Dorothy,Anne,and Margaret: Person-Centered Histories of Foster Children in the Mid-Twentieth Century,New York City

Children's stories are as absent from written histories as their voices. This marginalization is emblematic of a greater predicament: children's voices are likewise at the margins of the available records from which histories are written. As a result, the experiences of children often have to be reconstructed from records that center adults. This is precisely my purpose in writing this article. Relying on a close reading of a source – one written by an adult, from an adult's perspective, that centers the doings of adults – I seek to reconstruct the experiences of three foster children who lived during the mid-twentieth century in New York City. This period was the inflection point when the percentage of foster children placed within home settings, as opposed to institutions, reached a majority. This was a major turning point, the results of which profoundly affected the most vulnerable and resilient children, yet it is largely recorded in the unfeeling language of numbers or in the political discourse of social policy. Buried under countless obscuring documents, only a shining few give any glimpse into the subjectivity of these children. Reading against the grain of one such source, I write the stories of Dorothy, Anne, and Margaret, centering them in their own lives and treating them as historical Subjects. Before their narratives, I turn to histories written of the child welfare system during this period. These sources contextualize their lives and demonstrate what histories are currently available concerning children in the child welfare system.

Background and Historiography

Setting out to detail a “social history of public policy,” Rymph (2017, p. 4) writes a history of foster care and the welfare state through careful analyses of legal, bureaucratic, and professional sources, in addition to sources that highlight the realities of biological and foster parents. She notes, however, that she largely leaves out the voices of children in her work, in part due to the lack of records offering children's perspectives.

Rymph (2017) argues that the child welfare reformers of the mid-century were “hopeful that they could formalize, rationalize, and modernize” the disordered set of practices and institutions that preceded them (p. 2). Social work reformers sought to transform the system of child welfare from one that served poor families through orphanages to one that removed children from “pathological families” and placed them in new ones that mimicked a biological family (Rymph, 2017, p. 116). Despite this goal, the families they pathologized – in which parents were unmarried, divorced, using substances, deemed mentally ill, or seen as unable to support their children – were disproportionately the very same poor families who had been served by orphanages. Furthermore, because the families that children were removed from became pathologized, “by the 1950s, a consensus developed that almost all foster children were in some way damaged” and the system needed to be retooled to treat and rehabilitate these youth (Rymph, 2017, p. 113).

The result of this transformation was that the child welfare system split into two paths, adoptive homes and foster homes, which “were as radically separated as they ever have been” (Rymph, 2017, p. 7). This demarcation was total, as foster parents were forbidden from adopting the children they looked after. Social workers saw foster parents as “inferior” to adoptive parents and believed that foster parents who wanted to adopt a child who still had any attachment to their biological family were deviant (Rymph, 2017, p. 96). Likewise, any love between a foster parent and foster child was seen as evidence of the family's dysfunction. To agencies, a foster family was not a “real family,” only a temporary and substitute one (Rymph, 2017, pp. 98–9). By idealizing the biological family, social workers expected foster homes and adoptive homes to “be both ordinary and extraordinary, normal and not normal” (Rymph, 2017, p. 101). Such a perfectionist ideal did not encompass disabled children, who were excluded from home placements, as were Black children, for child welfare was seen as a service with the right to exclude children and parents on the basis of race. By the early 1950s, this would begin to change, as agencies attempted to place disabled children and recruit Black foster parents.

And yet, despite this perfectionist project, Rymph asserts that when it came to foster families, agencies were rather unsuccessful in engineering their ideal family. Instead, she argues that foster parents did not meet agency ideals of a “white middle-class model of family structure, parenting style, and gender relations” (Rymph, 2017, p. 109). Firstly, while agencies sought to recruit more middle-class and upper-class foster parents, most foster parents were working-class. According to Rymph, this was because foster children were not as “desirable” as adopted children, as they were seen as “suffering from numerous problems” (Rymph, 2017, p. 112). This perception of foster children ties back to the pathologization of their birth parents and is, therefore, a perception constructed by the child welfare system itself. However, in a greater affront to white middle-class ideals, in foster families, the mother was often seen as the most empowered position in the family. From the perspective of the social worker, the foster mother often occupied the “position of family head, organizer, and director” (Rymph, 2017, p. 109). Such a family structure could never fit into the child welfare system's conceptualization of the ideal family.

Taking a different approach, Lee (2016) instead focuses on the child welfare system as a whole. While Lee's text focuses on the everyday experiences of those involved within the foster care system in the contemporary moment, one section of her work outlines a history of the foster care system in New York City using an intersectional analysis. Lee relies especially on sources regarding the Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the only child protection agency in the city until 1962.

In her text, Lee (2016) argues that the child welfare system acts “parallel to policing and incarceration,” through “intentional surveillance and punishment” (p. 4). Lee's (2016) focus in this history is the historical process through which the structure of the child welfare system came to “build on and re-create stratified reproduction and inequalities of race, class, and gender” (p.4). First, Lee (2016) establishes that the child welfare system was designed to target social groups that “were seen as dangerous” or “troublesome” to the white middle-class (p. 19). Lee (2016) argues that this response was due to fear that without “a proper upbringing, poor children would remain poor and drain resources” from the state or “become criminals” (pp. 19–20). Therefore, child protection was used to regulate the behavior of poor parents while child removal was used to coerce poor children by putting them in families that could enforce their conformity to “dominant social norms” (Lee, 2016, p. 18). In this line of analysis, Lee differs from other authors by overtly challenging the narrative that the child welfare system emerged from a humanitarian desire to benefit children; instead, she understands the system as fundamentally purposed with social control.

