?

25. Children’s Emotional Value during the
Great Depression

26. “The emergence of this economically ‘worthless’
but emotionally ‘priceless’ child has created an
essential condition of contemporary childhood.”
Vivianna Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child