“A família é indispensável”: From Foundling Home to Foster Homes in Bahia, Brazil, 1937–45

In 1937, the state of Bahia, Brazil initiated an ambitious foster care program to find temporary homes for children from “broken” ones, saving them from the realities of institutionalization. Interestingly, the state had recently invested in an extensive reform project at the old Foundling Home of the Santa Casa de Misericórdia to make institutionalization meet the expectations of the modern children’s hygiene movement.  Even with all the medical innovations, leading reformists concluded that the new and improved Foundling Home somehow still fell short as an ideal domestic space.  Despite physicians’ best efforts, collective living for children could never provide an environment adequate for optimal development.  Something happened in familial homes that went beyond adequate nutrition, hygienic facilities, and rigorous medical monitoring, physicians argued, so foundlings and other poor children needed to be placed in state-supervised foster care.  By campaigning for foster care, 20^th century modernizers advocated for a system that resembled the traditional practice of placing foundlings in wet-nurses’ homes, a practice that dated back to the colonial period.  An earlier generation of reformers had asserted that wet-nurses endangered the lives of their charges and that a central institution, like the Foundling Home, was the ideal solution.

In the modernized version, however, foster families were “scientifically” selected according to the type of home environment they could provide for a child—both in terms of physical space and the intangible social and moral conditions engendered therein.  In an ideal home, children would benefit from having a maternal figure, but not one similar to the dangerous wet-nurse-mothers of old. This study of the domestic side of foster care reveals the conflict-ridden interplay between tradition and modernity in the recreation of the Foundling Home and the establishment of foster care.