During the mid-1940s to mid-1950s, Lee (2016) notes that the demography of the urban poor would change due to the migration into the city of African American and Puerto Rican families. Previously, the “troublesome” groups targeted by the system were European immigrants, but during this period, the system shifted to target poor people of color. At the same time, the City of New York expanded its role into the child welfare system, which before had solely been the role of private agencies. In 1945, the city took over the temporary shelters that had been created by the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (Lee, 2016). Over the next decade, the city for the first time would run its own foster care and adoption agencies.

Finally, Simmons (2020) complicates these analyses in her history. Simmons (2020) begins her work by describing how by the mid-century, most private institutions would only place white children, leaving the state to its own resources for foster children of color. The primary tool at the state's disposal was its public delinquency institutions, meaning that these children of color, after being deemed unadoptable, were deemed delinquent. Liberal judges saw these institutions as the only way to house these children using the existing resources of the state. In response to the overcrowding of these state institutions, in 1942 the City of New York passed the Race Discrimination Amendment, which prohibited agencies from refusing to place a child because of their race (Simmons, 2020). Consequently, most agencies turned to religion as a pretext to continue racial discrimination. Others refused to comply, deciding that it would be better to place no children than to provide a child of color with a home.

Still, many more agencies found other ways to exclude children of color by claiming that they were “unsuitable” not because of their race but their intelligence or their need for mental health services; these children were labeled as “mentally defective,” and agencies claimed they did not have the ability to benefit them (Simmons, 2020, p. 210). Here, Simmons goes further than other authors, acknowledging not only that disabled children and children of color were excluded from private adoption agencies, but also that children of color were labeled as intellectually disabled solely so that agencies would not be legally required to place them. Therefore, the Race Discrimination Amendment, which was designed to integrate the child welfare system so as to better serve children of color, resulted in “a system of racially-coded rejections” that crystallized ideas of children of color's “intellectual incapacity, emotional and behavioral conduct, and trajectory toward delinquency” (Simmons, 2020, p. 212).

Because state institutions had no more space and private agencies refused to place these children, they were subject to “racialized overcrowding in temporary shelters” (Simmons, 2020, p. 212). Such facilities were so crowded that children had to sleep in hallways, as sickness and disease spread throughout the shelters. The state, needing to place these children somewhere, turned to city jails and prisons: from 1942 to 1945, state courts were given the right to detain juveniles in adult institutions. Perversely, jails and prisons were seen as the “last safety net available” for children of color experiencing homelessness or neglect (Simmons, 2020, p. 212).

Finally, the state was forced to establish its own city-run foster home care program in 1948. Despite passing the Brown-Isaacs Bill in 1952, which replaced the Race Discrimination Amendment, private agencies would still “siphon off white children,” making the state foster care system increasingly composed of children of color (Simmons, 2020, p. 213). Simmons (2020) concludes her paper by underscoring how “the associations between color, crime, and childhood were built into the very institutional structures meant to protect and nurture children” (p. 216). In order to protect children of color from abuse and neglect, the state at first turned to incarceration and then constructed a new state-operated foster care system which was “inferior and rotten” (Simmons, 2020, p. 217). In Simmons's work, it is clear how the criminal justice system acted as a parallel child welfare system for children of color. Furthermore, while previous historians have focused on both government and agency policies, Simmons is able to meaningfully address the conflict between state and private actors, as private agencies sought to defy state mandates in order to continue practices of segregation.

Each of these writers builds on each other as they address unique dimensions of the child welfare system of New York City in the mid-century. Examined together, they highlight the ideologies that infected the child welfare system and led to the production of systemic inequalities for children and families. Each of the authors identifies the centrality of classism as a justification for the removal of children. Rymph (2017) highlights how adoption and foster agencies were motivated by eugenics in their concern for the social engineering of “perfect” families, families from which disabled children were excluded. Lee (2016) and Simmons (2020) focus their analyses on the reproduction of racial inequalities, and demonstrate the intersection of classism, racism, and ableism in government and agency policies and actions.

Yet though these authors address this remarkable inflection point in American history, they largely make arguments that concern systems, structures, and institutions. That is to say, while they write about children, children are still just outside the focus, and even when they are addressed, they are treated as victims. This characterization strips children of their role within history as Subjects, making them passive objects. By focusing only on the oppressive realities that children face, the child's personhood is lost as they become defined by their very marginalization – something done to them, and therefore outside of themself. Even if this historical focus comes from concern for children's well-being, children are still made by the historian into “objects of humanitarianism” (Freire, 2000, p. 54). ¹

A Note on Methodology

Thus, there are two moves my research makes: a move from the system to the child, and a move from the child as an object to the child as a Subject. Both of these moves are fundamental to the meaning of centering as conceptualized within this work. Centering the child means that they are treated as a Subject with dignity, worth, and respect as opposed to “an object to be dissected, diagnosed, manipulated” (Rogers, 2020, p. 21). This approach is incompatible with a method of writing history that negates the agency of the child, relegating the determination of the child's life entirely to sources outside of them which coerce, control, or condition them. Likewise, this approach is incompatible with a method of writing history which purports to center the child, but in reality centers their victimization. In such research, rather than viewing the child as a historical Subject, they are identified as an object of harm. As opposed to being child-centered, such research is damage-centered (Tuck, 2009).

