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Growing Up Dependent: Family Preservation in Early Twentieth-Century Chicago

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2011

David S. Tanenhaus
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On December 23, 1912, a Hungarian father brought his three young daughters (ages three, five, and seven) to the Cook County Juvenile Court to file dependent petitions on their behalf. He alleged that their mother had deserted the family, stolen their savings, and disappeared. As a single father, he could have and probably did argue that it was unreasonable to expect him to work and to raise his young children simultaneously. On Christmas Eve, after a six-man jury found each girl to be a “dependent child,” Judge Merritt Pinckney ordered them committed to the Lisle Industrial School and arranged for their father to pay $15 a month for their support. Thus, the single father had used the juvenile court to arrange for a private institution to raise his now motherless children, who because they were the same gender were at least allowed to grow up together in the same industrial school.

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Articles
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Law and History Review , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , Fall 2001 , pp. 547 - 582
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Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 2001

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References

1. Case Numbers 45041–45043, Juvenile Cases, Cook County Circuit Court Archives, Richard J. Daley Center, Chicago, Illinois [Case Nos. 45041–45043]. There are approximately 2,700 extant case files from the court's founding in 1899 until 1926, but it is not known why these select records were preserved. Every child who entered the juvenile court system was assigned a permanent case number and all his or her subsequent legal papers were filed under this number. In dependency cases, which included applications for mothers' pensions, siblings were assigned consecutive numbers. The case files are impounded and researchers must receive permission from the presiding chief judge of the Cook County Juvenile Court to look at them. To protect the confidentiality of the families involved, per judicial request, I use no real names in this article.

2. The mother's petition, dated May 25, 1914, is in Case No. 45041. The mother stated that she had $865 in the bank and her attorney was selling some property of hers in Hungary that would approximately double her savings. Verifying all of the mother's account is impossible, but the petition did provide a narrative explaining why the mother had been absent and why she was now a worthy mother. On the importance of studying the “fictional” aspects of supplications, see Davis, Natalie Zemon, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987).Google Scholar On the use of narratives to structure identity, both at the individual and institutional level, see Kunzel, Regina G., Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Profession-alization of Social Work, 1890–1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; and Kunzel, , “Pulp Fictions and Problem Girls: Reading and Rewriting Single Pregnancy in the Postwar United States,” American Historical Review 100 (1995): 1465–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. Case Nos. 45041–45043.

4. Recent research on the handling of delinquency cases reveals that using parental status to make determinations about how to track children has remained a feature of juvenile justice. Simon Singer, for example, discovered that prosecutors in Buffalo, New York, factored parental status heavily into their decisions about whether to indict juveniles as adults. “[P]arental status (a non-offense-related variable),” he discovered through multivariate analysis, “is the most important determinant of the prosecutor's decision to refer eligible juveniles to the grand jury.” He added: “The above findings are compatible with other multivariate research on the case processing of juveniles in contemporary juvenile court. Mark Jacobs used a multivariate analysis of juvenile court dispositions and found that the strongest predictor of out-of-home placement is parental marital status. He concluded that juveniles ‘from nontraditional families and children living apart from their parents are at risk of out-of-home placement entirely out of proportion to the risk of recidivism they pose.’” Singer, Simon I., Recriminalizing Delinquency: Violent Juvenile Crime and Juvenile Justice Reform (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 94–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. The best historical account of the use of orphanages from the Civil War until the Great Depression is Hacsi, Timothy A., Second Home: Orphan Asylums and Poor Families in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).CrossRefGoogle Scholar For an excellent contemporary source, see Hart, Hastings H., Preventive Treatment of Neglected Children (New York: Charities Publication Committee, 1910), 57–73.Google Scholar

6. Cmiel, Kenneth, A Home of Another Kind: One Chicago Orphanage and the Tangle of Child Welfare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 15.Google Scholar

7. For an insightful and provocative account of the revolt against institutionalization, including the leading role played by managers of institutions, see Crenson, Matthew A., Building the Invisible Orphanage: A Prehistory of the American Welfare System (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).Google Scholar

8. For good, if somewhat contrasting, accounts of the ideological significance to the development of the American welfare state of this first White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children, see Crenson, Building the Invisible Orphanage, esp. 258–62; Trattner, Walter I., From Poor Law to Welfare State: A History of Social Welfare in America, 5th ed. (New York: The Free Press, 1994), 216–17Google Scholar; and Katz, Michael B., In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 122–24.Google Scholar The standard accounts of the treatment of dependent children in the early twentieth century are Tiffin, Susan, In Whose Best Interest? Child Welfare Reform in the Progressive Era (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982)Google Scholar, and Vandepol, Ann, “Dependent Children, Child Custody, and the Mothers' Pensions: The Transformation of State-Family Relations in the Early Twentieth Century,” Social Problems 29 (1982): 221–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9. The best account of the tension between nineteenth-century traditions and public innovations in social policy during the early twentieth century is Keller, Morton, Regulating a New Society: Public Policy and Social Change in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994).Google Scholar

