Children's Rights Movement: A History of Advocacy and Protection

From the Moral Family to Civil Society

Welcome to today's lecture on the Children's Rights Movement. We'll trace how American society moved from viewing children primarily through the lens of family discipline to recognizing children as having rights deserving of public protection. This transformation reflects broader changes in how Americans understood virtue, citizenship, and the role of civil society.

Introduction: Why Children's Reform Matters

          Antebellum moral reform expanded civic virtue beyond politics to moral life.
Child reform extended this moral project to the next generation.
Voluntary associations bridged private virtue and public welfare.
Scope: From Puritan discipline to Progressive child advocacy.

        

If virtue sustains democracy, childhood formation becomes a civic project.

Start by connecting children's reform to the broader theme of moral reform we've been studying. Emphasize that reformers saw children as the future of the republic—if democracy depends on virtuous citizens, then childhood becomes a matter of public concern, not just private family business. This lecture spans from colonial Puritan discipline to Progressive Era reforms.

Conflicting Images of Children

Philosophical Foundations

Enlightenment triumphs over original sin

John Locke's tabula rasa: Children are blank slates shaped by environment and experience.

Primacy of Environment: Alter character by providing proper environment

Rise of Romanticism

Rousseau's romantic innocence: Childhood as a sacred stage of natural purity that must be protected.
Sentimentalization of children used to rouse public opinion

Ethos of Individualism (self-reliance and discipline)

creation of public schools and institutions

Together, these ideas suggested environment and education could produce virtuous citizens.

Practical Applications

Moral psychology: Proper discipline combined with affection forms character.
Institution building: Schools, reformatories, and orphanages as engines of moral engineering.

              Ideas reframed childhood as improvable through environment and care—driving optimism about human reform.
            

Industrialization, Urbanization, and the Crisis of Childhood

Industrial labor and child poverty (mills, mines, glassworks).
Immigration and urban overcrowding concentrate poverty.
"Street Arabs" / "Street Rats"; ≈30,000 homeless children in NYC by 1850s.
Reformers warned of a "terrible social crisis."
Civil society awakens: churches & charities mobilize.

Rapid urbanization created visible crises that demanded organized response.

The "discovery" of childhood poverty sparked a national reform movement.

Houses of Refuge & Reform Schools (1825–1900)

Public Schools

We already learned about the Common School crusade in Lecture 2 (Slides 21–32): Horace Mann's tax-funded classrooms

Origins & Philosophy

Youthful lawbreakers could be remolded

First House of Refuge: New York, 1825.
Alternative to adult prisons for children.
stressed rigorous discipline, education, and hardwork
offered basic education and "such employments as will tend to encourage industry"

Granted Broad Chaters

“all such children who should be convicted of criminal offenses… and rogues, vagabonds, common beggars, and other idle, disorderly, or lewd persons.”

Parens Patriae

Ex parte Crouse (1838): Parents' and rights and children's rights to due process could be overridden for child's "welfare."

Reform schools claimed benevolent purpose but operated like prisons.

"The object of the charity is reformation, by training its inmates to industry; by imbuing their minds with principles of morality and religion."
—Pennsylvania Supreme Court, Ex parte Crouse (1838)

Goal: moral reform through discipline, labor, education.

Based on belief that environment shapes character.