My task, therefore, becomes illustrating how children asserted their own agency and subjecthood while operating within systems of oppression. Shifting the focus from the systems themselves, I seek to answer how foster children took control in settings where they were made to feel powerless. Central to my inquiry is the subjectivity of these children, for “to deny the importance of subjectivity in the process of transforming the world and history is […] to admit the impossible: a world without people (Freire, 2000, p. 50). I argue that the subjecthood of these children must be understood according to their experience, rather than according to a system-oriented, “abstract, objectified view of the world that is fixed” or determined (delphi, 2024, p. 5). Accordingly, I write narratives in order to demonstrate how these children acted as agents of their own lives. While I add analyses following these narratives, my intent is neither to decenter these children, nor treat them as objects. Rather, my purpose is to understand foster children in terms “of biography, of history, and of the problems of their intersection within social structure” (Mills, 2000, p. 134). Thus, I seek to place them within history as Subjects and connect their experiences to an analysis of their position within society.

However, writing such narratives is made difficult when the source I am relying on is from the perspective of a social worker, an adult who held power over each of the children's lives and treated them in her writing as objects. In reconstructing these narratives, I am thus reading against the grain of the source to recenter the children within their own stories. My research, then, affirms that “the effort to reconstruct the history of the dominated is not discontinuous with dominant accounts or official history, but rather, is a struggle within and against the constraints and silences imposed by the nature of the archive” (Hartman, 1997, p. 11).

Recognizing the constraints of the historical archive, in the following section, I seek to place the source within the context it was written. Following this intertextual contextualization are the narratives and analyses themselves, which struggle against the constraints of the archive in order to rectify absences in written histories. While I use the terms narrative and story, the reconstructions are not historical fictions. Nor are they critical fabulations, though my purpose in writing is to work towards reconstructing a “counter-history” (Hartman, 2008, p. 3). Rather, I remain firmly rooted in the text, just as I read against its grain. Each event in these narratives is there in the source. Where I diverge from the text is not in terms of historical details, but in how these details are brought together and made sense of. In placing the children at the center, focusing on their agency and power, fundamentally, I seek to retell the stories of these children from their positions and subjectivities.

Fordham University School of Social Services and the Meaning of Catholic Social Work

The stories I have reconstructed follow the lives of three foster children, Dorothy, Anne, and Margaret. The material in which I have found the details of their lives, albeit in very different form, is a graduate thesis ² from Fordham University. The school's social work graduate program was rooted in the foundations of the New York School and Catholic teachings of social service. After attending the New York Charity Organization's Summer school in philanthropy, Thomas M. Mulry and Edmond J. Butler envisioned forming a new school of social work of Catholic patronage (Shelley, 2016). Around the same time, Father Terence J. Shealy, an esteemed professor in the Fordham School of Law, had been organizing the Laymen's League for Retreats, an annual religious retreat oriented towards social service (Shelley, 2016). These retreats would culminate in the opening of a School of Social Studies at Fordham in 1911. Five years later, after Mulry's brother became President of Fordham, he founded the School of Sociology and Social Service, which would later become the Graduate School of Social Service. Father Shealy would be the school's first Dean and Director.

By 1952, the graduate school was the second-largest social work program in the United States in terms of total enrollment and had become prominent in the field (Shelley, 2016). The program itself was avowedly Catholic in orientation, as “obvious from the composition of the faculty, the content of the courses, and […] the mission statement of the school” (Shelley, 2016, p. 239). The school helped professionalize the field of social work, training a new class of workers prepared to fill the ranks of Catholic welfare organizations across New York City. To do so, the program “developed a symbiotic relationship” with the Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York, working “closely together for decades” (Shelley, 2016, p. 238). The purpose of the Catholic Charities was to “maintain the Catholic ideal of the family” (Kreigenhofer, 1951, p. 3). To one social service student, this was especially necessary because “anti-Catholic organizations were helping our poor and weakening and destroying their faith” (McDermott, 1954, p. 23). At Fordham, the solution to this dilemma was Catholic social work, based on the integration of “Theology, Psychiatry, Psychology, Social Work and Education” (Behan, 1951, p. 1).

Integral to Catholic social work education was the very same diagnostic paradigm prominent in the New York School. In the Graduate School of Social Service, students learned to pathologize nonconformity, defining a “behavior problem” as that which is “abnormal” and therefore “necessitating social control” (McDermott, 1954, p. 9). Social casework was seen as the primary means of such social control, the goal of which was to make a person “useful” (Del Guercio, 1951, p. 18). Though psychiatric concerns were seen as social problems, insofar as they were “socially disturbing” (Del Guercio, 1951, p. 2), it was believed that casework with individuals was the pragmatic solution (McDermott, 1954; Behan, 1951; Del Guercio, 1951). Fundamental to such casework was diagnosis (Kreigenhofer, 1951; McDermott, 1954; Behan, 1951; Del Guercio, 1951). The impact of this diagnostic paradigm is most apparent in case studies, in which students of the program depersonalized the people with whom they worked. In such case studies, a human being could be reduced to deriding terms, denoted as “The Compulsive Mother” or “The Domineering Mother,” or could even be referred to by a diagnosis alone, such as “Masochistic Neurosis” or “Multiple Breakdowns” (Labrecque, 1954, p. 32; p. 44; p. 54; p. 63).

In the writings of students from the program, children in particular were made to be less than. The reality that there were not enough foster families for the number of foster children in the system was spoken of in the dehumanizing language of supply and demand, as if children were products to be consumed (Pucci, 1954). Children were designated as “unadoptable” because of a “defect” in their heritage or a “physical malformation” that had not been “corrected” (Pucci, 1954, p. 17). Children labeled as disabled were even described as “physically and emotionally appalling” (Pucci, 1954, p. 18). From these writings of students of the program, it is clear how the Graduate School of Social Service nurtured ideologies of pragmatism, pathology, and paternalism.

