18th Century Orphans Research Paper

The origins of the abuse, neglect, and mistreatment of children stems from the way children have been viewed throughout history. Dating back to the some of the earliest times in society, children have typically been viewed as property of their parents, with no real individual rights of their own.

What makes a child an orphan? There could be multiple ways a child ends up being parentless. Here is a story of one of the probable events. I was born in the poorest of countries. The government was corrupt and its leader was a dictator. You did not worry about what you were going to wear or even eat, for today would have been a struggle within itself. After all, how can I find space in my heart for love, if it is filled with anger? Through all my struggles and trials, I have learned to cherish the happy moments and forgive those who done me wrong.

Child abuse has been a big issue in the world for a long time. There has not always been child protective services like there is now. Children would be abused and neglected and nothing was being done because it was not being reported. The New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children was the world’s first organization in the late 1800s which was dedicated totally to child protection (Myers, 2008).

Many of the workers “demand a reduction of the hours of labor”(Document G), because they were required to work long hours with little pay in bad working conditions. Moreover, the workers had to comply to their bosses with no questions asked, “in which the individual no longer works as independently as formerly, but as a private in the ranks, obeying orders, keeping step, as it were, to the tap of the drum”(Document C). The labors did not work in good conditions, but because the economy was bad, workers could not just quit their job at their own free will. They needed money to pay for their tenements and food, and many of them lived in hull-houses or tenements stuffed with other families and individuals in the same position as them. On the other hand, according to the statistics provided by document A, food prices and fuel and lightening prices decreased significantly over the the years from 1870 to 1899. The cost of living also decreased over the years, but barely. Comparatively, big businesses started opening department stores which attracted the consumers during their leisure time. Department stores were “hundreds of stores coordinated into one and laid out” all under one roof which made it easier for the consumers to shop. Individuals started to enjoy leisure, while some went and shopped, some enjoyed movies and even walking around the

Living in a poorhouse in the 1800’s was considered normal because poor families couldn’t support themselves. “They are believed to have slept six people to one bed,” (Document 6) which is very disturbing because there aren’t any showers back then or even hospitals. It is a huge negative because of how horrible pollution and illnesses were commonly spread easily and killed off more people. Furthermore children were affected during this time because they had to stay at home in dangerous living situations with no protection. Luckily, this is a positive affect because child labor laws were passed. A huge defect is while they sat home, they weren’t being educated. Another main key point in this writing is children not being able to have an education. Instead of going to school and learning children were forced to work laboriously for a long amount of time. “From six in the morning till seven at night,” (Document 7). I acknowledge the suffering the children had to go through because they didn’t have a regular childhood. They were brought up in the world believing that working just to get by is normal

It was made up of people who did not make enough farming so they had to work in dangerous factories. The people of the lower class also had unsanitary living conditions because there jobs at the factories had little pay. Document 8 is an article about the conditions of the housing in the lower class. It states “..one penetrates into this chaos of small one-storied, one-roomed hits, in the most with no artificial floor, kitchen, living and sleeping-room all in one”. This house that was described is called tenets. The tenets were cramped and unsanitary for people of the lower class to live in. It caused a lot of diseases because of poor sanitary and tight living areas. Document 7 shows a dirty bar in a lower class neighborhood. The bar looks run down and the people look dirty and ragged. On the far right side a little girl is in the bar which shows that the family cannot afford a nanny to look after the kids while the they go out. Documents 5 and 9 show the working conditions of the lower class. The article on Document 5 says “..or from painful repetition of efforts which distorts or wear out his frame”. When the writer says “painful repetition” he refers to the painful work that occurs everyday long and hard hours, that the members of the lower class experienced. Document 9 depicts kids dirty and unhappy at work in the factories. The lower class kids had it worse because they worked 16 hours a day, 6 days a week. They got

Contrary to its name, the Orphan Train riders included not only orphans, but also children with only one parent, children that were given up because their family was too big, and runaways. These children often underwent parental death, abandonment, or prostitution. Still other orphans were immigrant children. They suffered from the overpopulation of New York and lack of job availability. Even the jobs they could get did not pay enough for them to survive. Many of the orphans turned to selling small items such as newspapers or matches to survive on the streets. These children often formed gangs to protect themselves from the sometimes violent world of street life in New York City. Police, after finding some of these gangs,