Houses of Refuge were supposed to save children from adult prisons, but they often became brutal institutions themselves. The Ex parte Crouse decision justified state intervention in families by claiming it served the child's welfare—a principle that could be both protective and coercive. These institutions show the dark side of reform: good intentions implemented through harsh, dehumanizing methods. Ex parte Crouse (1838) - Brief Lecture Notes: THE CASE: - Mary Ann Crouse, a minor girl, was committed to Philadelphia House of Refuge by her mother - Her father challenged the commitment, arguing she'd been imprisoned without trial - Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled AGAINST the father THE RULING: - Court established doctrine of "parens patriae" (state as parent) - State could override parental rights when acting for child's "welfare" - Reformatories were not prisons but "schools" - therefore no due process required - Parents' rights not absolute when child's best interest at stake WHY IT MATTERED: - Legal foundation for state intervention in families - Justified juvenile reformatories, industrial schools, and later juvenile courts - Established precedent: children's welfare > parents' rights - Made "child's best interest" a legal standard THE TENSION: - Progressive achievement: children have rights independent of parents - Paternalistic danger: who decides what's in child's "best interest"? - Often used to control poor and immigrant families - Middle-class reformers gained power over working-class child-rearing DISCUSSION POINT: "When should the state override parents' decisions? Who gets to define 'welfare'?" This case laid groundwork for everything from compulsory education to modern CPS. The same principle that protects abused children can also be used to impose class-based values on families. Reform is never neutral.

Girls in Moral Reform: Child Prostitution & “Fallen Women”

Due to Urban poverty and exploitation, many destitute girls forced into prostitution.
Magdalene & Female Moral Reform Societies: rescue, repentance, rehabilitation.
Institutions:
- First Stand Alone Female Reformatory – Boston Female Moral Reform Society's Home (1833)
- New York House of Mercy (1855)

Women-led organizations pioneered rescue but enforced Victorian purity.

Magdalene & Female Moral Reform Societies - Brief Lecture Notes: WHAT THEY WERE: - Networks of middle-class Protestant women (1830s–1900s) - Rescue homes for "fallen women" (prostitutes, unwed mothers, sexually "ruined" girls) - Named after Mary Magdalene, biblical figure associated with redemption - Run by women, for women—but with strict moral agenda THEIR PHILOSOPHY: - Rejected the idea that women who "fell" were irredeemable - Believed in rehabilitation through: - Religious conversion and prayer - Domestic training (sewing, cooking, housework) - Moral education and discipline - Isolation from corrupting urban influences - BUT: blamed individual moral failure, not structural conditions THE CHILD CONNECTION: - Targeted young girls as "preventable" cases - Rescued girls from brothels, dance halls, streets - Took in pregnant unwed mothers and their babies - Sometimes removed girls from immigrant/poor families deemed "immoral" - Fed into orphanages, adoption networks, and reformatories POWER DYNAMICS: - Middle-class women gained authority over working-class girls' sexuality - "Rescue" often meant forced confinement—girls couldn't leave - Inmates subjected to surveillance, labor, and moral policing - Double standard: blamed women, rarely confronted male clients WHY IT MATTERS FOR CHILDREN'S RIGHTS: - Part of broader movement to "protect" children from sexual exploitation - Established institutional machinery for controlling girls' behavior - Connected to age of consent campaigns - Blurred line between protection and punishment THE TENSION: Achievement: Created safe spaces for vulnerable girls with nowhere else to go Problem: Imposed middle-class sexual morality as condition of help Question: Were these girls being "saved" or controlled? DISCUSSION POINT: "These reformers genuinely wanted to help. But their vision of 'help' meant making poor girls behave like middle-class girls. When does protection become social control?" NOTE: This is the same reform impulse that led to child protective services—genuine concern mixed with class-based assumptions about proper family life.

Moral discipline over legal protection: girls treated as sinners, not victims.

Gendered reform: female delinquency as moral failure, not social injustice.

Age of Consent Reform: Protecting Girls from Sexual Exploitation

The Problem (Mid-19th Century)

Age of consent as low as 7–10 years in most states
Girls could be legally married or sexually exploited with minimal protection
Double standard: girls blamed for "seduction," men rarely prosecuted

              Age of consent laws codified the idea that children—especially girls—needed legal protection from adult exploitation.
            

Reform Campaigns (1880s–1910s)

Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) leads national campaign
Frances Willard: "Organize the motherhood of the world"
1885–1905: Most states raise age to 16–18
Framed as protecting female virtue and childhood innocence

Major victory: women exercised political power before they could even vote.