Because of the program's partnership with the Catholic Charities, students worked with very different populations than other social work schools. One agency of the Catholic Charities was the New York Foundling Hospital, the child welfare agency that oversaw the care of Dorothy, Anne, and Margaret. The organization was founded as the Foundling Asylum of the Sisters of Charity of New York in 1896, and would come to be a prominent Catholic foster care agency (Creagh, 2011). Because of its Catholic orientation, the Foundling Hospital prioritized Catholic parents above all else. This meant that, unlike many other foster care agencies, it would place children in families of different ethnicities as long as they were Catholic families (McKeown & Brown, 1995). In such cases, the sisters believed that the child “should be protected” from learning about their heritage because of how it could negatively impact the child (McKeown & Brown, 1995, p. 94). Despite this policy, Dorothy, Anne, and Margaret each knew details of their heritage and would grapple with what it meant to their self-conception. Their stories can be reconstructed from the writings of their social worker, Clare Jeanne Berger, who worked for the Foundling Hospital as part of her Master of Social Service at Fordham.

Foster Children and Issues of Identity: Labeling, Intersectionality, and Contradiction

In her master's thesis, Clare Jeanne Berger wrote of the very foster children with whom she worked at the Boarding Department of the New York Foundling Hospital. Berger treated their lives as case studies, compiling previous case notes and her own interviews in order to “trace the development of these girls from infancy” (Berger, 1953, p. 6). The purpose of her work was to learn about foster children's relationships with their birth parents and foster parents, and the extent to which their behavior was tied to these relationships. Her perspective was that foster children were unable to handle the difficulties of their lives and as a result would engage in “socially unacceptable or severely neurotic behavior” (Berger, 1953, p. 5). As a result, another focus of her analysis was an evaluation of the “capacity of these children to function” (Berger, 1953, p. 7). Though she devalued and pathologized the children with whom she worked, it is still possible to place these children at the center of their stories and critically examine the negative evaluations with which they are labeled – by their foster families, their former social workers, and Berger herself. Furthermore, despite its lens of paternalism, Berger's writing offers an exceptional glimpse into the lives of the following three children.

Dorothy

Dorothy was 15 months old when she was brought to the Foundling Hospital. She had been in a private foster home, but her parents were no longer able to financially support her after they had been arrested for substance use. As a young child, she spent three months in the institution without a family before she was finally placed. And then, right after finally finding some sense of permanency, Dorothy had a health crisis and was rehospitalized. After two weeks of treatment, she was placed in a different foster home. All through these movements, Dorothy would resist her disempowerment through what the adults in her life called “temper tantrums” (Berger, 1953, p. 32).

In her first few years in this new home, she grew to feel accepted and wanted. Dorothy developed a strong attachment to her three foster siblings and her foster mother Irene, a second-generation Irish immigrant. As she grew older, she began to express herself more openly, acting “friendly and affectionate” to her loved ones while still assertive and fiercely independent (Berger, 1953, p. 32). She began to build a relationship with her biological father, who would visit when he was not incarcerated in prisons or mental institutions. He brought her a doll that she “kept throughout the years,” a doll that brought her much comfort (Berger, 1953, p. 35). She also had frequent contact with her birth mother, who repeatedly made and abandoned plans to reunify with her. The broken promises took a toll on Dorothy. Having learned that she could not depend upon others, she developed a strong sense of self-reliance. She “resent[ed] help,” wanting to act without the aid or direction of others (Berger, 1953, p. 32). Yet, at five years old, she entered a private Catholic school and her need for independence was threatened, leading to a resurgence of “temper tantrums.”

Labeled by her teachers as “bold and disobedient,” Dorothy expressed her indignation (Berger, 1953, p. 32). She would destroy the possessions of those around her as a way to rebel against the strict rules and expectations enforced upon her. Seeing Dorothy's reaction to the limiting environment of private school, Irene moved her to a local public school. It was through her “temper tantrums” that Dorothy was able to affect change in her life; they were her way of taking control and communicating her needs. At public school, her behavior changed, though later teachers would refer to her as “quarrelsome and extremely difficult to manage” (Berger, 1953, p. 32). Despite the difficulties of her environment, she never stopped being herself – she continued to be assertive and fiercely independent, even if these qualities were not seen to be acceptable when present in a young girl.

Her troubles with the school system only amplified as she grew older. At twelve, Dorothy was given an IQ test by her school, a measure that labeled her as less than. Soon after, she developed severe test anxiety, causing her headaches and stomach pains at every evaluation. She felt that her teachers were hard on her, and they justified their behavior by calling her difficult. On Dorothy's part, she “would not do what was required of her” (Berger, 1953, p. 33). Ever independent, she refused to abide by the power of the adults in her life. By the time she was 15, she had decided that she did not want to continue with school, and planned instead to work. Then, she felt, she would have more control over her own life.

Near the same time, Dorothy redefined her relationship with her birth mother. She decided that her birth mother's presence in her life was motivated by self-interest. In part, this was because she was expected to do work for her birth mother every time she visited; moreover, her birth mother expected Dorothy to support her financially after leaving foster care. Dorothy expressed her frustration with these expectations, saying, “What did she ever do for me?” (Berger, 1953, p. 34). She felt used. And so, Dorothy chose to become estranged from her, refusing to accept any case plan that included visitation.