10. In her study of the Chicago court for the Children's Bureau, Helen Jeter made this point: “In these [dependency] cases and in aid to mothers cases as well, the jurisdiction is technically exercised over the child. Actually, however, the entire family is brought under supervision.” Jeter, Helen, The Chicago Juvenile Court (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1922), 12.Google Scholar

11. Important works on mothers' pensions include: Bell, Winifred, Aid to Dependent Children (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 3–19Google Scholar; Lubove, Roy, The Struggle for Social Security (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 91–112Google Scholar; Leff, Mark H., “Consensus for Reform: The Mothers'-Pension Movement in the Progressive Era,” Social Service Review 47 (1973): 397–417CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nelson, Barbara J., “The Origins of the Two-Channel Welfare State: Workmen's Compensation and Mothers' Aid,” in Women, the State, and Welfare, ed. Gordon, Linda (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Skocpol, Theda, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Howard, Christopher, “Sowing the Seeds of ‘Welfare’: The Transformation of Mothers' Pensions,” Journal of Policy History 4 (1992): 188–227CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gordon, Linda, Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Ladd-Taylor, Molly, Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 135–66Google Scholar; and Mink, Gwendolyn, The Wages of Motherhood: Inequality in the Welfare State, 1917–1942 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 27–52.Google Scholar

12. For a characterization of the early twentieth-century juvenile court as a social welfare institution, see Feld, Barry C., Bad Kids: Race and the Transformation of the Juvenile Court (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).Google Scholar Significantly, the annual reports of the Cook County Juvenile Court appeared in the Charity Service Reports, published by the Cook County Board of Commissioners.

13. Roy Lubove, The Struggle for Social Security, 111. His argument put the historian's seal of approval upon Abbott, Edith and Breckinridge's, Sophonisba P. study for the Children's Bureau, The Administration of the Aid-to-Mothers Law in Illinois, Publication no. 82 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1921).Google Scholar The phrase “fatal defect” is from Abbott and Breckinridge, The Administration, 167.

14. The three classic, historical studies of early twentieth-century American juvenile justice mention the administration of mothers' pensions only in passing. Anthony Platt, for example, in his famous study, The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), does not discuss them. Steven Schlossman and David Rothman discuss them, but only briefly, in Schlossman, , Love and the American Delinquent: The Theory and Practice of “Progressive” Juvenile Justice, 1825–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 73–74Google Scholar, and Rothman, , Conscience and Convenience: The Asylum and Its Alternatives in Progressive America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), 226.Google Scholar Other important works on early twentieth-century juvenile justice, which either do not discuss mothers' pensions or barely mention them, include: Ryerson, Ellen, The Best-Laid Plans: America's Juvenile Court Experiment (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978)Google Scholar; Schneider, Eric C., In the Web of Class: Delinquents and Reformers in Boston, 1810s-1930s (New York: New York University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Odern, Mary E., Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1995)Google Scholar; Clapp, Elizabeth J., Mothers of All Children: Women Reformers and the Rise of Juvenile Courts in Progressive Era America (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Manfredi, Christopher P., The Supreme Court and Juvenile Justice (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998)Google Scholar; and Feld, Bad Kids.

15. Goodwin, Joanne, Gender and the Politics of Welfare Reform: Mothers' Pensions in Chicago, 1911–1929 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16. Willrich, Michael, “Home Slackers: Men, the State, and Welfare in Modern America,” Journal of American History 87 (2000): 460–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On the concept of “governance,” see Burchell, Graham, Gordon, Colin, and Miller, Peter, eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Novak, William J., The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).Google Scholar

17. Willrich, “Home Slackers,” 463. Other good introductions to the theoretical literature about the coupling of welfare and justice include Garland, David, Punishment and Welfare: A History of Penal Strategies (Brookfield: Gower, 1985)Google Scholar; Lasch, Christopher, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York: Basic Books, 1977)Google Scholar; Polsky, Andrew J., The Rise of the Therapeutic State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; and Feld, Bad Kids.

