Abstract
Soderlind’s thoughtful, concise examination of the Stockholm City Orphanage for Girls over five decades is packed with information about the lives of the orphanage’s girls, its daily structure, the goals of its managers, and the ways these all changed over time. It certainly succeeds as a case study, but Soderlind’s approach also provides insight into the nature of orphanages in Sweden and the broader Western world before and after 1900, and serves as a particularly nice introduction to the variety of institutions designed to raise girls without any other functioning home. She begins by recognizing that orphanages differed from one another and had a variety of meanings to different groups: “what has been created for a certain purpose can also be used for another, and individuals from different social classes can consider and use the same institution, but from different perspectives” (p. 10). Soderlind’s recognition of the need to understand orphanages from multiple viewpoints allows her to avoid making overly broad generalizations. They meant different things to the children in them, the people who founded them, the people who worked in them, and the families those children left or were taken from to reside in the orphanage. Relatively few children in these orphanages, as elsewhere at the same time, were “full” orphans who had lost both parents. Most with either dependent children with families unable to care for them or “half orphans,” as the term went in the United States, that had one living parent.
Soderlind admits that the book “has as its focal point the Stockholm City Orphanage for Girls” (p. 5). The sources for that institution are much richer than the sources for four other girls’ orphanages in Stockholm that are also included (hence the plural in the title); those other orphanages are brought in effectively to reinforce or complicate Soderlind’s arguments as the sources allow. Her sources for the Stockholm City Orphanage run the gamut of what institutions like this leave for scholars: “minutes of meetings, admissions documents, rolls of residents, ledgers of admissions and discharges” (p. 12) as well as kitchen and health journals and reports from the orphanage’s matron.
The city orphanage was, as its name implies, managed by a Stockholm city agency, in this case the Poor Relief Board. Girls were accepted from the age of five onward, with the matron preferring to have girls arrive old enough to care for themselves before getting too old to accept the institution’s attempts to shape their characters. Soderlind notes that girls described by the matron as having bad behavior during their stay were almost all “ten years or older when they were admitted” (pp. 151–52). Like most American orphanages, these avoided infants, who required special care and tended to have a high mortality rate in institutional care. Girls became old enough to leave, usually to work as servants, around fifteen years, with that age varying a bit from among the five orphanages and rising to eighteen at the city orphanage after 1900. Parents were required to sign over guardianship of their children and in many cases paid a small fee to help with their child’s upbringing. The children were likely to stay for the better part of a decade, whereas in many other places, the majority of children were in orphanage care for a year or two before returning to their families. The city orphanage had room for about fifty girls, as did one of the others Soderlind covers (the Malmqvist Orphanage, which became larger later in this period); the other three were noticeably smaller, caring for ten to fifteen girls each. These orphanages wanted girls who needed help due to family poverty, not girls in need of institutional care due to perceived bad behavior. This was true in many nations, and as Soderlind nicely notes the distinction was not as clear-cut as middle-class adults wanted to think: “In practice it was not always so evident where the child should be placed. Poverty, neglect, and delinquency—where were the borders to be drawn?” (p. 35). The goal of all five Stockholm orphanages was to raise girls to be well-behaved and to train them to work as servants for families of means “so that as adults the girls would not be a burden on society” (p. 56). This training was to take place while the girls were also attending school within the city orphanage (they began going out to local schools in the 1910s), which sought to raise them in a home-like environment. After 1900, a small but increasing number of girls were helped by the orphanage to pay for training as teachers or other more respected, higher status jobs. Training girls to be teachers was important earlier at the Malmqvist Orphanage; the book is full of little nuances like this that add depth to the story Soderlind tells.
Catholic orphanages in the United States and elsewhere argued that they were superior to foster homes because they would accept sibling groups, even large ones, whereas siblings tended to be split up in foster homes. From the perspective of a parent, this was an advantage of many orphanages regardless of their specific religious or sectarian administration. Even though the Stockholm City Orphanage for Girls did not accept boys (orphanages for boys or coed orphanages seem to have been rare in Sweden), Soderlind sees it as maintaining family ties. It accepted sisters on a regular basis, was in the city and generally not too far from where the girls’ relatives lived, and had regular visiting hours.