Demanding Autonomy

Amidst the changes and conflicts of her life, Dorothy expressed the force of her will. From the earliest of ages, she expressed her rage, confusion, and discontent. She rebelled against her disempowerment, and she used her self-expression to change her environment. In systems that limited her, she wanted to be treated as a Subject. At first at the Catholic school and then in the public school, she was expected to “listen – meekly” (Freire, 2000, p. 73). ³ Adults in the school system resented that she would not be meek. She refused to conform to the limits of a system in which “the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply” (Freire, 2000, p. 73). And so, she was labeled as difficult. She was labeled as disobedient. These labels were put upon Dorothy because she refused to be what she was expected to be: “manageable” (Freire, 2000, p. 73).

Her experience in the school system can also be understood through the intersection of her age, gender, disability, and status as a foster child. Her fierce independence was seen as making her difficult, but this is also a reflection of how Dorothy transgressed the rigid gender roles of the time. Her desire for autonomy pushed against the social expectations regarding the behavior of children, and girls in particular. She was not conforming, obedient, or passive. She was her own person, and that meant that she did not fit into the roles prescribed to her. Like other foster children, her behavior was pathologized and she was subject to psychological testing. Almost directly after she was tested and labeled as intellectually deficient, she developed test anxiety. In response to being devalued, she doubted herself, and the consequences further affected her engagement with the school system. Amidst such repression, Dorothy empowered herself by leaving the very place that had found her to be less than. She left school and decided to work – not to support her birth mother but herself. Dorothy made her own way.

Anne

Like other foster children, Anne's life was turbulent. Her birth mother cared for her for two weeks before bringing her to the Foundling Hospital. She could not care for Anne because she was readmitted to the Central Islip State Hospital, formerly known as the State Hospital for the Insane; there she died three years later with no record of what caused her death (Berger, 1953). Over the course of Anne's time in the foster system, her birth father would continue to request to be reunified with her, but he received the same response time and time again: “The agency could not approve of the plan since there was no woman in the home who could care for Anne” (Berger, 1953, p. 43). Anne's status as a foster child was thus the result of the intersection of her society's treatment (and construction) of disability and its inflexible gender roles concerning the nurturing of children. Furthermore, as both of Anne's birth parents were first-generation immigrants from Malta, their treatment may have been influenced by discrimination against their ethnicity, language, and culture.

Anne spent the first eight months of her life in institutional care at the Foundling Hospital before she was placed in her first foster home. She was moved to her second foster home after only four months, where she would be cared for by her foster mother, Maude, and raised among five other foster children. “Constantly seeking attention,” Anne could not build the human connection that she needed after her unstable first year of life (Berger, 1953, p. 42). Her foster father, who himself had once been in foster care, did not interact with any of the children; likewise, Maude spent little time with them and provided little supervision.

By Anne's third birthday, the adults in her life began to see her as abnormal. Maude told the social worker that if Anne decided to shake a person's hand, she would continue to do so for fifteen minutes if not interrupted. Rather than attempting to understand Anne, Maude criticized her as “slow and dull” (Berger, 1953, p. 42). In kindergarten, Anne struggled to build relationships with other children and avoided them whenever she could. Having little to call her own, she refused to share with others, and for this, she was called selfish. Seemingly every time that she did not fit into what was understood to be normal and expected, she was assessed as having a personal deficit. At the end of kindergarten, she was tested and moved into a “slow moving group” (Berger, 1953, p. 42). Nearly held back, the greatest concern was the “indication that she [was] forming habits of day-dreaming and inattention” (Berger, 1953, p. 42). In first grade, Anne's daydreaming continued, and at the end of the year, she was held back. The school responded to her behavior with an IQ test, which labeled her as less than.

At six, Anne was moved to her third foster home, and at fifteen, she was moved to her fourth. Echoing other adults in her life, her fourth foster mother demeaned her as “dull,” “lazy,” and “very easy to manage” (Berger, 1953, p. 43). Despite this, when given the chance to return to her third foster home, she refused. Even with her new foster mother's negative evaluations, in this new home Anne felt more like herself. Here, she became more open, friendly, and social, as well as more interested in her life at school. Right before she graduated junior high school, at sixteen, her birth father remarried and went again to the agency to ask for reunification. However, this time it was not the agency who refused the request, but Anne.

While at first she seemed happy about the idea, five months later she decided that she did not want to reunify. Yet she felt conflicted. She said that she wanted to see her birth father, but also stated that she felt that he only wanted her to come back home so she could work to support him. Anne expressed her internal conflict and asked her social worker to share these feelings with him on her behalf. Only a week later, she decided that she did not want to visit him again, stating that she was “afraid to go home and stay overnight” and that he was “like a stranger to her” (Berger, 1953, p. 45). After this exchange, her birth father cut off contact. Later, she tried to reach out to him, but he did not respond. After not having heard from him for half a year, she felt that there was nothing left that she could do.

Acting as a Subject

Like Dorothy, Anne expressed her agency in deciding her family. After being moved from one house to another her whole childhood, she finally was able to make her own choices. First, she decided to stay with her fourth foster mother instead of returning to her previous family. Then she decided again to stay, rather than join her birth father. She defined her own life through her decision to refuse her birth father's attempt to reunify. While the cause of the shift in their relationship is to some extent unclear, Anne's decision was a choice for stability, familiarity, and safety. Anne made a choice, and in doing so she defined who she considered her family. When she had the choice, she wanted to stay.