18. For an overview of the poor law in the United States, see Trattner, From Poor Law to Welfare State, 1–78.

19. Willrich, “Home Slackers,” 478.

20. On the ascendancy of wage labor and its cultural meanings, see Stanley, Amy Dra, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).CrossRefGoogle Scholar The best analysis of the transatlantic response to the expansion of market processes is Rodgers, Daniel T., Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998).Google Scholar On progressivism generally see the classic studies by Hofstadter, Richard, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR (New York: Knopf, 1955)Google Scholar; Hays, Samuel P., The Response to Industrialism, 1885–1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957)Google Scholar; and Wiebe, Robert H., The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967).Google Scholar

21. Waters, Miriam Van, “The Juvenile Court from the Child's Viewpoint. A Glimpse into the Future,” in The Child, the Clinic and the Court, ed. Addams, Jane (New York: New Republic, 1927), 218–19.Google Scholar Also see Freedman, Estelle B., Maternal Justice: Miriam Van Waters and the Female Reform Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).Google Scholar Illinois had also established the world's first juvenile court in 1899; see Tanenhaus, David S., “Justice for the Child: The Beginning of the Juvenile Court in Chicago,” Chicago History 27 (Winter 1998–1999): 4–19.Google Scholar

22. Van Waters, “The Juvenile Court,” 220.

23. For a good overview of the doctrine of parens patriae and its relationship to juvenile justice, see Feld, Bad Kids, 52–53. The following is Feld's useful definition: “The legal doctrine of parens patriae—the right and responsibility of the state to substitute its own control over children for that of the natural parents when the latter appeared unable or unwilling to meet their responsibilities or when the child posed a problem for the community—provided for the formal justification to intervene” (52).

24. The 296 case files include the only extant dependency cases from the 1910s and the only extant mothers' pensions cases from the 1920s. Although the number of cases is limited and they come from two brief periods, the cases do allow the researcher to see the long-term consequences of tracking decisions. This longitudinal quality of the case files reveals a great deal about the overarching structure of family preservation policy in this period.

25. See, e.g., Abramovitz, Mimi, Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present (Boston: South End Press, 1988)Google Scholar, and Polsky, The Rise of the Therapeutic State.

26. The regulation of delinquent children has already become a part of this literature. See, e.g., Odern, Delinquent Daughters.

27. Child welfare experts currently use the term “family preservation” to describe programs that prevent the break-up of families. Once a child is removed from his or her home, the process of putting the family back together is called “family reunification.” For an excellent introduction to the recent history of family preservation policies, including the backlash against these programs, see Schuerman, John R., Best Interests and Family Preservation in America (Chicago: Chapín Hall Center for Children, 1997).Google Scholar

28. As part of the 1930 White House Conference on Child Health and Protection, the subcommittee on Mothers' Aid reported, “Since it was in the juvenile court that dependent children appeared, in certain states, to be sent to institutions, it was natural that in the inception of the plan its judge should be given the opportunity of ordering payment to the mother instead of an institution.” White House Conference on Child Health and Protection (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1933), 224 (italics added).

29. Claims of the law's authorship would actually postdate its enactment. Goodwin, Gender and the Politics of Welfare Reform, 104–12.

30. Ibid., 87. Goodwin has used the term “social justice feminists” to emphasize these women's broad understanding of political economy.

31. Ibid., 104–5.

32. Grossberg, Michael, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985)Google Scholar, esp. chap. 8. On the use of municipal courts in the early twentieth century to police social and moral jurisdictions, see Willrich, Michael, “The Two Percent Solution: Eugenic Jurisprudence and the Socialization of American Law, 1900–1930,” Law and History Review 16 (1998): 63–111.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On the importance of urban reform for progressives in Europe and American in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 112–59.

33. White House Conference on Child Health and Protection, 223.

34. For an excellent analysis of the progressive conception of childhood, see Ainsworth, Janet E., “Re-Imagining Childhood and Reconstructing the Legal Order: The Case for the Abolition of the Juvenile Court,” North Carolina Law Review 69 (1991): 1083–1133.Google Scholar

35. In 1910, Henry W. Thurston, a former chief probation officer of the Chicago Juvenile Court and superintendent of the Illinois Children's Home and Aid Society, explained how close these connections between dependency and delinquency were. “Perhaps the most fundamental fact revealed by the recent investigation of delinquent children of the Chicago court is the intimate relation of delinquency to truancy and dependency. In a great majority of cases of delinquent boys, the economic, family and school conditions of the child were unsatisfactory. It has long been possible for the charity worker, the truant officer and the school teacher to prophesy that the children of certain families would develop into delinquents. It is the duty and the opportunity of an efficient community to care so well for its truants and dependent children from the very moment when such a prophecy can be made, that it will never be realized. It perhaps goes without saying that in Chicago, at least, such a community efficiency has not yet been developed.” Thurston, “The Juvenile Court as Probationary Institution,” in Hart, Preventive Treatment of Neglected Children, 347.