Changes in the broader world inevitably reached into orphanages in some fashion. This was particularly true, though delayed, in the case of formal schooling. The city orphanage maintained its own school for decades. In 1916, “the older girls began attending the regular public school” (p. 117), a change the orphanage’s managers had resisted because they feared the disruptive influence of other children on the orphanage girls. Younger girls continued to be schooled within the institution for a few more years, but with the same schoolbooks being used to teach the same curriculum as in the public schools. Time for play and active recreation also came to be more important over time, reflecting broader societal trends, but the meaning of this to orphanage managers was “to counteract tendencies toward laziness and idleness” more than to have fun (p. 141).
For the matron who ran the city orphanage, training the girls to become useful servants who were employable, and who had good character, mattered more than formal schooling or time for play. The two went in hand in hand: “work was a way of forming the child’s character, and work was motivated as a preparation and training in skills for a future work life” (p. 118). The girls were taught to sew and knit, wash and iron clothes, cook and more generally work in the kitchen, clean house, and perform a variety of tasks that would be desirable in a household servant. Of course, that they provided for their own clothing and a clean institution also made the orphanage less expensive to run.
Orphanages for Girls in Stockholm is packed with information of interest to specialists in the history of children as well as to the general reader and never feels dense or overly theoretical. One especially interesting argument concerns sexual abuse. This is a very difficult topic in terms of finding good sources; no doubt abuse of children occurred in many institutions, at the hands of adults and at the hands of older children, as well as in many neighborhoods, but these events rarely produced sources for historians. Soderlind makes insightful use of the matron’s journals to show that several girls that had moved from the city orphanage to foster care had been sexually abused in the latter before returning to the orphanage. In 1896, the matron used this to argue for institutional care—her institution—as superior to foster homes. At the same time, while she brought up cases of sexual abuse in foster homes to support institutional care, there is no sense that the matron understood that abuse could also happen in orphanages. Soderlind shows how this argument against foster homes intertwined with the matron’s belief that city life was preferable to country life for the dependent girls in the orphanage’s care, better preparing them for jobs in urban households. After discussions in the 1890s of shifting away from institutional care toward more extensive use of foster homes, or of moving the orphanage to the countryside, keeping the institution in Stockholm and keeping girls under institutional care won out for another three decades. “After the 1890s, there was almost no foster home placement via the orphanage” (p. 199).
The debate over whether foster homes were superior to institutional care occurred across the Western world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the United States, the answer by 1909, at the latest, was that foster care was a more natural and desirable way to raise children. But the many advantages orphanages possessed as local institutions that kept children in the same neighborhood and, usually, religious setting as their families meant that orphanage care remained more widespread until the Great Depression. Soderlind tugs on the threads of this debate as it played out in Sweden, showing clearly that as in other countries the two systems worked hand in hand even as the debate among intellectuals and charity managers treated them as opposites. She handles the related argument over whether children should be raised in cities or in the countryside with equal skill. During the decades covered here, it was not unusual for orphanages that had been founded in cities to move to rural outskirts. But as Soderlind shows, the orphanage’s goal—to train its girls to become capable and employable servants to the city’s upper-class residents—supported staying in the city over moving to what was often argued was a healthier or cleaner countryside.
Soderlind also explores why there were significantly more orphanages for girls than for boys in Sweden and tries to put the possible explanations into international context. She relates the development of the city orphanage and its policies to the broader context of Sweden’s changing economy, the creation of labor laws, gendered expectations, and increasing educational expectations in Swedish society. Similar changes were occurring throughout Western Europe and in North America, allowing Soderlind to compare her findings to those of other scholars, particularly those studying orphanages for girls but also reform schools, coed orphanages or those for boys, and the treatment of servants. The author’s superb use of the historical literature on orphanages in several European nations as well as the United States and Canada deepens the specific story she is telling about Stockholm and gives the reader insight into how Sweden’s urban orphanages for girls compare to orphanages, especially orphanages for girls, across the Western world. Soderlind ties or contrasts her specific story to what happened elsewhere in dozens of ways, allowing this to serve as both an intelligent case study and an introduction to the history of orphanages in general in this era. Her use of Barbara Brenzel’s wonderful Daughters of the State, an outstanding case study of an American reform school for girls in the late nineteenth century, is particularly effective.
Orphanages for Girls in Stockholm, like Jessie B. Ramey’s excellent 2012 book Child Care in Black and White, is at the same time a powerful case study and a window into the broader world of poor and working-class children and families and the institutions with which they interacted and were often raised. It should prove useful to readers interested in urban history, family history, the working class, and gender as well as to those interested more specifically in dependent children.
Soderlind’s original thesis, and this book that flows from that work, was written in Swedish. Marie C. Nelson translated it into English, aside from footnotes about Swedish sources, which remain in Swedish.