Anne also expressed her agency in her refusal to conform to the limitations of the school system. As early as kindergarten, Anne's experience in schools was one of being treated as less than. The greatest concern of her kindergarten assessment was not her ability or disability – that only became a concern after they administered an IQ test – no, it was her imagination. In an education system that “inhibits creativity and domesticates […] the intentionality of consciousness,” (Freire, 2000, p. 73) Anne was seen as problematic because of her daydreaming. Her strengths were made to be deficits. Her ability to focus her consciousness on her own inventions led her to be seen as a problem. In a system where “the teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects,” (Freire, 2000, p. 73) Anne would not participate in her own devaluation. Instead, she would be the center of her own experience.

An Intermission

An undercurrent in the narratives of Dorothy and Anne is the practice of labeling. In each of their stories, they were made into an object for another to define. Their locus of evaluation was centered in the judgments of others, outside of their “internal frame of reference” (Rogers, 2020, p. 119). ⁴ As such, behaviors that could be understood in terms of their meaning to Dorothy and Anne were instead judged according to the “distortions” (Lorde, 2007, p. 115) ⁵ held to be true by the adults in their lives. Rather than being understood, they were evaluated: they were “labeled, looked upon as abnormal, hurt, [and] treated with little respect” (Rogers, 2020, p. 66). Their intelligence was insulted. Their intelligence was tested. Berger herself describes the children in terms of their deviation from “normal,” writing of their perceived “inability” to conform (Berger, 1953, p. 45). And so, because Dorothy and Anne did not fit into adult society's normative cultural constructions, their personhood was not understood in terms of “human difference but of human deviance” (Lorde, 2007, p. 116).

Dorothy's will for her own independence and Anne's capacity to imagine and daydream – these differences that made them each their own person were instead interpreted as patterns of deviance and disability. At no point in their narrative did Dorothy or Anne express that they felt such labeling was appropriate to their experience. Instead, these interpretations originated from the adults in their lives, those who exerted their control over what differences were seen as legitimate. Such conflicts concerning the locus of evaluation and the legitimacy of difference reverberate too in the story of Margaret.

Margaret

Margaret's story begins with her birth mother, who herself spent seven of the first eight years of her life in foster care. At eleven, Margaret's birth mother was referred to the Manhattan Children's Court by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which had been operating as the central agency of the entangled networks of juvenile justice and child protection. She was brought to court because of accusations that she had “relations with a colored boy” (Berger, 1953, p. 53). After being released on probation, she became pregnant and as a consequence was committed to an institution, St. Germaine's Home. Margaret's birth father was Black, and because of this, it was assumed – with admittedly “no information” – that he had “attacked” her (Berger, 1953, p. 53). After she gave birth to Margaret, Margaret's birth mother was labeled as intellectually disabled and committed to Wassaic State School, where she would remain incarcerated for the first fourteen years of Margaret's life.

The purpose of beginning Margaret's story with the experiences of her birth mother is not to decenter Margaret in her own narrative, but rather to acknowledge her own intersectionality and historicity. Margaret was born biracial in a time when relationships across race were seen as delinquent and criminal. She was made a foster child through the incarceration of her birth mother in a mental institution, which was tied to her birth parents’ transgression against ideologies of racial purity. Furthermore, because her birth father was Black, it was assumed that her parents’ relationship was not consensual, and he and his family were never considered when deciding who would raise Margaret. Finally, she was only able to be placed in a foster family because she was white-passing and the agency hid the details of her ancestry from her foster parents. Otherwise, like many foster children of color, she would have had little chance of a home placement. Margaret's story, therefore, is interwoven with the stories of her parents and irrevocably intertwined with the intersections of her race, color, and status as a foster child.

For the first three months of her life, Margaret remained at the hospital she was born in. She spent the next month in the New York Foundling Hospital before being placed in her first foster home. At eighteen months old, she was then transferred to her second and last foster home. Despite the instability and change that plagued her first two years, Margaret was “pleasant, agreeable, [and] friendly” (Berger, 1953, p. 53). Her new home was happy yet apprehensive to welcome her. Margaret's new foster parents were first-generation Italian immigrants who had lost their sixteen-year-old son and decided to foster after being denied the chance to adopt because of their age. In her new family, her foster father was friendly and lenient while her foster mother was vigilant and demanding. Struggling to adapt to her new home, Margaret became “ill at ease and fearful” (Berger, 1953, p. 55). Her foster mother, Angela, would describe her as “selfish and determined,” often expressing frustrations with her in the first few years of her placement (Berger, 1953, p. 55). Once, when Margaret was four, she scratched a new piece of furniture and Angela almost requested that she be transferred to a new home. Yet despite sometimes expressing frustration with her, Angela would become very attached and “would not consider letting Margaret leave her home” (Berger, 1953, p. 55).

However, this would change shortly after Margaret's eleventh birthday, when Angela was informed that Margaret was biracial. Beforehand, Angela and her husband were considering adopting Margaret, but after learning her birth father was Black, they decided that they would wait “to see how she would turn out” (Berger, 1953, p. 55). From that point on, Angela would tend to interpret Margaret's behavior in a negative light, saying, “It must be in her blood” (Berger, 1953, p. 56). And so, Margaret navigated living in a home where she experienced racism from her caregiver, where her actions were seen through an anti-Black lens and she could do little to escape judgment.

