An Institution That’s Been Broken for 200 Years

When I was a teenager in the early 2000s, my parents both died. Like many American children, I had been steeped in stories about orphans for years, but the books I had read and movies I had watched (Jane Eyre, Annie) failed to mirror my experience of parental loss. They also contributed to my mistaken understanding of orphanhood and the makeup of our child-welfare system—misconceptions that many Americans hold today.

For one, I believed that orphanages were still common in the United States—the reality is that most closed in the years following World War II. And I had only the vaguest sense of what foster care was, even though that’s where my brother and I would have likely ended up were it not for certain facts of our situation: We were middle-class, white, and had extended family ready to care for us. It wasn’t until I began researching my book on American orphanhood that I came to fully appreciate how much class and race have always determined who gets to have a family.

The two primary ways that the American child-welfare system has functioned over the past couple of centuries—through orphanages and foster care—are the subjects of two new books: , by Christine Kenneally, and, by Roxanna Asgarian. These books make clear how both systems have largely disregarded the problem that most families within them face: not necessarily the death of parents, but poverty. This was true even in the mid-to-late 19th century, when the number of American orphanages grew rapidly because of the confluence of mass immigration, a series of epidemics, the Civil War, and the rise of industrialism, which created an unreliable labor market and, in turn, poverty on a new scale. During this period, few children in orphanages—most of which were Catholic or Protestant and housed only white children—were orphans at all. Most had one or two living parents who were simply too poor to take care of them.