36. Howe, Frederic C. and Howe, Marie Jenney, “Pensioning the Widow and the Fatherless,” Good Housekeeping 57 (1913): 291.Google Scholar

37. Twenty state legislatures passed mothers' pension laws between 1911 and 1913. By 1920, forty states had enacted such laws. Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, 424. According to Grace Abbott, “While Judge Pinckney had said that if any other public agency were available the administration of mothers' aid did not belong in the juvenile court, in twenty states it was placed there with the general approval of those interested in dependent children because no other local administrative agency seemed at the time as well qualified. While two of the states adopting the court as the administrative agency were in the East [New Jersey and Vermont] and four in the South [Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Tennessee], the great majority were in the Middle West and Northwest [Colorado, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, South Dakota, Washington, and Wisconsin].” Abbott, Grace, The Child and the State, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938), 2:235–36.Google Scholar

38. Eliot, Thomas D., The Juvenile Court and the Community (New York: Macmillan, 1914), 17.Google Scholar

39. Ibid., 17–18.

40. For an accounting of social workers' concerns about judicial administration of welfare programs, see White House Conference on Child Health and Protection, 224–25. On concerns about socialized justice, see Waite, Edward F., “How Far Can Court Procedure Be Socialized Without Impairing Individual Rights?” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 12 (1921): 339–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For two excellent historical accounts of the concerns in the 1920s over socialized law, see Green, Thomas A., “Freedom and Criminal Responsibility in the Age of Pound,” Michigan Law Review 93 (1995): 1915–2053CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Willrich, “The Two Percent Solution.”

41. For an excellent introduction to American concerns about urban disorder and the quest for social control, see Boyer, Paul, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978).Google Scholar

42. Quoted in Bulmer, Martin, The Chicago School of Sociology: Institutionalization, Diversity, and the Rise of Sociological Research (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 13–14.Google Scholar

43. Although it was the first statewide mothers' pensions program, Pinckney was only responsible for its administration in Cook County. Carsten's early findings and conclusions were published in “Public Pensions to Widows With Children,” The Survey (4 January, 1913): 459–66. He also incorporated his analysis of the Chicago program into Public Pensions to Widows and Children: A Study of Their Administration in Several American Cities (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1913).

44. Stanley, From Bondage to Contract, 112.

45. Although Pinckney shared this concern, the quoted phrase is from Carstens, “Public Pensions,” 465.

46. Youth in Transition: Report of the Panel on Youth to the President's Science Advisory Committee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 24–26. In The Delinquent Child and the Home, Sophonisba P. Breckinridge and Edith Abbott explored the interconnections among truancy, schooling, and the labor market. They concluded'. “A strong plea is presented for the adaptation of the school curriculum to the actual demands of industrial and commercial life, the multiplication of uses of the school buildings, the prolongation of the school year by means of vacation schools, the establishment of continuation schools, the further development of industrial and trade training, and the perfection of the machinery for apprehending all truant children and securing their regular presence at school, as well as the working out of some plan by which the connection between their school life and their working life may be economically and intelligently made.” Breckinridge, Sophonisba P. and Abbott, Edith, The Delinquent Child and the Home: A Study of the Delinquent Wards of the Juvenile Court of Chicago (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1912), 176–77.Google Scholar

47. Grace Abbott quoted in Wolfe, Alan, “The Child and the State: A Second Glance,” Contemporary Crisis 2 (1978): 407.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

48. Schafer, Sylvia, Children in Moral Danger and the Problem of Government in Third Republic France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 4–5.Google Scholar

49. See, e.g., Charity Service Reports, Cook County, Illinois Fiscal Year 1910 (Cook County, Board of Commissioners, 1911), 166.

50. According to the 1907 Juvenile Court Act, the definitions of the “dependent” and “neglected” child included: “any male child who while under the age of seventeen years or any female child who while under the age of eighteen years, for any reason, is destitute, homeless or abandoned; or dependent upon the public for support; or has not proper parental care or guardianship; or habitually begs or receives alms; or is found living in any house of ill-fame or with any vicious or disreputable person; or has a home which by reason of neglect, cruelty or depravity, on the part of its parents, guardian or any other person in whose care it may be, is an unfit place for such a child; and any child who while under the age of ten (10) years is found begging, peddling or selling any articles or singing or playing any musical instrument for gain upon the street or giving any public entertainments or accompanies or is used in aid of any person so doing.” Laws of Illinois (Springfield: State Printers, 1907), 71.