Charles Loring Brace

Son of prominent Connecticut family
Goes to New York to study theology
Horrified at circumstances of street children
Establishes Children's Aid Society
Creates industrial schools, finds jobs for idle boys, newsboys lodging house

The Children's Aid Society (1853)

Unable to raise sufficient funds to care for all those in need

"Placing Out" -- Put up for adoption

send groups of children west; farmers take in children
Children now in better environments; Good Christian Homes
Drain city of "street Arabs;" fulfill need for labor in the country

The Orphan Trains (1854–1929)

≈200,000 children sent West between 1854–1929.
Some found loving homes; others faced exploitation and abuse.

First time reformers place interests of child before those of natal family!

"The class of a large city most dangerous to its property, its morals, and its political life, are the ignorant, destitute, untrained, and abandoned youth."
—Charles Loring Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York (1872)

Orphan Trains: The Shadow Side

1865–1870 Southern “apprentice” laws bind 40,000+ Black orphans to former slave-owners — legal re-enslavement.
1879–1934 Federal Indian Boarding Schools: 100,000 Native children forcibly removed; motto “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.”
1854–1929 Orphan Trains refuse Catholic & Jewish children in Protestant towns; Irish kids re-labeled “incorrigible.”
Result: the same reformers who “saved” white street arabs built pipelines to plantation, reservation, and reformatory for children of color.

        Shadow Truth

        Child “protection” was never color-blind.

        The train west for white orphans was the chain south or the wagon north for Black and Native children.

“We were taken from our mothers and put on the train with numbers pinned to our coats.”
—Mary Englund, Orphan Train rider, 1980 oral history

The Mary Ellen Moment, 1874–1875

9 April 1874 — Etta Wheeler carries a scarred, chained 10-year-old out of a Hell's Kitchen tenement.
21 April 1874 — Judge rules: a living child can be removed by habeas corpus.
15 Dec 1874 — New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children chartered ("The Cruelty").
First agency on earth with police powers to enter homes and seize abused children.
By 1910 → 250 sister societies nationwide.

              One whip-scarred girl + one courtroom photograph = the legal invention of child protective services.
            

Private charity became public authority in eight months.
Moral outrage → statute → badge → CPS.

"Mama has been in the habit of whipping me with a rawhide and scissors."
—Mary Ellen Wilson, testifying in her own tiny voice, 10 April 1874

Learn More Here

This is one of the most important moments in child welfare history. Mary Ellen Wilson was a 10-year-old girl being beaten and chained by her foster mother. When social worker Etta Wheeler found her, there was no legal mechanism to remove an abused child from a home—so they used an animal cruelty law to argue she deserved at least as much protection as a dog. The case sparked outrage and led to the creation of the first child protective services agency with actual police powers. Within eight months, moral outrage became law enforcement authority. Ask students: What does it say about society that animals had legal protection before children did? The Mary Ellen Wilson case established a legal principle - that children had rights and the state could intervene to protect them. It created institutional machinery: the NYSPCC and similar societies. But it focused primarily on individual rescue cases - removing specific children from abusive situations. What it didn't do was address the structural conditions that endangered children en masse: poverty, housing, labor exploitation, lack of sanitation. The same tenements Riis photographed in 1888-1890 had been there all along. The child labor he documented was ongoing. The children sleeping in alleyways weren't necessarily being beaten by parents (like Mary Ellen) - they were victims of economic systems and urban neglect.

Jacob Riis: Making Invisible Problems Visible

Jacob Riis (1849–1914)
Danish immigrant → police reporter → social reformer

              The Problem: The SPCC could rescue individual children, but couldn't change the structural conditions that endangered thousands.
            

What the SPCC Couldn't Fix

The tenement system itself
Endemic poverty
No playgrounds or parks
Unregulated child labor
Overcrowded schools

Riis began photographing in 1887–88, over a decade after Mary Ellen Wilson.
The children were still there.