On the other end of the society scale, the working poor were working and living in unbearable conditions. There were no irrigation systems, running water or any way of preserving hygiene in the homes or the factories. The working poor lived in slums and tenements which were breeding grounds for diseases. In the book, “The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844” by Friedrich Engels, he states, “...at the end of the covered passage, a privy without a door, so dirty that the inhabitants can pass into and out of the court only by passing through foul pools of stagnant urine and excrement.” (page 78)1. This gives us a peek into the horrible unsanitary conditions that the working class were forced to endure while the business owners were living in beautiful mansions and summer houses.

Many families were threatened by advancing cholera and smallpox which would spread very fast because they lived in the small badly ventilated tenements that housed many families. There are modern day tenements, but now they are called apartments. The definition of a tenement is “occupied by three or more families, living independently and doing their cooking on the premises; or by more than two families on floor, so living and cooking and having a common right in the halls, stairways, yards, ect.” The modern tenements are much cleaner with better lighting and

Many tragic events have occurred throughout history that lead to the protection and advocacy of children, for example in Greece, during ancient times, infanticide would be legal and even enforced under certain cases like illegitimate or deformed children. Children would be sold into slavery or be put to work if families needed the extra income. Unwanted European newborns were discarded without penalty and children were pushed into adulthood as quickly as possible. “Owing to the high infant mortality rates of the times, estimated at one or two in three, the investment of love in a young child may have been so unrewarding that by some ruse of nature… it was suppressed. Perhaps also the frequent childbearing put less value on the product. A child was a born and died and another took its place” (Tuchman, 19778, p.50).

Orphan Children living in the 1800s were living on overcrowded streets of cities. Over 30,000 abandoned kids were placed into new families throughout Canada and the United States using what were called ‘orphan trains’ . This movement was one of the first documented for foster care in America. The Orphan Train Movement was a supervised welfare program that operated between 1854 and 1929. These kids faced many obstacles, a rough childhood, and their family life could be torn apart or challenging for them.

In the United States, the history of child protective services are divided into three eras; before organized child protection, creation and growth of organized child protection, and government-sponsored child protection services. The first time that child protection was organized was in 1875 by the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (Myers, p. 449). Before 1875, children did not have the protection that is practiced today and the intervention to protect children was uncommon. Prior to 1875, prosecution was not the only solution to child protection. Massachusetts in the early 1640s had laws that gave courts the right to remove children from parents who did not teach their children properly. Also Massachusetts passed a

Housing was deemed a necessity as people were living in poor conditions, families were overcrowded and there was families living in tenements that shared toilet amenities. Also there were homeless people living in the streets.

But what if we were completely untouched by society, isolated from all forms of humanity? Without other people to interact with and learn from, babies would grow to be nothing more than a wild animal. Every human being is born with the potential to develop into an intelligent, social creature, but without human influence a person can never develop into what we consider to be a member of human society. One can clearly see this through the reports of feral children. There has been only a few cases reported and very few studied. In cases from the past feral children are reported as wild children who could not speak or communicate in anyway. These children bit, scratched, growled, and walked on all fours. In addition to this primal behavior, they ate grass, ravenously tared apart small animals and devoured the raw meat. The most shocking quality of the children was their apparent lack of sensitivity to pain or cold. (Henslin 66-7) The most famous case of a feral child was “The wild boy of Aveyron” in 1798. At first this case would have been written off as just another folk tale, but a French scientist, Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, conducted immense studies of the

The lowborn workers toiled away for hours in physically exhausting jobs only to afford apartments that were sterile and cold. “There were some nine cots in the place . . . he was sick of the bareness and privation connected with his venture” (Dreiser, 304). The pay affected the men and woman’s own mode of life. They were forced to share living spaces with other families and more often than naught, had to bunk with complete strangers. The very comforts associated with a home, such as wood and furniture, were often too large of an expense. Even with Governmental/ Charity handouts the citizens had no money in which they could afford better living conditions. The rooms they were given to stay in were cold and sterile, and they were not guaranteed a place to stay every night.