51. According to the Juvenile Court Act, “If the court shall find any male child under the age of seventeen years or any female child under the age of eighteen years to be dependent or neglected within the meaning of this act, the court may allow such a child to remain at its own home subject to the friendly visitation of a probation officer, and if the parent, parents, guardian or custodian of such child are unfit or improper guardians or are unable or unwilling to care for, protect, train, educate or discipline such child, and that it is for the interest of such child and the people of this State that such child be taken from the custody of its parents, custodian or guardian, the court may make an order appointing as guardian of the person of such child, some reputable citizen of good moral character and order such guardian to place such child in some suitable family home or other suitable place, which such guardian may provide for such child or the court may enter an order committing such child to some suitable State institution, organized for the care of dependent or neglected children, or to some training school or industrial school or to some association embracing in its objects the purpose of caring for or obtaining homes for neglected or dependent children, which association shall have been accredited as hereinafter provided.” Laws of Illinois (Springfield: State Printers, 1907), 74.Google Scholar

52. Quoted in Newberry, Ruth, “Origin and Criticism of Funds to Parents Act” (master's thesis, University of Chicago, 1912), 12–12aGoogle Scholar. Cf. Pinckney, , “Public Pensions to Widows: Experiences and Observations Which Lead Me to Favor Such a Law,” Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections (1912): 473–80.Google Scholar The best account of Pinckney's career is Flynn, Frank T., “Judge Merritt W. Pinckney and the Early Days of the Juvenile Court in Chicago,” Social Service Review 28 (1954): 20–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Although limited outdoor public relief and a poorhouse still existed in Cook County, there were no publicly managed institutions designed specifically for dependent children in the county during this period. Public funds were, however, paid to private institutions and associations organized under the state's Industrial School Acts of 1879 and 1883. For contemporary accounts of how the Chicago juvenile justice system worked, see “Testimony of Judge Merritt W. Pinckney,” in Breckinridge and Abbott, The Delinquent Child and the Home, 202–-6; Cook County Ill., Report of a Committee Appointed under Resolution of the Board of Commissioners of Cook County, Bearing Date August 8, 1911 (1912); and Jeter, The Chicago Juvenile Court. The best historical overview of child welfare in Illinois, broadly conceived to include both dependency and delinquency, is Gittens, Joan, Poor Relations: The Children of the State in Illinois, 1818–1990 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).Google Scholar

53. Pinckney, “Public Pensions,” 142–43. Other notable juvenile court judges, including Julian Mack, constructed similar narratives about such separations of mother and child. See, e.g., Leff, “Consensus for Reform,” 400, 410; and Michel, Sonya, “The Limits of Maternalism: Policies toward American Wage-Earning Mothers during the Progressive Era,” in Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of the Welfare States, ed. Koven, Seth and Michel, Sonya (New York: Routledge, 1993), 294.Google Scholar

54. Laws of Illinois (Springfield: State Printers, 1911), 126.

55. Ben Lindsey, the famous judge of the Denver juvenile court, offered this explanation about the gender-neutral wording of the Illinois and Colorado laws. See Lindsey, Ben B., “The Mothers' Compensation Law of Colorado,” The Survey 29 (15 February 1913): 714–16.Google Scholar

56. Goodwin, Gender and the Politics of Welfare Reform, 117–18.

57. Pinckney, “Public Pensions,” 475. Also see Newberry, “Origin and Criticism,” 16–17; Hunter, Joel D., “Administration of the Funds to Parents Law in Chicago,” The Survey (31 January 1914): 516–18Google Scholar; and Carstens, “Public Pensions.”

58. For the political economy of poor relief in Cook County, see Goodwin, Gender and the Politics of Welfare Reform, chaps. 2 and 4. Also see Breckinridge, Sophonisba P., The Illinois Poor Law and Its Administration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939), 33–45.Google Scholar

59. Pinckney, “Public Pensions,” 474.

60. Ibid.

61. For a good overview of the Charity Organization Movement and its ideology, see Trattner, From Poor Law to Welfare State, chap. 5.

62. On the efforts to abolish outdoor relief in the nineteenth century and the rise of scientific charity, see Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse, 36–84.

63. Pinckney, “Public Pensions,” 477, 479. On concerns about male desertion in this period, see Willrich, “Home Slackers.”.

64. Pinckney, “Public Pensions,” 475.

65. The citizens' committee that choose these representatives from its ranks included Jane Addams; Louise de Koven Bowen, the president of the Juvenile Protective Association; Charles Wacker of the United Charities; Sol Sulzberger of the Jewish Aid Societies; Adolph Kurtz of the Jewish Home-Finding Association; Mrs. Arthur T. Aldis of the Visiting Nurse Association; Mary H. Wilmarth of the Woman's City Club; Dr. Henry Favill of the City Club; Gustave Fischer of the Industrial Club; A. A. McCormick of the Immigrant's Protective League; and Minnie Low of the Bureau of Personal Service.

