In the closing years of the nineteenth century, Caroline Pemberton, daughter of a prominent “old” Philadelphia family and a child welfare reformer with over a decade’s experience working among the city’s “outcast children,” published Your Little Brother James (1896), a novel that reads like a page from a reformer’s case records. Eight-year-old James—introduced as “an unwanted baby that wouldn’t die”—has no father and a dangerous mother who lacks maternal instinct. Having failed to kill the resilient boy in his infancy, James’s mother continues to neglect him: he runs wild in the street, pawns items for his mother and...

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, charity and child welfare reformers and labor advocates across the nation all used the troubled laboring family as the object of their sharply conflicting assessments of American society. In these years reformers of diverse political perspectives contested the meanings of family relations in order to define both the problem of the working-class family and its solution. Labor leaders, charity workers and child savers concurred that contemporary conditions—including class polarization, male unemployment, and female and child labor—threatened the laboring family’s ability to transmit republican values through the nurturing of potential citizens....

In january 1877, Philadelphians turned their attention to the dramatic murder trial of Morris Springfield.¹ Although Springfield had been charged with murdering his sister, he had reason to expect sympathetic treatment from the city’s residents, the press, and the judge. Alice had been a known prostitute; she had escaped while serving a second term in the House of Correction. While her death had been violent, Victorian Philadelphians were not surprised when fallen women came to no good end. On the other hand, her brother Morris was known as a kind and industrious workingman who was good to his mother, had...

Early in july 1878, an agent of the Pennsylvania Society to Protect Children from Cruelty (SPCC) visited a working-class district of Philadelphia to investigate charges of drunkenness and immorality lodged against a pair of sisters. The charges were serious, as were the potential consequences of the agent’s visit. The women were alleged to associate with disreputable persons and visit houses of ill-fame, accompanied by their young children. Afterward, they were thought to squander the proceeds on rum. Although one of the women, Kate, had been separated from her husband for over ten months, it was rumored that she had recently...

In 1893 alice hamilton took a moment’s rest from her busy rounds as a medical student to reflect on her experiences treating an unmarried mother in an Ann Arbor hospital. In a letter to her cousin Agnes, she recounted:

Little Miss Jackson’s baby came a week ago…. I didn’t hear until the next morning that the baby was born dead. Then I went in to see her and she told me all about it and cried so because it hadn’t lived long enough for her to hold even a minute. To all of us it seemed such a good thing...

In july 1879, Caroline L.’s neighbors in a working-class district of Philadelphia had good reason to view her boarding establishment for infants with suspicion. Case records of the SPCC revealed that “There is every reason to believe that d’fndt is engaged in ‘baby-farming’; she has now 2 or 3 babies on hand—within the last two months, 3 or 4 babies have been seen taken out of the house dead; the little coffins were placed in a private carriage, and rapidly driven away. There has been no sign of a doctor or undertaker attending the house—no crepe ever appeared...

In the 1890s Caroline Pemberton declared James, the central character of her novel Your Little Brother James, to be a member of the American family and challenged her readers to take responsibility for his welfare. Over one hundred years later, it would be difficult to convince many readers of either their “familial” relationship to the poor or their responsibility for the well-being of those in poverty. Rather than accepting public accountability for the welfare of all citizens, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRA) that heralded welfare’s demise implies that poor people are responsible for their...