"Long ago it was said that 'one half of the world does not know how the other half lives.' That was true then. It did not know because it did not care."
—Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (1890)

VERBAL TRANSITION FROM MARY ELLEN WILSON SLIDE: "So by December 1874, we have the SPCC—the first agency in the world with police powers to remove abused children. And they got busy. Over the next decade, they investigated thousands of cases, removed children from dangerous homes, prosecuted neglectful parents. This was real, important work. But thirteen years later, in 1887, when a police reporter named Jacob Riis started walking through those same Hell's Kitchen tenements with a camera, the children were still there. Not necessarily being whipped and chained like Mary Ellen—but sleeping on street grates, crowded into airless rooms, working in sweatshops. What the SPCC could do was rescue individual children from bad situations. What they couldn't do was change the structural conditions—the tenement system itself, the poverty, the lack of playgrounds, the child labor. Those problems were still there. And that's where Jacob Riis comes in..." Emphasize: Riis tackled a different kind of problem—not saving children from bad parents, but changing the environment itself. Timeline: Started photographing 1887-88, over a decade after Mary Ellen case. Question to pose: "Why were children still in danger 13+ years after Mary Ellen Wilson?"

Revolutionary and Dangerous: Flash Powder Photography

The Technology of Exposure

Flash powder = magnesium powder + potassium chlorate

Ignited with match → brilliant explosive flash
Thick, choking smoke filled rooms
Only available since mid-1880s

The Risks

Set at least 2 documented fires
Blew out windows
Terrified subjects
Sometimes chased from buildings

              Why it mattered: First time windowless interior rooms could be photographed—spaces middle-class reformers had never seen.
            

The worst conditions were in interior rooms with no windows, no light—spaces that had literally never been photographed before Riis.

Emphasize the drama: Riis would enter tenements late at night, often with police officers, carrying this flash equipment. The process: Assistant holds pan of powder, Riis opens camera shutter, assistant touches it with a match—BOOM—brilliant flash, then thick acrid smoke fills the room. SPECIFIC STORIES TO TELL: THE LODGING HOUSE PANIC: Riis was photographing a group of men in a lodging house. When the flash exploded, the men scattered in absolute terror—they thought it was a police raid or that they were under attack. The smoke was so thick they couldn't see anything for several minutes. Imagine waking up to an explosion in your room! CHASED FROM BUILDINGS: Residents would sometimes chase Riis and his team out of buildings, furious at being startled awake by explosions in their homes in the middle of the night. THE FIRES: Riis set at least two documented tenement fires with his flash powder. Fortunately both were quickly put out, but imagine the risk—conducting explosions in wooden buildings filled with families. The physical danger mirrored the social danger of exposing these problems—society didn't want to see these conditions any more than tenement residents wanted photographers exploding flash powder in their rooms at midnight. Why it was necessary: The worst conditions were in windowless interior rooms that had literally NEVER been photographed, never been seen by middle-class reformers. The SPCC investigators might interview a family in their front room during the day and never see the airless sleeping quarters in back where children actually lived. Discussion question: "Was this justified? Riis risked setting buildings on fire and terrified the people he was trying to help. What does it take to create social change?" Transition: "Riis would travel around giving magic lantern slide lectures with these images—standing in the dark, projecting these shocking photographs while telling stories about what he'd seen. What you're about to see mimics those presentations..."

Photography and Structural Reform

Riis's Reframing

              Old question: "Which parents are neglecting their children?"

              New question: "How can ANY parent raise children in these conditions?"

Concrete Reforms Achieved

Tenement House Act (1901) — mandated ventilation, sanitation, fire safety
Playgrounds & parks — created in tenement districts
Child labor reform — momentum for regulation
School expansion — more facilities in poor neighborhoods

Photography's Power

Made invisible problems visible
Provided undeniable visual evidence
Combined facts with emotional appeal

Legacy

Model for Progressive Era reform
Lewis Hine built on his foundation (1908–1918)
Settlement house movement adopted similar methods

These reforms changed the environment for ALL children, not just rescued individuals.

From individual rescue → structural transformation.