66. The following description of the review process draws upon Newberry, “Origin and Criticism,” and Carstens, “Public Pensions.”

67. Carstens, “Public Pensions,” 461.

68. The Funds to Parents Act triggered a political battle between Bartzen and progressive reformers for control of the juvenile court. The expansion of the court's staff and the granting of pensions made the court into a potentially powerful tool with which to collect political support through patronage jobs and the delivery of relief. The political history of the administration of mothers' pensions is beyond the scope of this article but has been recounted in Goodwin, Gender and the Politics of Welfare Reform, chap. 4, and Tanenhaus, David Spinoza, “Policing the Child: Juvenile Justice in Chicago, 1870–1925,” 2 vols. (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1997), 2: 209–75.Google Scholar

69. Carstens, “Public Pensions,” 461.

70. Pinckney, “Public Pensions,” 476.

71. Ibid.

72. On the importance of economic considerations, see Goodwin, Joanne, “An American Experiment in Paid Motherhood: The Implementation of Mothers' Pensions in Early Twentieth-Century Chicago,” Gender & History 4 (1992): 323–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

73. Hunter, “Administration of the Funds to Parents Law,” 516.

74. Under the common law, the father was always first in the line of responsibility. The principle of extended familial responsibility for poor relations dates back to the Elizabethan poor laws. In Illinois under the Pauper Act of 1874, those liable for support included: “the father, grandfather, mother, grandmother, children, grandchildren, [and the] brothers or sisters” of the poor person inquestion. The lines of responsibility were: “The children shall first be called on to support their parents, if there be children of sufficient ability; and if there be none of sufficient ability, the parents of such poor person shall be next called on if they be of sufficient ability; and if there be no parents or children of sufficient ability, the brothers and sisters of such poor person shall be next called on if they be of sufficient ability; and if there be no brothers or sisters of sufficient ability, the grandchildren of such poor person shall next be called on if they be of sufficient ability; and next the grandparents, if they be of sufficient ability.” The Revised Statutes of Illinois, 1874, ed. Hurd, Harvey B. (Springfield: State Printers, 1874), chap. 57, 754–59.Google Scholar The Pauper Acts are reprinted in Breckinridge, The Illinois Poor Law, 243–71.

75. Hunter, “Administration of the Funds to Parents Law,” 516.

76. The following section is based upon 197 consecutive case files (Case Nos. 44851–45050) from November 26, 1912, until December 26, 1912. Out of the 197 first-time petitions filed in the juvenile court by family members, probation officers, and the police from November 26 through December 26, 1912, eighty were for a “dependent child.” In 1911 this broad category was expanded to include the applications for mothers' pensions. By comparing the twenty-nine applications for financial assistance with the fifty-one “nonpensioned” dependency cases handled by the court, we can see how the court's administration of the new law fundamentally transformed the juvenile justice system.

77. On family violence, see Pleck, Elizabeth, Domestic Tyranny: The Making of American Social Policy against Family Violence from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987)Google Scholar, and Gordon, Linda, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence (New York: Penguin Books, 1988).Google Scholar Revisionist accounts of orphanages include Zmora, Nurith, Orphanages Reconsidered: Child Care Institutions in Progressive Era Baltimore (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Cmiel, A Home of Another Kind; Hacsi, Second Home, and Rethinking Orphanages for the Twenty-First Century, ed. McKenzie, Richard B. (Thousand Oaks, Ca.: Sage Publications, 1999).Google Scholar

78. Hart, Preventive Treatment of Neglected Children, 70.

79. “Report of Chief Probation Officer,” Charity Service Reports (1911), 143.

80. Ibid., 144. Witter provided two examples of private charities paying mothers small sums to keep their children at home. He recounted, “An example of this is the case of three children brought to the attention of the Court about three months ago, but for private charity stepping in at least two of these children would have been sent to institutions at a monthly expense to the county of $7.50 per child; add to this the amount supplemented by the institution, and the amount aggregates $30 per month, making a total of $90 for the three months. The actual amount expended by the Children's Day Association in keeping the children with the mother was $36” (144).

81. Case Nos. 45023 and 45037.

82. Case No. 45037. She was paroled to live with her parents on March 31, 1914, and was permanently discharged that December.

83. According to the case files, twenty-one of the thirty-two children committed to an institution were reunited with a family member. See Case Nos. 44858 (mother), 44859 (aunt), 44860 (parents), 44862 (father), 44863 (aunt), 44865 (aunt), 44895 (father), 44898, 44899 (siblings, mother), 44901, 44902 (siblings, father), 44948–44951 (siblings, parents), 44962 (mother), 45024 (mother), 45037 (parents), 45041 (mother), 45042, 45043 (siblings), and 45044 (parents). The number of reunions was most likely higher but missing papers from a few case files make it impossible to ascertain to whom children were paroled. See, e.g., Case Nos. 44952–14956.