Conflicted about her relationship with her foster daughter, Angela decided to leave for Europe. She requested that Margaret be placed in an institution while she was gone, saying that Margaret would “stop lying and stealing if she was placed with the nuns” (Berger, 1953, p. 56). When pressed by the social worker, Angela admitted that she had little actual concern about Margaret's behavior; instead, her accusations were likely influenced by her feelings about her foster daughter's heritage. For the ten months she was gone, Margaret remained in the Sacred Heart Orphanage. When Angela finally returned from Europe, she was anxious to be reunited with Margaret. Despite her prejudice, she decided that she wanted to be Margaret's mother. The agency almost refused their reunification, but Margaret wanted to go home. Even though Margaret knew she would continue to be unfairly treated because of her identity, she decided what she wanted for her life: she wanted a family.

Margaret and Angela's relationship was also strained because of what happened to Margaret's birth mother. As she grew up, Margaret was not allowed to play with the neighborhood children or visit any friend's home. Angela was especially worried about Margaret being around boys. Her anxiety only increased as Margaret grew older, and reached its inflection point when she became fourteen, the age that her birth mother became pregnant. Without such strict supervision, Angela was afraid that Margaret might “turn out like her mother” (Berger, 1953, p. 56). And yet, regardless of her foster mother's attempt to socially isolate her, Margaret built a close relationship with a neighborhood friend. With this friend, Margaret could be herself and unafraid of negative evaluation. It was this one friend with whom she shared her identity as a foster child. She never shared this with the other children at school, though they questioned why Angela was significantly older than the other parents. Margaret disregarded them, as she did not feel that any of them were “deserving of an explanation” (Berger, 1953, p. 58). She found empowerment through her choice of self-disclosure, deciding that only her closest of friends deserved to see her as she was.

Margaret did not feel that the adults in her life saw her as she was, but rather judged her because of her heritage. Growing up, Angela would only ever tell Margaret that her birth mother was “crazy” (Berger, 1953, p. 52). And so, when her social workers forced her to talk about her birth mother, she felt that they “were trying to punish her” (Berger, 1953, p. 59). Their prying made her feel less than because of the stigma attached to her birth mother's confinement in a mental institution. When the social workers visited, they treated her as if she was not “not bright enough” or “good enough” for her foster home (Berger, 1953, p. 53). Margaret was only further belittled by the IQ test she was made to take at the Kings County Hospital, which labeled her as less than. Amidst such universal devaluation, Margaret hoped that one day she would be seen as her own person and not in connection to the way the adults in her life perceived her mother. Unfortunately, the prejudice felt against her birth parents transferred onto her, and Margaret was forced to be resilient through such hardship.

In her resilience, Margaret became determined to see her birth mother. At fifteen, she decided that she wanted to see the person whose treatment had so influenced her own. She wanted to see her and know her, and to see whether she was safe and being taken care of. The visitation was discouraged, but Margaret would not be assuaged. And despite the fluctuations in Angela's relationship with Margaret – despite the prejudices Angela had expressed against her, despite the way that Angela herself had demeaned her birth mother – she firmly supported Margaret in her decision. Angela would support her foster daughter, and she would do so “irregardless” of any obstacles (Berger, 1953, p. 58). Margaret expressed her own agency by deciding to see her birth mother, in her mind the source of so much of her life's conflicts. In doing so, she decided to critically examine her history. She would decide for herself the role her mother played in her own identity, refusing to be limited by what she had been told by others.

Coming to a Self-Definition

To understand Margaret's story, it is necessary to reflect on her intersectionality. Because of her race, color, gender, disability, and status as a foster child, she experienced “intersectional subordination” (Crenshaw, 1991, p. 1248). Marginalized along converging “axes of power,” (Cho et al., 2013, p. 787), Margaret's story cannot be separated from her identity – the identity with which she was labeled, and the identity she experienced within herself. Because she was white-passing, the agency decided to withhold her biracial identity from her foster parents so she could be placed in a home. Thus, when Angela was finally informed about her identity, Margaret became “racialized” (Collins, 2009, p. 83). In Angela's eyes, her foster daughter had been transformed – though nothing actually changed within Margaret. Now stigmatized because of her race, Margaret lost the “familiar full acceptance” (Goffman, 1986, p. 35) that she had finally found in her home. Angela could not see Margaret as who she was, but was limited by her own socialized “fear and loathing” of difference (Lorde, 2007, p. 115). In response to Margaret being racialized, Angela requested that she be placed in an institution, illustrating the disempowerment Margaret faced because of the interaction between her race and status as a foster child.

Like other foster children, Margaret was pathologized and subject to psychological testing, but because of her race and disability, her experience was different. From the earliest of ages, she experienced paternalism, ableism, and racism coming from the very social workers who claimed to be concerned for her welfare. From them, she experienced these oppressions “in daily social interaction” (Collins, 2009, p. 26) before she even knew why. She felt routinely devalued and was made to feel as if she did not belong; blinded by their prejudices, the social workers made Margaret feel like she was not intelligent enough, or even good enough for a home.

At no point is it clear how Margaret defined her own identity, and yet, the intersection of the identities with which she was labeled profoundly affected her experience. Margaret lived in the contradiction between her “self-definitions and everyday treatment” (Collins, 2009, p. 97). Having experienced “domination based on difference” (Collins, 2009, p. 78) before an awareness of the very ways that she was different, Margaret's own reality was split down the middle. The disconnect between her self-conception and her treatment created a “dual consciousness,” whereby she was forced to understand herself through the distorted lenses of others (Collins, 2009, p. 106). ⁶ She lived in this contradiction, but that is not to say that she was defined by it. By deciding for herself to see her birth mother, Margaret challenged the distortions of others and chose instead to center her own perception. By deciding to reach out to her, Margaret disregarded others’ interpretations of her heritage and its impact on her own identity. She would see for herself.

