Orphans by Contract: Custody and Negotiation in New York City Orphan Asylums

Middle-class benevolent workers and reformers sought to use nineteenth-century orphan asylums to isolate working-class and racially and ethnically “other” children from living parents and relatives in order to construct a childhood for them that would create future members of the working class who embodied middle-class values and social norms.  However, working-class families fought to use the asylums as part of their own survival strategies and forced managers to modify their goals and policies in response to family demands.  Specifically, this paper explores the admission and dismissal decisions made by administrators and children’s relatives, analyzing the distinct and yet often complementary motives of each group and assessing the imbalance of power inherent in negotiations over child custody.  It also pays attention to the moments when children asserted their right to a voice in these processes through running away (frequently to return to relatives).

This paper is based on a combination of qualitative evidence and statistical analysis of admission and dismissal decisions for a sample of over 3,500 children admitted to five orphan asylums in New York City between 1817 and 1889.  Analysis of this data (supported by graphs that will accompany the presentation) proves that each group turned to the orphan asylum to meet its own distinct needs and worked to use it to further these ends, making decisions along the way based on their unique perspectives and assumptions.  The resulting institution and the childhoods of inmates reflect the integration of these various threads and the (often uneven) negotiation between groups.  In the final analysis, this paper attributes the asylums’ long tenure to their ability to meet the often competing needs of these distinct groups.