84. For a contempt charge, see, e.g., Case No. 44897.

85. Case No. 44900.

86. Ibid.

87. Unfortunately, the case file does not tell us what ultimately became of the baby with no name.

88. See Case Nos. 44857; 44896; 44952–44956 (five siblings); 44963; 44993, 44994 (two siblings); 45023; and 45050.

89. An officer of the court and his wife adopted James, a six-month-old African-American baby. It was later discovered, however, that James's mother was a minor at the time of the original adoption and thus could not legally consent to the proceedings. In 1915, a second adoption occurred after the mother reached the age of majority. Case No. 44963.

90. Leff, “Consensus for Reform,” 398.

91. There is growing literature on fatherhood, but unfortunately the historical works had little say to say about single fathers in the early twentieth century. See, e.g., Griswold, Robert L., Fatherhood in America: A History (New York: Basic Books, 1993).Google Scholar For the history of women and child care in America from colonial times to modern times, see Michel, Sonya, Children's Interests/Mothers Rights: The Shaping of American Child Care Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).Google Scholar

92. More than one-third of the “legitimate” children brought to the court were growing up dependent because they had lost their mothers to death (nine or 18 percent), desertion (six or 12 percent), or commitment to an insane asylum (three or 6 percent). For the following discussion of children growing up without mothers, I am only examining the family situations where the father was still present. I have excluded children born out-of-wedlock as well as cases in which both parents either died or deserted their children. The eleven cases of single male-headed families are: 44862, 44895, 44901 and 44902 (siblings), 44960, 44991, 45041–45043 (siblings; the case of the three sisters), 45044 and 45045 (siblings). The other motherless children were: 44859 (mother dead, father missing); 44863 (mother dead, father deserted); 44865 (mother dead, father deserted); 44992 (both parents deserted); 45925 (mother deserted, father dead); 45026 (both parents deceased); 45041 (mother deserted, father dead); There were also a couple of cases in which an illegitimate child's mother had died, 44857 and 45050. These children, accordingly, had no legal parents.

93. Case Nos. 44862 (reunited with father), 44895 (reunited with father), 44901 and 44902 (siblings, reunited with father), 44991 (reunited with grandmother), 45041–45043 (siblings, reunited with mother [i.e., the case of the three sisters]), 45044 (reunited with parents [mother had been in insane asylum; missing information in sibling's case file 45045 makes it impossible to determine whether he was reunited with family]).

94. Case Nos. 44862 (father contributes $10 per month), 44895 (father unable to contribute), 44901 and 44902 (siblings, father contributes $20 per month), 45041–45043 (siblings, father contributes $15 per month), 45044 and 45045 (siblings, father unable to contribute).

95. Case Nos. 44862 and 44895.

96. See Case Nos.: 44876–44870 (5 siblings), 44881–44883 (3 siblings), 44884 and 44885 (2 siblings), 44886 and 44887 (2 siblings), 44888 and 44889 (2 siblings), 44890–44892 (3 siblings), 44893 and 44894 (2 siblings), 44981–44983 (3 siblings), 44984, 44985 and 44986 (2 siblings), and 44987–14990 (4 siblings). Hilda is case no. 44985 and Mary is case no. 44877.

The cash payment was part of the probation decree, which read: “And the Court further finds that the defendant ― parent ― of said dependent child ― poor and unable to properly care for the said child, but ― are otherwise proper guardian. It is therefore ordered that the said ― be and remain a ward of this Court, and that said ward be permitted to go hence and be and remain in the custody ― of parent of said child, subject to the friendly visitation of the Chief Probation Officer of this Court or such assistant Probation Officer as may, from time to time, be designated by him.

It is further ordered, adjudged and decreed, that the sum of ― dollars per month be and hereby is fixed by the Court, as the amount of money necessary to enable the parent to properly care for said child at home, and that the Board of Commissioners of Cook County, Illinois, through its County Agent, or otherwise, be and hereby is directed and ordered to pay ― to ― parent ― the sum ― of dollars per month, beginning until further order of the Court.”

97. The average and median age of the twenty-nine home-based track children was seven and a half years. The average of the fifty-one institutional track children was a little over six and a half years and their median age was eight years.

98. Abbott and Breckinridge, The Administration, 25–27.

99. Ibid., 27.

100. This information comes from a 1914 conference committee report, whose findings are discussed by Abbott and Breckinridge, The Administration, 30.