Key distinction: Individual moral failing vs. structural problem. Riis made it impossible to see child welfare purely as a matter of individual rescue—his photographs demanded systemic change. Before Riis, Americans concerned about children's welfare might support the SPCC's work removing children from abusive homes. After "How the Other Half Lives" (1890), they had to confront how housing policy, urban planning, labor regulation, and public investment in parks and schools were also children's rights issues. Discussion questions: "What can photography do that statistics can't?" "Who's doing this work today? Making invisible problems visible?" Connection forward: This structural approach becomes the model for Progressive Era reform—you'll see Lewis Hine doing similar work with child labor photography, settlement houses documenting neighborhood conditions, Progressive reformers using "scientific" investigation to push for change. The children Riis photographed weren't just victims of bad parents—they were victims of bad systems. That insight fundamentally changed American reform movements.

The First Juvenile Court: Cook County, Illinois (1899)

Revolutionary Principles

Children not tried as criminals—treated as "wards" of the state.
Judge acts in loco parentis (in place of parents).
Focus on rehabilitation, not punishment.
Informal proceedings; no jury trials.
Probation instead of incarceration when possible.

The Chicago Model Spreads

By 1925: juvenile courts in every state.
Progressive reformers see this as triumph of scientific child-saving.
Critics note: children lose due process rights in the name of protection.

Juvenile courts embodied Progressive faith that expertise could reform society.

The juvenile court system represented both genuine progress and new forms of state control over children and families.

"The child is not prosecuted for a crime; the child is protected from a condition."
—Judge Richard Tuthill, opening day, July 3, 1899

Child-Labor Reform Milestones, 1904–1938

1904 National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) founded in NYC; Lewis Hine hired to photograph "the shame of the states."
1910 Hine's photos of 8-year-olds in coal breakers and cotton mills printed in every major magazine.
1916 Keating-Owen Act bans interstate sale of goods made by children under 14 (or 16 in mines).
June 3, 1918 Supreme Court strikes it down in Hammer v. Dagenhart ("Congress cannot regulate local labor").
1938 Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) survives court challenge; sets first federal floor: 16 for regular work, 18 for hazardous.

              1904 → 1916 → 1918 → 1938

              One Lewis Hine photograph → one federal law → one permanent childhood.

Child labor did NOT vanish in 1850. It took 34 years of lobbying, photography, and two Supreme Court defeats to outlaw it nationwide.

"I'm 12. I been workin' here two years. I like it."
—Addie Card to Lewis Hine, 1910

Gilded-Age Nationalization: The WCTU "Do Everything" Revolution

Frances Willard (WCTU president 1879–1898) turned temperance into a total social gospel.
"Do Everything" platform: child labor laws, kindergartens, age-of-consent reform, juvenile courts, suffrage.
1886–1905: WCTU raises statutory rape age from 10 to 16 in forty states.
1899 Illinois Juvenile Court Act—first children's court—drafted with WCTU lobbyists.
1904 National Child Labor Committee founded in WCTU offices.

Willard's motto: "Organize the motherhood of the world."

Women's moral networks became the scaffolding of the 20th-century welfare state.

WCTU & Frances Willard

Founded 1874, Cleveland. World's largest women's organization by 1890.
Willard's alliances: Prohibition Party, Knights of Labor, NAWSA.
Laid groundwork for 18th Amendment (1919) and 19th Amendment (1920).

Conclusion: The Legacy of Children's Rights Reform

Achievements

Childhood recognized as a distinct life stage requiring protection.
Legal reforms: juvenile courts, child labor laws, compulsory education.
New institutions: orphanages, foster care, social work professions.
Shift from family sovereignty to state responsibility for child welfare.

Ongoing Questions

How much state power over families is justified?
Who decides what's in a child's "best interest"?
Do children have rights independent of their parents?
How do class and race shape who gets "protected" vs. punished?

The children's rights movement transformed American society by making childhood a matter of public concern, not just private family business.

              But reform was never neutral—it always reflected the values, prejudices, and power dynamics of the reformers themselves.
            