A Synthesis

The stories of Dorothy, Anne, and Margaret illuminate the entangled issues of identity in these children's lives. Because of their status as foster children, the adults around them had access to parts of their history that might be seen as “discreditable” or “ordinarily concealed” (Goffman, 1961, p. 24). And so, they were judged by information they had no part in sharing, and may not have even known themselves; they were judged because of their parents and how they had been pathologized and othered. They expressed themselves in the ways that they could: “antagonism, affection, or unconcern” (Goffman, 1961, p. 43). Often, such acts of self-determination were interpreted in psychiatric terms, and as a result, their autonomy led them to be labeled deficient. Interviews with foster parents reveal uniform degradation, in which Dorothy, Anne, and Margaret were negatively regarded by those closest to them. When describing their foster children, the caregivers’ kindest remarks revolved around how easy they were to manage.

However, it would be wrong to say that Dorothy, Anne and Margaret simply internalized the language that marginalized them, having “no valid independent interpretation of their own oppression” (Collins, 2009, p. 28). Dorothy knew her own value and always strove for her own independence. She and Anne refused to conform to the dehumanizing expectations of the school system. Both of them refused to be reunified with their birth parents, who they believed were trying to exploit them. They did not want to be used or further victimized, and they knew that they deserved not to be. Likewise, Margaret refused to accept the way she had been characterized by choosing to find her birth mother. She had been treated differently because of her birth parents her whole life, and she chose to take control of her own self-definition by deciding for herself what she felt about her birth mother and the role she played in her own life. As such, Dorothy, Anne, and Margaret's actions acknowledge that the “primary responsibility for defining one's own reality lies with the people who live that reality” (Collins, 2009, p. 39). They chose to be the center of their own stories, the Subjects of their own experiences.

Reflections

But to what extent do the stories I have reconstructed represent the realities of these children? Clare Jeanne Berger wrote case studies on the children that she worked with, synthesizing her own case notes with the information made available to her by the writings of other social workers. Berger, an adult author, decided what was written and what was important enough to document. As a result of the biases of such a source, the stories I have been able to reconstruct focus more on these children's interactions with adults – and often social workers – in their lives. Any discussion of their self-expressions is limited to what is known to these adults. This is why I call the pieces of information available in these sources “glimpses.”

As these life details are truly just glimpses, the children's stories are necessarily incomplete. But simply because they are incomplete does not mean that these stories should not be told. During many important times in these children's stories, they were very young, without the ability to speak or write. Because their experiences were documented by adults, I am able to present what could not have been recorded by the child themself when they experienced it. Furthermore, should the child have chosen to document it later, a good deal of the events which we have access to in these sources may have been forgotten or repressed in their memory. And so, even if we are forced to piece together these narratives based on the accounts of adults, these children's stories are only able to be told at all because of such an adult-centric source. Despite limitations, each story uncovers details about a child's personhood, their struggle, and their victories. And these stories deserve to be told. Pieced together, these glimpses amount to something valuable.

By centering individual children's stories, one can see the interconnections of their experience in a way obscured otherwise. Here are the stories of three children, whose lives touch on the intersections of countless domains of power. Rather than only illustrating the history of the child welfare system, these narratives touch on – among other areas – the criminalization of substance use, the incarceration of people in asylums, patriarchal definitions of the family, the banking method of education, the policing of racial purity laws, and the impacts of the juvenile justice system. Such interconnectedness could only be shown because these histories were told with people at the center: no system is ever as complicated as one person's life.

Like all histories, these children's stories are made sense of and given meaning in the present moment. When reading the worlds of Dorothy, Anne, and Maragaret, it is particularly striking the echoes with which we are faced: the ways in which the lives of children currently living in the foster care system experience parallel realities to these historical figures. When given space to construct narratives of their experience, foster children share the difficulty of repeatedly moving from one home to the next (Devost, 2023). Foster children continue to face pervasive anti-Black racism from their closest caregivers (Akuoko-Barfi et al., 2021). Furthermore, foster children continue to express how they are managed, controlled, and stripped of their agency and autonomy; how they are surveilled and their expressions of agency and autonomy are pathologized as deviance (Edwards et al., 2023).

When children in the foster care system are listened to, they share experiences of being decentered and made an object for another (Wilson et al., 2020). Adults in their lives, rather than acting out of concern for their welfare, are “caught up in bureaucracy and [have] lost view of the child” (Wilson et al., 2020). Children share that their experiences are not valued. They share their dislike of “being treated as ‘children,”’ that is to say, inferior (Wilson et al., 2020). And yet, although the system is not amenable to the participation of the child, children continue to make their voices heard, advocating for radical change and asserting their disregarded humanity to those who would listen (McTavish et al., 2022). Foster children continue to come to their own self-definition and act as the author of their own stories (Devost, 2023). At the same time, the continuities of the child welfare system call into question the more than half-century of reform efforts, which have left intact a state apparatus of entangled and deeply rooted oppressions.

Centering this system, both in the contemporary moment and in the writing of history, has consequences. The lives of Dorothy, Anne, and Margaret cannot be accounted for by any history which centers systems, structures, or institutions. The details of their lives are obscured by a top-down history in which they cannot fit. Children deserve to be at the center of their own histories, and their stories deserve to be treated with dignity, worth, and respect.

History is not some objective thing to be studied in the abstract, it is something that is experienced by people. Thus, any history of the child welfare system must be a history of foster children.