101. Ibid., 31.

102. In 1919 the dietician was replaced by the written document “Chicago Standard Budget for Dependent Families,” which was prepared by the Chicago Council of Social Agencies. Juvenile Court Annual Reports (1919), 8.

103. Charity Service Reports (1913), 300.

104. Ibid., 297.

105. Under the 1913 revision of the law, fourteen was set as the upper-age limit. In a 1923 revision of the law, the upper-age limit for eligibility was raised to sixteen. For a summary of the law's changes, see Goodwin, Gender and the Politics of Welfare Reform, 199.

106. For a discussion of both this racial ideology of difference as well as African-Americans perspectives on mothers' pensions, see Goodwin, Gender and the Politics of Welfare Reform, 31–36, and Abramovitz, Regulating the Lives of Women, 318–19.

107. The percentages have been calculated from the statistics in Charity Service Reports (1913), 92. Of the 190 cases of dependency involving African-American families, only six had received pensions. In contrast, 23 of 48 Austrian, 30 of 54 English, 140 of 311 Irish, 23 of 69 Russian families received pensions.

108. On concerns about desertion in this period, see Willrich, “Home Slackers.”

109. Pinckney, “Public Pensions,” 479.

110. Ibid.

111. Case Nos. 44898, 44899.

112. Case Nos. 44881–4883 (3 siblings) and 44888, 44889 (2 siblings).

113. According to Goodwin's Gender and the Politics of Welfare Reform, “between 1911 and 1927, 13 percent of the pensioned families [in Cook County] included a father who had been either institutionalized or disabled through injury” (161).

114. Laws of Illinois (Springfield: State Printers, 1913), 127.

115. Goodwin, Gender and the Politics of Welfare Reform, 132.

116. McCarthy, Kathleen D., Noblesse Oblige: Charity & Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago, 1849–1929 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).Google Scholar

117. Abbott and Breckinridge, The Administration, 14.

118. Goodwin, Gender and the Politics of Welfare Reform, 134.

119. Ibid., 199.

120. Jeter, The Chicago Juvenile Court, 18.

121. Garrett, Annette Marie, “The Administration of the Aid to Mothers' Law in Illinois 1917 to 1925” (master's thesis, School of Social Service Administration, University of Chicago, 1925).Google Scholar Also see Goodwin, Gender and the Politics of Welfare Reform, chap. 4. The amount Cook County spent on mothers' pensions also increased from roughly $86,000 in 1912 to over $280,000 in 1919, although the average pension remained fairly constant.

122. Leff, “Consensus for Reform,” 413–14.

123. Hopkirk, Howard W., Institutions Serving Children (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1944), 14.Google Scholar

124. This series includes ninety-nine consecutive case files, Case Nos. 83301–83400, running from roughly September 1 to September 22. There are thirty-two “nonpensioned” dependency cases and thirty-five mothers' pensions among these records.

125. In all but two cases, the mother had died. See Case Nos. 83319 and 83320 (siblings, mother insane), 83347–83349 (siblings), 83350–83352 (siblings), 83353–83356 (siblings), 83367–83370 (siblings), 83370, and 83371, 83372 (siblings).

126. According to the case files, eleven of the eighteen children committed to an institution were reunited with a family member. See Case Nos. 83319 (parents), 83350–83352 (father), 83353 (father), 83356 (sister), 83368 (father), 83369 (cousin), 83370 (father), 83371 and 83372 (father). Two brothers aged out of the system. See Cases No. 83348 and 83349.

127. Juvenile Court Annual Reports (1920), 10. On the politics of mothers' pensions in Illinois during the 1920s, see Goodwin, Gender and the Politics of Welfare Reform, 146–53.

128. Case No. 83325.

129. Case Nos. 83399, 83400.

130. For the best discussion of the significance of this work requirement, see Goodwin, “An American Experiment in Paid Motherhood,” 323–41.

131. On the consequences of the devaluing of women's work and the myth that women on welfare did not work, see Goodwin, Gender and the Politics of Welfare Reform, 187–97.

132. Abbott and Breckinridge, The Administration, 6.

133. On the gradual removal of the administration of mothers' pensions from juvenile courts, see Howard, “Sowing the Seeds,” 197.

134. Calvin Coolidge, “Coolidge Urges Home Control Need,” New York Times, 25 October 1925, pp. 1, 27. For an excellent analysis of Coolidge's “minimalist” ideology, see Johnson, Paul, “Calvin Coolidge and the Last Arcadia,” in Calvin Coolidge and the Coolidge Era: Essays on the History of the 1920s, ed. Haynes, John Earl (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1998), 1–13.Google Scholar